This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear oral argument in Trump v. Barbara, a case that challenges the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to redefine birthright citizenship. Although the Court has not yet put the case on the calendar, it will likely do so during this term, and issue an opinion before the justices adjourn for the summer.
The Fourteenth Amendment, which Congress adopted in the years following the Civil War, extended citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Yet Trump declared last January that going forward, persons born in the United States would not be citizens unless at least one parent is a citizen or a lawful permanent resident. If the Court allows the executive order to take effect, it would deny citizenship to hundreds of thousands of newborn babies every year, and recreate an antebellum caste system in which social disadvantage is passed down by law from parent to child.
The intense backlash against the ongoing immigration raids in Minnesota and the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents has led to some backpedaling and a reported tone shift from the White House. The much vaunted toning down even included a rare moment of moderation and mea culpa from one of President Trump’s most notoriously hardline aides, Stephen Miller. However, while Miller walked back claims Pretti was a “domestic terrorist,” on social media, he and his team have continued to promote a paranoid narrative that the people protesting ICE are violent and even reminiscent of armed insurgents in the Middle East.
“Working under the most adverse conditions imaginable, stalked, hunted, tailed, surveilled and viciously attacked by organized violent leftists every hour of the day, our heroic ICE officers selflessly defend our sovereignty and the lives of our people. True courage and devotion,” Miller wrote in one X post on Tuesday.
That overheated commentary came at the same time Miller was calling reporters trying to clarify the Trump administration’s initial comments about Pretti’s death.
In the hours after Pretti was shot multiple times on Jan. 24 in Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement claiming he was present at the scene of an immigration raid to “massacre law enforcement.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem additionally described Pretti as a domestic terrorist, which is a label she also applied to Renée Good, another activist who was killed by federal agents earlier this month. Both Pretti and Good were among the community members in Minneapolis who arrived at the scenes of immigration raids. This type of rapid response has been a core part of the growing nationwide movement opposing ICE.
While rapid responders aim to disrupt the immigration enforcement operations, they have largely been non-violent. ICE, on the other hand, killed dozens of people last year. Pretti was a licensed gun owner and was carrying a pistol when he was killed, but video analysis of the incident shows that it was not drawn and agents removed it from his person before shooting him.
There are many signs that Americans are not buying the Trump administration’s narratives about ICE. Recent polls have shown that a majority of Americans believe ICE is too aggressive, that they are making communities “less safe,” and that their operations should be decreased. More broadly, polls indicate overall approval for Trump’s immigration policies is underwater, with a majority of people convinced too many people are being deported and that many do not fit the administration’s claim these operations are focused on violent criminals. There’s good reason for the public skepticism. While the Trump administration has consistently insisted they are targeting the “worst of the worst,” data has shown the majority of people being detained and deported have no criminal records. Trump seems to be acutely aware of all the negative reactions and, in a speech earlier this month, he openly worried about having “bad public relations people.”
That context helps explain why the response to Pretti’s death descended into what Politico later described as “finger pointing” on Jan. 27 with Noem attributing the initial comments to Miller, who reached out to reporters suggesting the characterization of Pretti as a terrorist was based on inaccurate information from Border Patrol. This back and forth — and a dramatic reshuffling of the officials leading the charge in Minneapolis — are indicative of mounting political pressure and opposition to ICE. Yet, while Miller is dutifully participating in the public and official toning down, he and his team are also continuing to spin wild fantasies casting the protesters as a terrifying guerrilla insurgency.
In other X posts in the days since Pretti’s death, Miller has accused Democrats of trying to incite attacks on ICE and of fomenting “armed resistance.” Kara Frederick, who White House salary records identify as a special assistant to the president and senior policy advisor to Miller, also reposted a lengthy message from a man identifying himself as a special forces veteran who compared rapid responders to Middle Eastern insurgents because they are tracking ICE vehicles, have encrypted group chats, and are receiving “mutual aid from sympathetic locals.”
“When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers … you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies,” the man wrote.
On Instagram, Frederick also shared a post comparing criticism of ICE to a “psy op.”
TPM asked the White House how the overheated and dramatic posts from Miller and his team likening protests to militancy square with the administration’s supposed tonal shift. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson responded by pointing to an incident where a woman allegedly bit a Border Patrol officer and severely injured them during the protests that erupted in Minneapolis in the hours after Pretti was shot on Saturday. A second woman was also charged with biting an officer in a separate incident near the same time and vicinity.
