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jonathan ross
We Are All Minnesota
Trump thought Minnesotans would be pushovers and great “performance fodder” as televised victims of his version of macho violence. He was wrong.
Jan 23, 2026
President Donald Trump stepped into a major political landmine by picking Minnesota as the Democratic state he opted to savage with his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this time around. No one, anywhere, has ever regarded Minnesota as any kind of threat to any nation. Writer and former “Prairie Home Companion” radio personality Garrison Keillor often talked about the rock-steady courtesy and careful reticence of the hard-working and (once) stoic Minnesotans. “We Minnesotans believe in low key,” he quipped about himself and the other residents of his home state. Hardly the rampaging “paid political agitators” Donald Trump conjures up.
Minnesota consistently tallies among the lowest per capita crime stats in the nation. Yet there Trump’s jack-booted thugs are in repeated scenes on TV across the nation, hurling Minnesotans to the ground, kneeling on their backs, wrapping their beefy arms around their necks and squeezing, shooting them. This, despite the fact that Democratic California, along with the Republican states of Texas and Florida, have the highest number—millions—of undocumented immigrants in the nation. Yet Trump is focusing on the Midwestern state.
Nearby residents across the Minnesota’s border identify with their out-of-state neighbors. I grew up in Wisconsin, and considered Minnesota part of us, as I did Michigan, Iowa, and much of Illinois. If Trump thinks he carefully sidestepped red Iowa and Michigan, and purple Wisconsin (which went for Trump in 2024) in his targeted violence, he’s hugely mistaken. What happens in Minnesota is felt by all Midwesterners. Like me, other Wisconsinites have relatives over the border, they shop in Minnesota, and some have farms and businesses there. Minnesotans talk like us. We have the same accents, and some of us call drinking fountains “bubblers.” That kind of identification is something Trump, born and raised in Queens, will never get.
Even more problematic for Trump is that the great swath of middle Americans view Midwesterners as one of them. The country often dismisses the complaints and actions of the New York metropolitan area and the West (i.e. “left”) Coast. But they don’t take that attitude when it comes to Minnesotans, widely considered the salt of the earth by their fellow Americans.
It’s not so easy (or a genius political move) to remain popular as a vengeful president scapegoats a steady state from heartland America with combat-outfitted thugs.
Nevertheless, Minnesotans are being brutalized on the streets of Minneapolis: their “papers” demanded by ICE agents (which citizens are not required to carry), their car windows smashed and their bodies dragged over shattered glass, slugged when they dare lift their cell phones to record the violence. Yet the Minnesotans, a huge percentage of whom are hunters and own guns, remain nonviolent protesters against the brutality, steadfast and indomitable in their opposition, relying on whistles to alert one another to ICE violence, relentlessly recording the federal agents’ assault on the law despite threats from angry, threatening officers. Minnesotans have staged protest sit-ins in churches, at Hilton Hotels, where agents sleep, and at Target stores where masked men have kidnapped teenage US citizens working there. Protesters last month staged an all-night raucous anti-ICE “concert” to keep the agents awake as they tried to sleep in their Hilton Hotel beds.
It’s a lose-lose situation for Trump. Early poll results already hint that the president’s support in the wake of the violence in the Midwest—and nationally—is tanking. It’s not so easy (or a genius political move) to remain popular as a vengeful president scapegoats a steady state from heartland America with combat-outfitted thugs.
Even before news spread that ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Minneapolis mom and US citizen Renee Nicole Good in the face on January 7, a number of polls found increasing anger over Trump’s Minneapolis thugfest.
A national YouGov poll taken the same day of the shooting before word of the killing had been widely shared found that 52% of those surveyed already either somewhat or strongly disapproved of how ICE was doing its job (39% somewhat approved or strongly approved). Just 27% thought the agency's tactics were "about right," compared to 51% who labeled them"too forceful.”
Six out of ten of those surveyed said they believed a “war” or “conflict” is erupting in the streets of America.
A Reuters/Ipsos survey January 15 found Americans’ approval of Trump’s immigration approach was at its lowest point in his second administration. An AP-NORC poll found that just 38% of Americans approved of Trump’s immigration enforcement, down from a 49% high this spring. In addition, a majority of voters (51%) in a recent CNN/SSRS poll said ICE’s actions are making US cities less safe.
