Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor. She is currently a contributor to CAFE, a blog where legal experts comment on current issues. Here, she expresses her concern about the use of federal force to occupy and terrorize American cities. Will we grow to accept the presence of masked, brutish federal agents in our cities?

She writes:

ICE may have left Minneapolis (or at least officials have said they are drawing down—“Border Czar” Tom Homan said over the weekend that a “small” federal security force would stay behind “for a short period of time”), but we cannot afford to forget what they did there. Even though this particular ICE surge was in Minnesota, it matters for all of us.

We cannot afford to forget Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and the other people and incidents, even, perhaps especially, those we do not have names or faces to attach to because of the sheer volume. When a government shoots and kills its own citizens—citizens exercising essential constitutional rights lawfully and in public, we must not forget. When that government lies about what happened, demonizes the victims, calls them terrorists, and opens an investigation into one of their family members instead of the law enforcement agent who pulled the trigger, we cannot afford to look away. If we do, if what happened in Minneapolis becomes just one more horror to be tossed with the rest of the trash at the end of its news cycle, we will forever lose a big, significant piece of what it means to be an American.

If you had federal agents killing American citizens in broad daylight on your 2026 bingo card, congratulations. Most of us didn’t. But shock and surprise are no reason to let what happened fade away, to push it aside because it’s too painful to stay focused on. If anything, Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s deaths reinforce the reasons we can’t forget that Trump militarized federal immigration enforcement agencies to terrorize people on the streets of an American city. A president who once said he could shoot someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue without losing his followers’ support must not be permitted to turn that cynicism into prophecy.

This administration has shown no remorse for what it did in Minneapolis. It has defended and continues to defend the surge in court. ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security. In a normal administration, regardless of party, you would have expected the Secretary to be outraged and demand a thorough investigation into what happened if personnel in one of the agencies she oversaw killed Americans in broad daylight. Instead, she called what happened self-defense and publicly defended the officers’ actions despite video of both events that showed it was not.

Two days after Customs and Border Patrol (CBP)  agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, Noem’s top adviser and unofficial chief of staff Corey Lewandowski, with whom she is rumored to have been having an affair for years, “messaged Trump’s pollster with a request: They needed to cut an ad to help her.” She sought support for herself, not accountability. Noem subsequently, according to reporting,  tried to fire her Coast Guard pilot for failing to move her blanket from one plane to another. She was forced to rehire him when she realized there was no one else to fly her plane home.

That’s the level of function at DHS these days. Meanwhile, the agent who shot Renee Good appears to be facing no serious consequences from the federal government, while Alex Pretti’s death is only under investigation because of unambiguous footage of the shooting showing he wasn’t a threat to anyone. There are no guarantees of a fair investigation or of a timely outcome. Nothing suggests Americans aren’t at risk of repetition in another time, and another place, if the president chooses to deploy his militarized law enforcement agency again.

Even for those who may not have caught on to this fact yet, we are all affected by this administration’s response to citizen dissent. In Maine, where ICE briefly surged in January in an effort that local reporting said was directed toward the state’s Somali community, an ICE agent filmed a woman who was observing his activity, and when she asked why, he told her, “Because we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” Anyone who opposes this administration runs that risk.

It’s an administration that arrests first and validates later, which means it has swept up people with legal immigration status as well as American citizens, in the race to rack up statistics for its mass deportation plan. A CBS News report, citing internal government data, found that fewer  than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s first year back in office had violent criminal records. We can’t afford to ignore or forget about it. Memory is the key.

It is all about threats, intimidation, and the risk of violence—all conduct that Americans are deeply ingrained against expecting from their government. Late last week, the New York Times ran a storyabout DHS, reporting that it sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment on ICE. Whether there is actually an investigation, whether they get the information or not, putting a report like this in circulation is a great tactic for a regime that wants to frighten people, to get them to second-guess themselves before they post on social media or attend a rally. It’s not what democracies do. In a democracy, leaders tolerate voices that disagree with them, they don’t shoot them.

How dangerous of a stage are we at when a government starts killing its own citizens? I asked Princeton Professor Kim Scheppele, who studies comparative law and has expertise in Hungary, among other failing democracies, whether there is any precedent after Nazi Germany for a supposed democracy to use paramilitary forces to execute its own people in public. “Not in any country that pretends to be a democracy,” she told me. “That’s why the 20th-century dictators are different. And now so are we.”

Scheppele explained that the new autocrats, the ones who have come to power in the 21st Century, don’t kill their own citizens until very late in the process of autocratic consolidation, and even then, not in the type of direct, public confrontations that led to Good and Pretti’s deaths. In Russia, opponents of the regime started falling from windows about 10 years into Putin’s reign, but they were difficult to attribute directly to the Kremlin. Erdogan, in Turkey, only began killing his own citizens (that is, outside Kurdish areas) after the attempted coup in 2016. Scheppele concluded that “Since most of the new autocrats pretend to be democrats, this sort of state violence and killing we’ve seen since the start of the surge immigration campaigns is quite rare.”

Dictators try to silence opposition, whether it’s through intimidation or violence. The question our democracy faces now is whether we’re going to let that happen here.

Stay Informed, 
Joyce

CAFE Contributor Joyce Vance is a co-host of the CAFE Insider podcast and the former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. She is also a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.