State terror is America’s new national reality

After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation.

- M Gessen

US federal agents detain a protester along a commercial street on Saturday during clashes following the fatal shooting of a demonstrator earlier in the day in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

(AFP)

It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.

Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota, its officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous US citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a US citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury centre; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people's papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have Killed another US citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse with no criminal record. It seems he was white. The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at pointblank range.