“Earlier this week, a violent rioter in Minneapolis bit off an ICE officer’s finger. Violent rioters who assault federal law enforcement officers and impede law enforcement operations are not merely ‘protestors,'” Jackson said.
Miller also shared a post highlighting the biting incident from the Department of Homeland Security on his X page. Along with all of the messages painting the protesters as part of a violent campaign, Miller has also continually advanced a very hyperbolic Great Replacement vision of the overall immigration picture.
“The Democrat Party yearns and fights and struggles for nothing more than a fully open border to the third world,” he wrote on Wednesday evening.
The administration’s public posture may be changing, but these posts are a window into Miller’s mind. It’s a frightening, feverish place.
— Hunter Walker
Dems Want To Know Why Tulsi Gabbard Was At FBI Raid
Multiplereports have now confirmed that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present at Wednesday’s FBI raid of an election office near Atlanta in Fulton County, Georgia.
“Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure,” a senior Trump administration official told NBC News. “She has and will continue to take action on President Trump’s directive to secure our elections and work with our interagency partners to do so.”
In a post on X on Thursday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) questioned Gabbard’s presence at the raid.
“Why did Tulsi Gabbard take part in a raid on an elections office? We need to step up to protect our elections from this administration’s meddling,” he wrote.
During a press briefing on Thursday, David Becker, a former DOJ lawyer and the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research said, “there is no reason for the Director of National Intelligence to be in any kind of voting site.”
“She has neither the authority nor the competence to assess anything in that voting site,” he added. “Having someone from another agency, particularly an intelligence agency is entirely odd and unusual.”
— Khaya Himmelman
Georgia Senator in the Dark on Fulton County Election Raid
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told TPM Thursday that he hasn’t learned anything more about the Wednesday FBI raid of the Fulton County election office.
Agents seized “all physical ballots from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County,” “tabulator tapes for every voting machine used in Fulton County” and “all voter rolls from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County,” per the warrant.
Ossoff did not sound optimistic that more information on the raid — which seems born of President Trump’s conspiracy theory-inflected grievance from losing the 2020 election — would be forthcoming.
“It’s not an administration known for its transparency,” he quipped as the Senate elevator doors slid close.
Masks have become the central symbol of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement wilding sprees across America in 2025. They are emblems of a secret police. Their gaiters and balaclavas convey menace. But their central justification is the idea that the agents themselves are endangered by their work, that their identities must be kept secret because they are endangered by the very public they menace while at least notionally working to serve and protect. The general argument is that ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents risk being “doxxed,” being identified and having their private information and home addresses made public. But the word has been the subject to an absurd expansion. Earlier this week I heard an anecdote about a group of ICE agents who were eating at a Minneapolis restaurant. A right-wing account said the agents were then “doxxed,” which in this case meant that activists saw them and sent out word to other activists who then started protesting outside the restaurant.
It’s remarkable how accepted this purported need for anonymity has become. Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has become increasingly outspoken about ICE and called for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to lose her job. But he still thinks ICE agents should remain masked because of this fear of “doxxing.” A bunch of the country seems to have forgotten that even the most abusive of metropolitan departments require their officers to show their faces and wear name tags as a matter of course.
In this post I want to dig more into that rationale: that the people who are entrusted with the power to wield legitimate violence to serve the public need special protection, special rights to privacy and anonymity in order to do so. What is implicit in this claim is that ICE needs to do its work in a highly abusive manner, or perhaps even that its work is to be as abusive as possible. Why else do they need to be more anonymous than your average beat cop? If they’re going to get a lot of people mad, it just follows that they need some additional protection from the consequences of generating that kind of anger.
Needless to say this argument treads a pretty slippery slope.
In October 2025, with Senate Republicans and Democrats unable to come to an agreement on the then-expiring Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, the country plummeted into what later became the longest government shutdown in the history of the U.S. Just months later, we are on the cusp of another — this time partial — government shutdown as Democrats call for reforms to rein in ICE following the Saturday killing of Alex Pretti in the hands of federal agents in Minnesota.
This time, the dynamics around senators’ negotiations to avoid or, if it comes down to it, end the shutdown are strikingly different from the last time around.
A small number of tickets are still available for tomorrow night’s event in D.C.I’ll be talking about DOJ weaponization with a stellar panel:
Stacey Young, a DOJ veteran who is the founder and executive director at Justice Connection;
Kyle R. Freeny, a former DOJer who was a member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and is now senior counsel at the Washington Litigation Group; and
Anna Bower, senior editor at Lawfare
Ticket information here(TPM members should look out for a special discount code in your inboxes to get 2-for-1 tickets. Reach out to allegra@talkingpointsmemo.com if you didn’t receive or can’t find it.) See you tonight!