Trump’s net job approval rating slid to -14, YouGov pollsters reported Jan. 20 after the president’s immigration crackdown, the lowest of his second administration. The American Research Group reported Wednesday that Trump’s approval rating had cratered to -28.
“What’s happening in Minnesota right now defies belief,” Democratic Gov. Tim Walz said in a televised address last week. “News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities,” he added, characterizing the ICE attacks as a “campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”
Trump thought Minnesotans would be pushovers and great “performance fodder” as televised victims of his version of macho violence. They may be quietly hard-working, and sometimes excruciatingly reserved, but they have spines of steel and they know what’s right.
We are all Minnesota.
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The Nazi Political Theory That Explains ICE's Impunity
Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the violent face of the country’s transformation into a new 21st-century dual state.
Jan 23, 2026
Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, will not be brought to justice. Let that sink in. Ross is going to skate, because in Donald Trump’s America, his agency operates above the law. As Vice President JD Vance put it at a White House press conference the day after the shooting, Ross has “absolute immunity for doing his job.”
Vance’s comments shed light upon the larger legal design behind ICE’s newfound power. In Trump’s second term, the United States is rapidly devolving into what the late German émigré legal and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel called a “dual state,” in which acts of violence perpetrated against designated enemies of the regime are not only tolerated, but often celebrated as acts of valor and redemption.
A socialist attorney who practiced labor law in Berlin, Fraenkel fled Nazi Germany in 1938, eventually settling in Chicago. There he would write his most famous work, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, a study of the legal system implemented by the Third Reich in the 1930s.
Fraenkel’s central thesis is that the Nazis did not dismantle the legal structure of the Weimar Republic all at once or entirely, but replaced it with a bifurcated system in which state functions were divided between a “normative” sphere—which operated according to set rules and regulations—and a “prerogative” sphere, where violence was permitted and traditional legal restraints did not apply.
The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point.
To keep capitalism up and running, Hitler’s government had to maintain the façade of a stable “normative” legal system that permitted businesses and Christian Germans to engage in commerce and settle contract cases, employment disputes, landlord-tenant matters, and other civil issues in court. As University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq noted in a March 2025 Atlantic magazine essay, this duality allowed capitalism to “jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.”
But as the judiciary surrendered its independence through a combination of cooptation and intimidation, the “prerogative” system came to dominate. “On any given day,” Huq explained:
… people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers.
The case was closed with no further appeals.
Fraenkel largely attributed the theoretical underpinnings of the dual Nazi state to the work of the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Often referred to as the “Crown Jurist of National Socialism,” Schmitt joined the party in 1933 and went on to serve as president of the National Socialist Association of Legal Professionals.
Schmitt was an unrelenting critic of liberalism, decrying its weaknesses for embracing universal human rights and what he deemed its hypocritical and indecisive fixations on discussion, debate, negotiation, and compromise. As a counter to universalism, he promoted a “friend-enemy” concept of politics, insisting that all states necessarily distinguish between those whom it embraces as friends worthy of protection and those who are forever considered enemies, outsiders and invaders deserving of its wrath, retribution, and punishment.
As a complement to the friend-enemy concept, Schmitt promoted the idea of the “state of exception,” arguing that the sovereign in a well-functioning state must be vested with emergency powers to suspend the rule of law to maintain public order and ensure the survival of the nation. Soon after joining the party, he declared that the Enabling Act, which effectively made Hitler a dictator, had become the provisional constitution of Germany. He would go on to enthusiastically support the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping Jews and other “enemies” of citizenship, and to defend Hitler’s right as sovereign to define the enemy as he saw fit.
All of this will sound eerily familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the news. Since retaking the presidency, Trump has declared nine states of emergency on a range of issues stretching from the imposition of bloated tariffs on foreign goods to designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and proclaiming a national emergency at the southern border. The border proclamation, issued on January 20, his first day back in office, cited the now-familiar charge of an “alien invasion” of “criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers,” and laid the groundwork for both his mass-deportation program and for giving ICE the largest budget of any police agency in the country.
ICE is now a formidable paramilitary force, having hired 12,000 new agents in the past year, more than doubling its size, and ramping up to hire more. It has been deployed into American cities on orders from Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to root out the invaders. It has become the violent face of the country’s transformation into a new 21st-century dual state.
Undocumented immigrants remain ICE’s primary target, but citizens like Good are also in jeopardy. Good’s case stands out because she was white, and her killing was caught on video. But she is not alone. While there are no official figures that specifically track how many citizens have been victimized by immigration agents, ProPublica reported last October that it had found more than 170 cases where citizens were detained during raids and protests. According to the report:
Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.
