Trump Escalates His War on America as Dems Debate What Words They Can Say
The president is launching increasingly violent invasions of blue cities. Meanwhile, Democratic elites are concerned some might say: ‘Abolish ICE.’
Donald Trump is leading an increasingly violent takeover of Democratic-led cities with masked secret police. That’s been the story of US politics for half a year now, but the story exploded last week when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent murdered Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, on video in Minneapolis. Ten days later, with Trump sending around 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota, having them go “door to door,” as the administration has put it, and an ICE deployment to Maine reportedly on tap, the opposition party is still figuring out what to say – and what, if anything, it should do.
To be clear, some Democrats, liberal wonks, and centrist think tank staffers know with extreme certainty what they don’t want Democrats to say: “Abolish ICE.” Apparently, the thought of eliminating the agency that’s offering up $50,000 signing bonuses, $60,000 in student loan repayment, and neo-Nazi dog-whistles in its campaign to recruit far-right reactionaries to menace immigrants and US citizens alike might be a bridge too far for some median swing voters.
As Trump leads a brutal attack on the Americans who didn’t vote for him, as well as those who did, Democratic elites seem unable to engage with what he’s doing. Instead, they appear more focused on trying to tone-police the progressives and activists who want to put an end to the president’s various crackdowns. That remains the case despite new polling that shows the idea of abolishing ICE is more popular than it’s ever been, and has the support of a plurality of Americans.
Throughout his second term, Trump has ramped up immigration raids all over the country, while launching larger, concentrated militarized assaults on blue cities, against the wishes of Democratic governors and mayors. Flush with cash from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” ICE is now working to hire thousands more agents to let loose on city and residential streets with masks, guns, and face-scanner apps, with right-wing influencers and cameras on hand to make cruelty porn for the bloodthirsty MAGA base. ICE agents are raiding high schools, and pulling over vans filled with students and school staff. Federal agents are breaking people’s car windows at gas stations, and ripping them out of their vehicles as they drive to doctors’ appointments. They’re arresting the restaurant workers who serve them dinner. They allegedly threw tear gas and flash-bangs at a family’s vehicle as they were driving home from the grocery store with their kids.
The president is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military to Minnesota, because the locals have not humbly accepted his federal invasion, his plan to break apart their community, or Good’s murder. Trump’s administration is undermining any effort to investigate her killing, and attempting to use the federal probe to instead target her wife and left-wing activist groups. The administration is refusing to allow Democratic lawmakers to conduct routine oversight at ICE detention facilities, in defiance of a court order. On Friday, it was reported that Trump’s Justice Department is investigating Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for supposedly impeding federal agents from doing their jobs – shortly before a judge ordered the Trump administration to stop arresting peaceful protesters, and to stop hitting them with chemical agents and less-lethal munitions. Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance and chief White House policy adviser Stephen Miller are falsely claiming that ICE agents have absolute federal immunity.
As Trump moves to expand his mass deportation campaign, ICE is detaining more people than ever – and racing to expand its detention capacity by stowing people in warehouses. More immigrants are dying in federal custody. A county medical examiner is reportedly expected to rule a man’s death at a Texas detention center a homicide, with a witness alleging he saw guards choke the man and heard him say, “No puedo respirar,” meaning: “I can’t breathe.”
‘Reform and Retrain’
There are no signs the Trump administration’s approach will get any less brutal any time soon, largely because the White House wants it this way, despite occasional discomfort from Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles and some others. Multiple senior administration officials tell Zeteo that ICE and other agencies’ show-me-your-papers approach – which understandably evokes memories of barbaric, totalitarian regimes – is great enforcement policy. “If anything, we aren’t doing enough of this,” one Trump adviser says.
According to sources familiar with the matter, several top officials, including President Trump himself, have said in meetings in recent weeks that they hope that their Minneapolis crackdown is so severe that it will cause many Somali immigrants to just leave, even if they are US citizens. Furthermore, two Trump officials tell Zeteo that many in the administration “would not mind it,” in one senior official’s words, if some protesters reacted to the president’s Minnesota siege with significant violence – if only so Trump could finally seize on a pretext, invoke the Insurrection Act, and order a full-on military invasion of the city.