Performative Politicization
Across two different categories of cases in two different states yesterday, the Trump DOJ engaged in the kind of performative politicization that it experimented with in Trump I but has brought into full bloom in Trump II under Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Bondi is as much content creator as she is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Her public moves yesterday echoed recent reporting that FBI Director Kash Patel is more concerned about what he can tweet than the underlying investigations themselves. (Patel got himself in trouble again with a tweet, this time causing internal political blowback in Mexico.)
In Minnesota, Bondi showed up in person to tout the arrests of protesters for allegedly assaulting federal agents while still refusing to investigate the shooting deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents. It’s an unmistakeable statement not just about who the current regime favors under the law but about impunity.
While attorneys general routinely tout high profile arrests, Bondi took it a step further: posting on social media photographs of many of the arrested protesters in violation of DOJ guidelines. That move drew a rebuke from a federal judge, as I lay out below.
In Georgia, the FBI executed search warrants on the Fulton County voting center on Wednesday, retrieving ballots and other election administration records from the 2020 election in a Big Lie-fueled move that was as absurd as it was dangerous. More than five years after the election, Trump is still chasing his white whale of election fraud and a host of DOJ and FBI appointees are eager to oblige. The theatrical move checks the box for loyalty, keeps the Big Lie alive, sows doubt about any future Trump loss, and creates the kind of MAGA spectacle that Trump loves.
In the administration of any other president, DOJ would not have let itself get dragged into such obviously politicized shenanigans, let alone lead the charge in fanning the flames of public reprobation against defendants and public suspicion about election administration. But Bondi has to churn out content at an increasingly frenetic pace to stay in the good graces of President Trump and his White House, creating an irreconcilable tension between her own fortunes and the independent administration of justice.
Bondi Rebuked in Minnesota
Swaggering like an Old West marshal, Bondi hailed charges against 16 people accused of “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal immigration agents by posting their mug shots on X.
Bondi was quickly rebuked by U.S. Magistrate Judge Dulce J. Foster during an initial hearing. “This conduct is not something that the court condones,” Foster said in court, describing herself as “deeply disturbed” by the move. But Foster said because the cases were not yet assigned to her, she couldn’t do anything about Bondi’s conduct.
The charges against the protesters arose from chaotic scenes around provocative immigration enforcement actions, including one at Roosevelt High School, and the Justice Department in recents weeks has often failed to win convictions in similar cases in other states.
The Latest on the Pretti Shooting
The two CBP agents who shot Alex Pretti were immediately put on administrative leave, DHS said, claiming that earlier reports that the officers had remained on duty were inaccurate.
The Justice Department continues to insist to reporters that it may conduct its own investigation of the Pretti shooting depending on what the probe by Homeland Security Investigations turns up. Again, this is not typically how DOJ use-of-force civil rights investigations typically proceed.
Videos emerged of an earlier incident between federal agents and Pretti in which he kicked out the tail light of one of their vehicles and they proceeded to rough him up before driving away.
More From Minnesota …
The chief federal judge in Minnesota cancelled a contempt of court hearing after ICE finally abided by his order to release a detainee, meaning the acting ICE director will not have to appear in court personally. U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz, who said the detainee could still seek monetary sanctions for his delayed release, blasted ICE for defying 96 court orders in 74 Minnesota cases since Jan. 1: “This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
Another round of resignations by prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office could be coming, the NYT reports: “On Tuesday, prosecutors in the office’s criminal division confronted the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, Daniel Rosen, and an aide to Mr. Blanche, over concerns that they were being asked to execute orders that went against the department’s mission and best practices, according to four people briefed on the exchange.”
U.S. District Judge John Tunheim temporarily blocked the Trump administration from arresting or detaining refugees in Minnesota who are seeking permanent status.
FBI Seizes Georgia Voting Records
The FBI seized what the Justice Department had already sued to get: 2020 voting records from Fulton County, Georgia. Trump’s animus about the Georgia result has been focused all along primarily on plurality Black Fulton County, which has the largest Black population in the state.
A few nuggets:
Oddly, the search warrant was obtained by the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Thomas Albus. (While many reports still identified him as interim U.S. attorney, he was confirmed to the permanent position by the Senate on a partly line vote in December.) It is not at all clear why a U.S. attorney from outside the jurisdiction is involved or why this particular U.S. attorney.
