Garrett Graff writes:

It’s sometimes hard to capture just how far the looking glass we are in American politics and daily life, but here’s one snapshot: I was on Audie Cornish’s CNN show last Thursday morning, which I always try to do when I’m in Washington, D.C., and at the time I went to bed the night before, we were prepping to talk about some combo of the following: The US takeover of Venezuela and Donald Trump’s meeting with its opposition leader, who may or may “award” him her Nobel Peace Prize later that ay (she did); the fact that the US may or may not launch military strikes in Iran; and how the US may or may not be moving toward a military invasion of Greenland.

But then when we actually got to set Thursday morning, we spent a lot of the show discussing how there was another federal shooting in Minnesota, during the paramilitary occupation of the third-largest metropolitan region in the Midwest by a presidential secret police sent there to terrorize local communities.

If you’re feeling like the news is a tsunami right now, you’re not wrong. If you’re feeling like the heaviness of the world is a literal weight on your shoulders, you’re right.

Right now, there are 3,000 ICE officers and CBP agents on the ground in Minnesota — a number that dwarfs the ten largest local and state police agencies there combined. It’s an insane use of federal resources.

On Saturday on Ali Velshi’s MS NOW show, I talked about a regular theme of mine since August: This is what fascism looks like — there is no bright line between democracy and autocracy, it’s a spectrum, and not all of the country will experience that switch at the same moment in the same way. But let’s be clear: There is a US city living under occupation by fascist presidential secret police right now.

The brutality of the occupation in and around Minneapolis — scenes from the Global War on Terror transplanted from Kabul or Baghdad to Minnesota — has a lot of people asking basic questions about ICE and CBP, so I thought I’d devote today’s column to trying to explain what ICE and CBP are and what they aren’t, what powers they have, and what’s changed in America to bring this war to our streets. [Continue reading…]