By Socialist Horizon
Starting in early December of 2025, the Trump regime deployed more than 2,000 ICE and other immigration enforcement agents to flood Minneapolis to carry out “Operation Metro Surge,” what the Department of Homeland Security called “largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out”. This was a coordinated attack and occupation of the city directed against the Somali population with the intention of carrying out mass arrests and detention fueled by the grotesque racism of Trump, the operatives in his regime, and aligned white supremacists. What they got instead was mass resistance from the people across the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, and a battle between opposing forces that fight on to this day.
Over the first month, ICE agents met so much resistance to their operation that Trump had to surge in an additional 1,000 agents, and green light the unchecked use of force by agents against the anti-ICE defense movement. This played out in the most barbaric form with the killing of Renée Nicole Good, a community organizer and mother of three who was shot and murdered by ICE agent Jonathon Ross. Good’s killing sparked the mass mobilization that led to calls for a citywide general strike.
The Battle of Minneapolis and the General Strike
The “Battle of Minneapolis,” a class struggle between thousands of working-class Minnesotans and the invading and occupying army of Trump’s ICE, reached its most advanced scale on January 23rd, when labor unions, community groups, religious institutions, and large swathes of the general population organized to carry out a general strike.
On Friday, at least 50,000 people in Minneapolis, with some estimating as high as 100,000, braved extreme cold of -9 below zero and dangerously low wind chills ranging from 30 to 40 degrees below zero to participate in a mass protest developing out of the called general strike. While not a complete general strike, the action did shut down some sectors of the economy, the shutting down of the transit system, hundreds of businesses closing, and with many schools closures.
The general strike demonstrates the fullest power of the working class to shut down the capitalist system and all its constituent components. This unique ability of the working class to collectively cease the operation of the capitalist system emerges from its central role in capitalist production. While the capitalist class owns the means of production, the workers determine whether or not production in whatever form takes place. Through the withholding of labor on a generalized scale, workers can prevent capitalists from earning necessary revenue and for profit-making to occur. If the capitalist system stops functioning and generating wealth, this creates disruptions that can multiply and push sections of the capitalist class into existential crisis while reverberating in secondary ways that negatively impact all aspects of how the capitalist system operates. A crisis of this scale necessitates the political representatives of the capitalist class, whether Republican and Democrat, to have to negotiate and make concessions (like demobilizing and withdrawing ICE from Minneapolis) to preserve the capitalist system.
At another action, a few thousand protesters gathered at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport (MSP) demanding that ICE deportation flights cease. Over the previous weeks of the ICE occupation, more than 2,000 people abducted by federal agents had been placed on flights contracted through Delta Airlines and Signature Aviation and sent to unknown destinations. As part of the call for the shutdown action at MSP, a significant percentage of airport workers stayed home in a coordinated “sick out”. Outside the airport, over 100 religious leaders carried out a civil disobedience action by blocking the main road to obstruct access.
The scale and heroic actions of the people in Minneapolis inspired hundreds of solidarity actions across the country, showing the initial stages of a national movement against ICE taking shape.
ICE Death Squads
The next day after the mass action ICE agents murdered Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care unit, Veterans Administration nurse who was actively supporting his community as part of the anti-ICE defense network. Pretti was shot 10 times at point-blank range and killed execution-style. The circumstances leading to this cold-blooded murder escalated quickly by the agents, who appeared eager to carry out another execution-style killing like that of Renee Nicole Good who was shot three times at point-blank by ICE agent Jonathon Ross. Pretti was filming the agents during an operation, then directing traffic through an ICE operation that blocked the road to traffic, and then attacked, sprayed with chemical agents, and then violently gang-jumped and beaten by several agents for trying to help another community member who was also being assaulted.
Pretti is the sixth person to be shot and killed by federal immigration officers since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, while 19 people have been shot by ICE agents in total. An additional 32 people who have been killed in ICE custody in 2025.
Since the ICE invasion of Minneapolis, the mass scale of violent repression has led to more than 3,000 arrests and abductions, untold numbers of beatings and the gassing of community defenders and bystanders with chemical and explosive agents such as tear gas, pepper spray, pepper spray pellets, carcinogenic gas laced with lead and chromium, and flash bang grenades—including one incident where one was thrown into a car of a family driving by injuring the driver and his six children.
This is an escalation of state violence designed to terrorize the people of Minneapolis because they have been a highly organized and effective campaign of mass resistance to the occupying ICE forces. Rather than cowering the Minnesotans, it has drawn even more people into the struggle.
There is also a radicalization taking place amongst frontline organizers and defenders comprising thousands of people engaging directly in anti-ICE patrols, workplace, and community self-defense groups, emergency response teams, mutual aid support, and other innovative and bottom-up methods to thwart the ICE occupation and their attacks.
Tens of thousands more people from all communities and walks of life are the next layer of support for the efforts to prevent ICE from carrying out their mass abductions. Trump’s surge of ICE terror into the state of Minnesota has activated a mass movement of resistance from all sectors.