Nothing about Catherine M. Salinas, the longtime magistrate who signed the search warrant, is particularly notable; if anything, her career history might suggest a more liberal than conservative lean. (Judges are limited in how far they can look outside the four corners of a search warrant application.)
The search warrant identifies two potential criminal violations at the center of the investigation, summarized by the WaPo as: “one regarding the retention and preservation of election records by officials and the other criminalizing efforts to defraud voters from an impartially conducted election.”
Photo of the Day
This neither speaks for itself nor does it make any sense, but it is a photo for the ages:
U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard speaks on the phone while standing inside a vehicle loaded with boxes outside the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center after the FBI executed a search warrant there. Photo by Elijah Nouvelage pic.twitter.com/zj5QHVVS2x
The Trump administration has delayed rolling back the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding that greenhouse gases harm public health because of concerns the proposal is “too weak” to withstand a court challenge, the WaPo reports.
U.S. Life Expectancy Reverses Slide
Life expectancy in the United States rebounded from the COVID pandemic and the opioid crisis to reach a new all-time high in 2024, the CDC announced today.
‘We’ll Take Our Stand for This Land’
By his own account, Bruce Springsteen wrote this new song Saturday after the fatal CBP shooting of Alex Pretti and recorded it Tuesday before releasing it Wednesday:
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
I agree with a lot of your post on disorganized retreat. But I want to come at this from another angle.
For the most benefit practically and politically over the next few months, the concession that is most important imo is giving MN AG full, real time access to all evidence. Not to be crass about it but the public loves a murder trial. Talking about legislative constraints on ICE will put the public to sleep. But the public will have an endless appetite when it comes to pursuing justice for Alex Pretti and putting the man who shot him in the back of the head in jail.
In Ward 10, the Minneapolis neighborhood where ICU nurse Alex Pretti was gunned down by federal agents, neighbors are turning to each other for everything from groceries to school dropoffs.
“We have people who are, every single day, taking their vulnerable neighbors’ kids to school for them; taking them to work; taking them to do their laundry; bringing groceries to folks so they can be safe in their homes,” Aisha Chughtai, the Minneapolis council member representing Ward 10, told Talking Points Memo.
“This is the most Minnesotan thing I know. This is the most compassion-for-neighbors thing I know.”
Federal agents have occupied Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota since December as part of “Operation Metro Surge,” a deportation campaign aimed at the Twin Cities. That surge has resulted in the deaths of both Pretti and 37-year-old mother and activist Renée Good. As ICE increased its presence in the city this month, Minnesotans also stepped up, with tens of thousands braving harsh winter weather to protest, act as legal observers, and participate in mutual aid. These acts, Twin Cities residents say, constitute basic care for their communities. But the GOP wants to cast these support networks as something more sinister: a conspiracy, possibly even a criminal one.
It’s a familiar tactic by a Trump administration that has often alleged dark motives for acts of decency. In Minnesota, though, that tactic is backfiring on a historic scale.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
As the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have intensified over the past year, politicians and journalists alike have begun referring to ICE as a “paramilitary force.”
Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat, called ICE “a personal paramilitary unit of the president.” Journalist Radley Balko, who wrote a book about how American police forces have been militarized, has argued that President Donald Trump was using the force “the way an authoritarian uses a paramilitary force, to carry out his own personal grudges, to inflict pain and violence, and discomfort on people that he sees as his political enemies.” And New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie characterized ICE as a “virtual secret police” and “paramilitary enforcer of despotic rule.”
All this raises a couple of questions: What are paramilitaries? And is ICE one?
Defining paramilitaries
As a government professor who studies policing and state security forces, I believe it’s clear that ICE meets many but not all of the most salient definitions. It’s worth exploring what those are and how the administration’s use of ICE compares with the ways paramilitaries have been deployed in other countries.
The term paramilitary is commonly used in two ways. The first refers to highly militarized police forces, which are an official part of a nation’s security forces. They typically have access to military-grade weaponry and equipment, are highly centralized with a hierarchical command structure, and deploy in large formed units to carry out domestic policing.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JANUARY 28: A family is escorted after their hearing in immigration court as masked federal agents patrol the halls at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on January 28, 2026 in New York City. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and other federal agencies continue to make detainments in immigration courts as immigrants attend court hearings, a day after dozens of demonstrators were arrested in Manhattan on after occupying the lobby of a TriBeCa hotel where federal immigration agents were reportedly staying while carrying out the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
The second definition denotes less formal and often more partisan armed groups that operate outside of the state’s regular security sector. Sometimes these groups, as with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, emerge out of community self-defense efforts; in other cases, they are established by the government or receive government support, even though they lack official status. Political scientists also call these groups “pro-government militias” in order to convey both their political orientation in support of the government and less formal status as an irregular force.
