Lydia Polgreen writes:

Late last Wednesday night, I was standing on a street corner in the Hawthorne neighborhood in North Minneapolis when I witnessed an extraordinary confrontation. A federal agent marched up a narrow residential sidewalk flanked by modest bungalows, kitted out in gear fit for the battle of Falluja: full body armor, military boots and camouflage fatigues and helmet, with a heavy machine gun slung by his side. His carriage was erect, his gaze fixed straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the crowd of protesters who blew whistles and shouted curses as he passed, enraged that one week after Renee Good was gunned down by an ICE agent, another civilian had been shot by ICE in their city.

Suddenly, the tense scene dissolved into slapstick. The federal officer slipped on a patch of ice and tumbled to the ground. A raucous roar of laughter and jeers erupted from the protesters surrounding him. He scrambled to his feet and marched on. But a few seconds later one of the protesters shouted, “He dropped his magazine!”

And sure enough, lying on the patch of ice was a fully loaded magazine from his automatic weapon. Dan Engelhart, one of the city’s parks commissioners, was standing nearby. He grabbed the magazine and turned it over in his hands.

“Well, we’re fucking close to civil war,” he told me.

As a longtime foreign correspondent, I have covered civil wars in countries across the globe. Not so long ago, I would have rolled my eyes at the notion that one could erupt anywhere in America, much less in my once placid home state of Minnesota. And yet there I was, eyes stinging and throat burning as tear gas wafted over me, watching heavily armed agents of the federal government invade a quiet residential neighborhood five miles as the crow flies from the suburb where I went to middle school.

Like many Americans, I had watched the video of the killing of Good by an ICE officer on a residential street in Minneapolis with horror and sorrow. From afar, this tragic and possibly criminal act of violence could plausibly be seen as incidental to President Trump’s mission to deport undocumented people from the country. But when I landed in Minneapolis on Monday and saw the size, scope and lawlessness of the federal onslaught unfolding here, I understood that Good’s killing was emblematic of its true mission: to stage a spectacle of cruelty upon a city that stands in stark defiance against Trump’s dark vision of America.

Thousands of masked, heavily armed agents, some with minimal training, have been unleashed on the streets of an American state. They have been promised near-total legal immunity by the president, effectively unshackled from any constitutional constraints.

They have been given limitless license to abduct anyone, not just the undocumented immigrants but American citizens who happen to look foreign, whatever that might mean. Even Native Americans, whose ancestors lived here long before anyone else, have been detained on the absurd suspicion that they are undocumented immigrants. They have roughed up local lawmakers, detained and jailed legal observers without charges, tear-gassed high school students, smashed in car windows of bewildered drivers unlucky enough to cross their path. Anyone who gets in their way — by protesting, filming their actions or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time — is presumed to be a domestic terrorist.

We’ve all seen the horrifying viral videos. I was a couple of blocks away, engulfed in a cloud of tear gas not far from where Good was gunned down, when a disabled woman on her way to a doctor’s appointment was dragged from her car, cuffed and carried away like a livestock carcass by federal agents.

But it was the quiet yet pervasive fear that stunned me most. St. Paul’s new mayor, Kaohly Her, who came to the United States as a Hmong refugee at the age of 3, told me she has started carrying proof of citizenship with her at all times, just in case she is stopped by ICE agents. There are empty desks in school classrooms across the Twin Cities as immigrant children stay home, afraid that they or their parents will be snatched up by ICE agents who lurk in idling S.U.V.s near schools during drop-off and pickup. Restaurants and shops have closed because their employees are too afraid to come to work, even if they are here legally, because the informal policy of federal agents seems to be to detain first, ask questions later.

Minnesota is under siege. It might not yet be a civil war, but what the White House has called Operation Metro Surge is definitely not just — or even primarily — an immigration enforcement operation. It is an occupation designed to punish and terrorize anyone who dares defy this incursion and, by extension, Trump’s power to wield limitless force against any enemy he wishes.

“This is tyranny,” Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me. “There is no other way to put it. We’re all shocked by it. Nobody ever thought America would look like this. We now don’t have to speculate as to what American fascism looks like. It’s right outside the door.” [Continue reading…]