But what’s important at this moment, according to Democratic wonks and the party’s consulting class, is that the party does not respond to any of this with too much force, rhetorically speaking.
One memo circulating around Capitol Hill, presented by the centrist think tank Searchlight Institute, posits that Trump set “a trap” for Democrats by sidestepping Congress and weaponizing “immigration enforcement, pushing ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] to take actions that are at odds with the rule of law – including refusing to identify themselves or their agencies in public and wearing masks, lying to judges about use of force, and routinely violating court orders.”
“Responding to this kind of lawlessness by saying you want to ‘Abolish ICE’ is exchanging one kind of lawlessness for another,” continues the memo, which was written by Blas Nuñez-Neto, who oversaw Joe Biden’s 2024 border crackdown.
Nuñez-Neto is a senior adviser at WestExec, a defense industry consulting firm that has worked with corporate clients like Google and spy-tech firm Palantir, the latter of which reportedly dropped the Democratic-aligned firm after Trump won the election.
The memo instead calls on Democrats to “embrace an aggressive plan to rebuild ICE based on two concepts: Reform and Retrain.” Its nine-point plan would roll back many of the changes and tactics that Trump has implemented.
Progressive strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio tells Zeteo, “You can’t retrain a militia force that is attempting to conduct full-scale brutality. By insider accounts, a large measure of these people are nationalists, they’re white supremacists.”
“Their ethos and their desire is to harm and eliminate, so that can’t be trained,” she adds. “The people that are doing this job do not desire to be doing it differently. So it’s about as logical as saying: Let’s train a kindergartener to drive a motorcycle. It can’t be done.”
‘We Disagree on the Task’
Blue Rose Research, a Democratic message-testing company that works with the party’s primary political organs – and whose work was deeply embedded within Kamala Harris’s Super PAC – previously advised Democrats to cast Trump’s military power grab in Washington, DC, as an effort to “distract” people’s attention away from other issues, like his tariffs or Medicaid cuts.
In its ICE-related messaging memo and email this week, Blue Rose kindly did not advise Democrats to sidestep the ongoing conversation. The firm acknowledged its researchers are finding it “difficult to lower Trump’s approval with voters using immigration-related messaging,” but still offered “a few clear best practices for communicating that consistently emerge across all of our testing.”
“Messages tend to be less persuasive when they use charged language or sweeping calls like ‘abolish ICE’ or ‘state-sponsored terrorism,’” the firm wrote. “More measured language that focuses on accountability and common-sense tends to be more effective at hitting Trump or increasing perceptions of Democrats.”
Proposals that test better, according to Blue Rose, include requiring ICE agents to wear visible identification and limit their use of masks, and requiring agents to obtain a warrant from a judge before making arrests. The “abolish ICE” messages Blue Rose chose to poll don’t seem to make the strongest available case, though, as to why the agency must be abolished.
“We should abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), because ICE has become a cruel agency that separates families and terrorizes immigrant communities,” reads the first message they tested. That’s certainly true, but this message could have been written years ago. What’s new is that Trump is deploying ICE as a paramilitary force to terrorize whole populations of Democratic-led cities. What’s new is ICE is amping up the violence, and murdering a woman on video.
“We should abolish ICE and transfer its essential functions to other agencies, because it is a recently created agency that has become abusive and unaccountable,” reads the second message they tested – suggesting the agency is doing “essential” work.
Speaking of the centrist messaging operations, Shenker-Osorio says: “They’re not actually attempting to find messaging to address the issue. They’re attempting to find messaging to continue the harms. The only purpose to electing people to oppose the regime is if they oppose the regime, and if they don’t oppose the regime, then why are they being elected?”
“That’s just where we disagree on the task,” she continues. “I think the concentration camps have to be closed, and I think the abductions need to be ended, and I think the dragging out of ordinary citizens, the breaking their cars and hurting them – that’s not negotiable. There’s no in-between. It has to come to a full and complete stop.”