ICE Created to Serve Capitalist and Imperialist Aims
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was created in 2003 as part of the formation of the newly created Department of Homeland Security and at the onset of the US “War on Terror”. Twenty-two enforcement agencies were combined into DHS, including the two largest ICE and CBP, and tasked with turning the then War on Terror inwards against not only migrants and refugees, but also anti-imperialist activists, political dissidents, and anyone else that opposes the Trump regime.
ICE operations like that in Minneapolis apply a military strategy referred to as counter-insurgency strategy. The adapted variation of military “Population-Centric Counterinsurgency” aims to invade, occupy, and establish control over a population and the environment in which that population exists for the purpose of executing stated military objectives (collective punishment, isolating or rooting out ‘insurgents’, etc.). Counter-insurgent strategy had originally been developed and deployed by US military forces in war theaters to attack and suppress insurgent movements of resistance operating in population centers, especially acting against occupying military forces like the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, or against US-aligned governments. This military strategy is now being applied against the US population.
It is also significant that the Minneapolis occupation coincides with ramped up U.S. imperial aggression outside its borders. The U.S. invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its President Nicolás Madura and his wife Cilia Flores is the imperial arm of ICE. In fact, Maduro was dragged in chains to a Brooklyn jail so that Trump could declare his arrest part of the US war being waged against Venezuela abroad, and by ICE in U.S. cities domestically.
Trump precipitated his attack on Venezuela by falsely labelling Maduro’s government as a “narco-terrorist” regime, declaring local Venezuelan street gang “Tren de Aragua” an international drug cartel, raining Hellfire missiles on small boats and obliterating more than 100 people off of Venezuelan and Colombian coasts claiming they were drug smugglers, and then criminalizing 650,000 Venezuelan migrants and refugees in the US, claiming they were part of this same international crime syndicate.
In March of 2025, Trump proclaimed that Venezuelan immigrants inside the US belonged to the Venezuelan crime gang “Tren de Aragua” and were “conducting irregular warfare” against the US. Trump invoked the 1798 law to send about 250 Venezuelans to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they were subjected to torture by the Bukele regime, before being ordered to cease such flights by a federal judge. Trump has now ordered the mass deportation of Venezuelan migrants from US cities using direct deportation flights to Caracas. This was after “reaching agreement” with the administration of Delcy Rodríguez, former Vice President under Maduro now installed as President.
Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the killing of over 100 people during the violent abduction of Maduro, and the criminalization and targeting of Venezuelan migrants and refugees is directly linked to the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. The same imperialist methods of attack, abduction, and repression are deployed, and the same racist propaganda used to justify violent strategies, with the same ramping up of repressive violence against those targeted and those that resist.
Waging Internal War
Beginning in 2003, ICE was initially deployed through the “National Fugitive Operations Program” to surveil, target, arrest, and deport undocumented Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern people from over 20 targeted nations who were residing in the US—reflecting the war on Arab, Muslim, and ME people in the regions being targeted by US military operations).
In 2006, the purview was expanded to include the targeting of undocumented workers from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. This refocused targeting of immigrant workers was carried out in response to the mass immigrant worker mobilizations of 2006, where over 3 million people participated in strikes, marches, boycotts, and walkouts demanding legalization. Between 2006 and 2007, ICE agents orchestrated hundreds of invasive raids across the country in over 100 cities and towns nationwide that targeted factories, farms, homes, and public community spaces decapitating the movement.
The imperative to repress, contain, control, and instill the permanence of fear in the migrant and international working class as a function of the US capitalist system can explain why both the Republicans and Democratic Parties have worked together to build up ICE and detention and deportation capacities through successive administrations up to Trump’s current second term.
Building ICE as a Bipartisan Project
ICE is now the largest armed enforcement agency in the US. It was originally allocated $3.3 billion dollars under George W. Bush, but has risen and expanded each successive administration reaching a budget of $10 billion dollars under Biden in 2024. Under Trump’s second term, the budget for ICE has been expanded to $75 billion over the next four years, on top of the $10 billion Congress already appropriated ICE in March 2025. ICE now has $28.7 billion at its disposal this year, which is nearly triple ICE’s entire budget for FY24.
Trump’s originally stated goal was to build a force capable of deporting 3,000 people per day, ultimately deporting “15-20 million people” over his second term. To do this, ICE has been deployed into all 50 states to conduct operations. While ICE made 1,179 arrests by Jan. 26, the daily average arrests dropped to around 800 by the end of January and to fewer than 600 during the first two weeks of February 2025. Reuters reports that in January Trump deported around 38,000 people, less than Biden’s average of 57,000 removals a month in 2024.
This led to the surge strategy to rachet up arrest numbers, with the massive increase in funding, buildup, and deployment of agents in the summer of 2025 to cities “under Democratic Party control”. Thousands of agents were surged into cities to conduct high intensity raids and occupy strategic targets, reminiscent of the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan military to engage in mass abduction and deportation. This surge strategy was first deployed in Los Angeles, then Chicago, Charlottesville, and now Minneapolis.