They typically receive less training than regular state forces, if any. How well equipped they are can vary a great deal. Leaders may turn to these informal or unofficial paramilitaries because they are less expensive than regular forces, or because they can help them evade accountability for violent repression.
Many informal paramilitaries are engaged in regime maintenance, meaning they preserve the power of current rulers through repression of political opponents and the broader public. They may share partisan affiliations or ethnic ties with prominent political leaders or the incumbent political party and work in tandem to carry out political goals.
In Haiti, President François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Tonton Macouts provided a prime example of this second type of paramilitary. After Duvalier survived a coup attempt in 1970, he established the Tonton Macouts as a paramilitary counterweight to the regular military. Initially a ragtag, undisciplined but highly loyal force, it became the central instrument through which the Duvalier regime carried out political repression, surveilling, harassing, detaining, torturing and killing ordinary Haitians.
Is ICE a paramilitary?
The recent references to ICE in the U.S. as a “paramilitary force” are using the term in both senses, viewing the agency as both a militarized police force and tool for repression.
There is no question that ICE fits the definition of a paramilitary police force. It is a police force under the control of the federal government, through the Department of Homeland Security, and it is heavily militarized, having adopted the weaponry, organization, operational patterns and cultural markers of the regular military. Some other federal forces, such as Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, also fit this definition.
MINNEAPOLIS, UNITED STATES â” JANUARY 15: Federal agents clash with protestors outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during a demonstration over the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman who was killed by a U.S. ICE agent, on January 15, 2026. (Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The United States is nearly alone among established democracies in creating a new paramilitary police force in recent decades. Indeed, the creation of ICE in the U.S. following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is one of just four instances I’ve found since 1960 where a democratic country created a new paramilitary police force, the others being Honduras, Brazil and Nigeria.
ICE and CBP also have some, though not all, of the characteristics of a paramilitary in the second sense of the term, referring to forces as repressive political agents. These forces are not informal; they are official agents of the state. However, their officers are less professional, receive less oversight and are operating in more overtly political ways than is typical of both regular military forces and local police in the United States.
The lack of professionalism predates the current administration. In 2014, for instance, CBP’s head of internal affairs described the lowering of standards for post-9/11 expansion as leading to the recruitment of thousands of officers “potentially unfit to carry a badge and gun.”
This problem has only been exacerbated by the rapid expansion undertaken by the Trump administration. ICE has added approximately 12,000 new recruits — more than doubling its size in less than a year — while substantially cutting the length of the training they receive.
ICE and CBP are not subject to the same constitutional restrictions that apply to other law enforcement agencies, such as the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure; both have gained exemptions from oversight intended to hold officers accountable for excessive force. CBP regulations, for instance, allow it to search and seize people’s property without a warrant or the “probable cause” requirement imposed on other forces within 100 miles, or about 161 kilometers, of the border.
Both ICE and CBP have been deployed against political opponents in nonimmigration contexts, including Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, in 2020. They have also gathered data, according to political scientist Elizabeth F. Cohen, to “surveil citizens’ political beliefs and activities — including protest actions they have taken on issues as far afield as gun control — in addition to immigrants’ rights.”
In these ways, ICE and CBP do bear some resemblance to the informal paramilitaries used in many countries to carry out political repression along partisan and ethnic lines, even though they are official agents of the state.
Why this matters
An extensive body of research shows that more militarized forms of policing are associated with higher rates of police violence and rights violations, without reducing crime or improving officer safety.
Studies have also found that more militarized police forces are harder to reform than less-militarized law enforcement agencies. The use of such forces can also create tensions with both the regular military and civilian police, as currently appears to be happening with ICE in Minneapolis.
The ways in which federal immigration forces in the United States resemble informal paramilitaries in other countries — operating with less effective oversight, less competent recruits and increasingly entrenched partisan identity — make all these issues more intractable. Which is why, I believe, many commentators have surfaced the term paramilitary and are using it as a warning.
The FBI executed a search warrant on Wednesday at an election office near Atlanta in Fulton County, Georgia, a locale infamous among MAGA conspiracy theorists who fulminated about the 2020 election and beyond. The search was, indeed, related to the 2020 election, according to a sweeping search warrant that surfaced hours after the raid.