What Reforms?
The New York Times weighed in on the “Abolish ICE” conversation with a piece headlined, ‘Abolish ICE? It’s a Slogan Some Democratic Critics of ICE Would Abolish.’
The paper spoke with Senator Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who said ICE is “out of control” but knocked the idea of abolishing the agency wholesale. “The last thing we need to do, again, is to make the same mistake when it comes to ‘Defund the Police’ rhetoric,” he said, adding: “People want a slimmed-down ICE that is truly focused on security.”
The Times also highlighted a memo from the centrist think tank Third Way, which warned: “Every call to abolish ICE risks squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform of immigration enforcement – while handing Republicans exactly the fight they want.”
The paper suggested that some Democrats “worry that calls to eliminate the agency will distract from efforts to rein it in,” while providing few specifics on what steps Democrats might hope to take to reform ICE. Right near the end of the story, though, the Times noted, “Democrats in Congress are debating whether they should try to hold up funding for the agency at the end of this month as they try to force changes.”
As Zeteo reported earlier, Democratic lawmakers only appeared to notice this week that their leaders had negotiated an appropriations package with Republicans that would give billions of new dollars to ICE to further expand its detention capacity, beyond the agency’s huge cash windfall in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.
Some lawmakers have started calling for the extra funding to be stripped. But there is no guarantee that Senate Democrats will try to hold up any part of the appropriations package to block more funding for ICE, even though the bill will require at least seven Democratic votes to pass.
Shenker-Osorio, the progressive strategist, says Democrats must “put up a struggle,” at the very least, and attempt to tank the legislation. “Otherwise,” she says, “how would anyone believe you’re going to fight for them?”
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The Democrats’ Brilliant Strategic Response: Arguing About Words While Rome Burns
So let me get this straight: ICE agents murdered a 37-year-old mother on camera, 3,000 federal agents are doing door-to-door operations, they’re recruiting with neo-Nazi dog whistles and $50k signing bonuses, and the Democratic Party’s response is… checks notes—debating whether “Abolish ICE” might upset swing voters?
Olympic-level political malpractice.
Here’s the game theory: When one player executes maximum aggression and the other is paralyzed by focus groups, the aggressive player wins.
Every. Single. Time.
The best part? A plurality of Americans now support abolishing ICE—the exact position Democratic elites are afraid to touch. They’re refusing to adopt a “popular position”because they think it might be unpopular. Brilliant.
Meanwhile, the administration escalates because there’s no cost. Maine is next. Why wouldn’t they keep going? The opposition is too busy tone-policing activists to actually oppose anything.
Second-order effects these geniuses are missing:
First order: Federal agents murder resident on camera
Second order: Democratic leadership debates messaging
Third order: Base becomes demoralized, swing voters see weakness, administration escalates further because there’s zero resistance
This is what institutional collapse looks like: masked federal agents murdering American citizens on video while the opposition party debates whether saying mean things about ICE would poll well.
At this point, the Democratic Party’s tombstone should read: “We were very concerned about our messaging during the collapse.”
P.S. To any Democratic strategists reading this: When federal agents are murdering people on camera and public opinion supports the position you’re afraid to take, maybe the problem isn’t the message. It’s your complete inability to respond to authoritarianism because you’re trapped in a 2012 electability mindset.
The game changed. You didn’t. And now American citizens are dying while you debate what words are acceptable.
—Johan
Professor of Behavioral Economics & Applied Cognitive Theory
Former Foreign Service Officer
I am not a Democratic Elite and I say abolish ICE. ICE did not exist before 2003, and we handled immigration just fine. I see no need for it. Reforming it is not going to do anything because how do you reform White Supremacist Militia members? YOU DON'T! So, since advocating for that is just a wastie, waste of timey time, I do not recommend putting energy into this nothing plan for addressing ICE. Thank goodness for judges who are being clear and trying to hamper them as much as any legislation would, but they are not always being listened to. Trump wants something else, and that is what these cretins listen to.