Trump’s Strategy For Racial Targeting and Brutality
The surge strategy was further enabled by a Supreme Court ruling that authorized the right for ICE agents to racially profiled. In the case known as “Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem”, the Supreme Court granted an emergency request from the Trump administration that overturned an LA judge’s order that barred roving ICE patrols from targeting and snatching people off Los Angeles streets based solely on their racial appearance, what language they speak, what type of work they do, or where they are located. Now, ICE was cleared to engage in racial hunts through the targeted urban centers.
Trump then revoked the “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) and the legal protective statuses for more than 1.5 million immigrants who were in the country with legal authorization and many of whom are in different stages of moving through the process of achieving refugee status for themselves and their families. This created a population of “deportable people” overnight who could be abducted by ICE.
This also coincides with Trump issuing a memo to ICE in June 2025 that directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pause worksite immigration raids that had been orchestrated as part of his immigration crackdown. Capitalist interests pushed back against Trump and the detrimental effects of these raids were having on their business and profits, encouraging Trump to then refocus on refugees.
In October, Trump then purged ICE leadership by kicking out the heads of 10 regional field offices, replacing them with people from Border Patrol led by Gregory Bovino, who became the chief architect in charge of conducting President Trump’s ICE operations in Chicago and then in Minneapolis because of his reputation for heavy handed repressive tactics and racial abuse. According to one report, “Leaks inside the administration indicated that the White House was sick of ICE trying to target individual immigrants with arrests and wanted more of Bovino’s profiling-based tactics.”
In the face of mass resistance to the surge strategy, the Trump regime declared “absolute immunity” for agents carrying out violent repression against anti-ICE activists. ICE also began an intentional recruitment policy to bring more ideologically far-Right and fascist-minded individuals and groups into ICE, with virtually no vetting, and reduced ICE agent training from 16 weeks to 6 weeks. This on top of the fact that there is little oversight of ICE operations, creating a closed internalized and protective culture where violence and corruption can thrive. Two days before the murder of Alex Pretti, a federal appeals court ruled that ICE agents could deploy chemical agents and use violence at their own discretion against anti-ICE protesters.
The mass outrage against ICE murders now appears to be leading to a new change in Trump’s strategy. Trump dismissed the petty tyrant and architect of ICE brutality Gregory Bovino–perhaps offering him up as a scapegoat. He has announced that his appointed “Border Czar” Thomas Homan will replace Bovino and “report to him directly” about events on the ground in Minneapolis. But Homan is no different.
Homan has been appointed during the second term of Barack Obama and by Trump for both terms. He was appointed by Obama as ICE’s Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations in 2013. He was the architect of Obama’s brutal family separation policy, arguing that the separation of children from their parents and caregivers “would be an effective deterrent” to crossing the border to seek asylum. He was so effective at deploying cruel and inhumane methods against migrants and refugees to facilitate deportation at such a large scale that Obama, the “Deporter-in-Chief” awarded Homan a Presidential Rank Award, lauding Homan’s “success expanding arrests and detention beds for the recent surge in children and families fleeing violence in Central America”.
As part of the first Trump administration, he was brought in to expand his family separation policy. After 2018, he began contributing to Fox News as a commentator, later joining the far-Right Heritage Foundation in 2022 where he became a contributor to the development of Project 2025. Before becoming part of Trump’s second administration, Homan was recorded accepting a bag containing $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives. The FBI was investigating allegations that Homan was accepting bribes from border security companies in exchange for the promise of government contracts if Trump won the 2024 election. In September 2025, Trump’s Department of Justice abruptly closed the investigation. Meanwhile, with Homan back in office in Trump’s second term, Homan’s former clients are landing “big federal paydays” and winning profitable contracts from the Trump White House amid his ICE-unleashed crackdowns on US cities.
The reshuffle of command and recycling of Thomas Homan to replace the despised Gregory Bovino reflects in how the people of Minneapolis have punched back against ICE and Trump, especially after the brutal killings. But ICE’s war will continue and escalate under Homan, so we need to continue building the resistance to ICE from the bottom-up in cities across the country, and to unify them on a national scale. We also need to organize around the call to completely abolish ICE.
Build the Resistance on a National Scale
Resistance movements have played a significant role in opposing and preventing ICE from achieving its objectives on the ground. Mass and organized action has allowed people to avert arrests, disrupt or obstruct raids and operations, organized critical mass makes tactics to render ICE immobile and ineffective, organized vigilance and emergency response systems to rapidly respond to the points of ICE activity, organized patrols in targeted neighborhoods, developed defense plans, mutual aid groups and activities, and now deployed the greatest weapon in the arsenal of working-class struggle: the general strike.
We will need to join, build, and strengthen class struggle movements against ICE violence and occupation to defeat the class war that is being waged on us from above. We also need to build a revolutionary party in the US that can help shape, organize, and unite the most militant sections of the mass resistance movement against the capitalist and imperialist systems driving these wars abroad and at home.
Socialist Horizon is committed to this project. We urge people who wish to join us to reach out at contact@socialisthorizon.org
Originally published on Punto Rojo