To date, not a single federal agent has been prosecuted for these incidents. Nor are any prosecutions likely.
In “normal” times, we could at least expect Agent Ross to face a rigorous Justice Department investigation. It is not true, to return to JD Vance’s comments, that Ross enjoys absolute immunity under existing law. It has always been difficult to prosecute federal law enforcement officials, but no such immunity exists.
But these are not normal times.
Trump, who now openly directs the Department of Justice and the FBI, has precluded the possibility of any serious federal investigation. Nor can we count on a state investigation conducted in concert with federal law enforcement. The FBI has announced it will exclude Minnesota authorities from participating in any fake pro-forma probe of Good’s death.
Perhaps most regrettably, we cannot count on the Supreme Court to hold Ross and other offending agents to account. The Supreme Court has endowed Trump with the powers of the unitary executive, holding in Trump v. United States that the president may exercise his pardon power however he pleases to excuse anyone from any federal prosecution.
The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point. We can be heartened by the fact that the United States is not Germany in 1933, and Trump, for all his bluster and megalomania, is not Hitler. The country’s fate remains open, and dependent on the nonviolent and lawful collective action that we—all of us—take in the coming weeks, months, and years.
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Independent Autopsy Provides 'Strong Evidence' Against ICE Agent Who Killed Renee Good
"Our legal team will continue its unwavering and proactive advocacy for Renee’s life and her family," said lead attorney Antonio M. Romanucci, whose firm commissioned the autopsy.
Jan 22, 2026
"As a lawyer, I've been waiting for this," New York University law professor Ryan Goodman said early Thursday after attorneys for Renee Good's family released findings from an independent autopsy conducted as part of a civil investigation into her death.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot Good in Minnesota two weeks ago. While the Trump administration has tried to paint the 37-year-old US citizen and mother of three as a "domestic terrorist," and argue that the ICE agent was acting in self-defense, videos, eyewitness accounts, and analyses of the shooting have fueled calls for Ross' arrest and prosecution.
The independent autopsy provides "strong evidence against Agent Ross, given what it means about [his] second or third shot through [the] left-side window" of Good's vehicle, Goodman wrote on social media. Those shots make the "easiest criminal case of a willful killing."
The Chicago-based law firm Romanucci & Blandin said in a Wednesday statement that it commissioned a "highly respected and credentialed medical pathologist" to conduct the autopsy at the request of Good's family, and the expert found:
- There were three clear gunshot wound paths to Renee's body;
- One gunshot wound struck the left forearm, causing soft tissue hemorrhage;
- One gunshot wound traversed the right breast without penetrating major organs;
- One gunshot wound entered the left side of her head near the temple and exited the right side of her head;
- The breast and left forearm wounds were not immediately life-threatening; and
- A fourth wound was a graze wound consistent with a firearm injury, but with no penetration.
"We believe the evidence we are gathering and will continue to gather in our investigation will suffice to prove our case," said lead Attorney Antonio M. Romanucci. "The video evidence depicting the events of January 7, 2026, is clear, particularly when viewed through the standards of reasonable policing and totality of circumstances. Additionally, our legal team will continue its unwavering and proactive advocacy for Renee's life and her family."
The firm noted that "the results of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's Office autopsy have not yet been released to the family or legal team."
The Washington Post highlighted that "Romanucci, one of the firm's founding partners, was on the legal team that represented the family of George Floyd after he was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. That legal team also commissioned an independent autopsy that contradicted aspects of the Hennepin County medical examiner's autopsy."
The day after Good's death, Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, announced that the probe into the fatal shooting "would now be led solely" by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Meanwhile, several officials with the US Department of Justice (DOJ), including prosecutors and others in the Civil Rights Division, have recently resigned over the case.
The DOJ has refused to open a civil rights investigation into Good's killing but is investigating Minnesota officials for alleged conspiracy to impede the thousands of federal immigration agents sent to the Twin Cities. On Tuesday, the department subpoenaed Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, state Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Saint Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, and Ramsey County Attorney John Choi.
"This Department of Justice investigation, sparked by calls for accountability in the face of violence, chaos, and the killing of Renee Good, does not seek justice," Walz said in a statement that mirrored those of the other targeted officials. "Minnesota will not be intimidated into silence and neither will I."
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