Happy Sunday, I hope you and yours are well. 

After a brief detour last week to Northern England, the focus of the newsletter today returns back to events in the US. The tone of the immigration crackdown has shifted and the Whitehouse  has rhetorically conceded some ground. Tom Holman has relieved Kristi Noem as the face of the operation. On Thursday, the administration agreed to withdraw 700 ICE officers from Minneapolis, leaving 2000 in the region. But we shouldn’t be fooled by any of this. 

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Since we last corresponded there have been new alarming incidents elsewhere. 

If you missed the situation in Portland, it is galling and demonstrative of the law enforcement impunity around use of force that I've been talking about in this forum and others for roughly a decade. In Portland, a nonviolent demonstration against an ICE facility was attacked by federal agents. 

Here’s a report from Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB):

The union-organized protest began several blocks from the Portland ICE building and included a march through the city’s South Waterfront neighborhood. During the march, sometime after 4 p.m., some protesters crowded the immigration building’s driveway, blocking a security gate that leads into the facility.

Federal officers stationed at the ICE building deployed tear gas that drifted through the air, traveling several blocks and into the larger crowd of demonstrators made up of families, including children and elderly people. 

Note the direction of force. 

Note who escalated the situation and who gassed a crowd including children and the elderly. 

The majority of violence perpetrated at protests is state violence against often peaceful demonstrators and language used by journalists describing “clashes with law enforcements” or “protests turning violent” obscure the direction violence is delivered.

Like, I guess you can blame the protestors for temporarily blocking a driveway but in doing so, you’re siding with history’s Bull Connors, who cracked John Lewis’ skull, and beat civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama 60 years ago. 

Here’s a video for those that need a history lesson on Bloody Sunday in Selma.

What’s notable about Selma is state violence perpetrated that day on the Edmund Pettus Bridge was widely condemned by national leaders. The response today is different and indicative of what ails us.

I don't know what to say about a country where we can't universally condemn tear gassing children and shooting protesters who are sprawled out on all fours in the back. But that is the US in 2026.

I am firmly in the camp of abolishing ICE and I think I made that case a fortnight ago. Among the common responses to calls to abolish ICE are calls for more training and body cameras. 

I could go off on these for a while but I'll offer the following as a rejoinder:

1. More training isn’t the solution: Neither the officer who shot Renee Good nor the officers that shot Alex Pretti was “new” or a recent recruit; Ross an Iraq War veteran, who shot Good, has been with ICE since 2015. Gutierrez and Ochoa who shot Pretti have been with CBP since 2014 and 2018 respectively, meaning all three officers have more experience in their roles than I have teaching internationally—they have ample training.

2. Body cameras are not a solution: since the introduction of body cameras as standard issue equipment for law enforcement offices in the US the number of police killings has gone up, not down. Instead, body cameras are used most effectively to justify assault allegations against civilians made by police officers. The officer who shot Renee Good literally had his cellphone in his hand, filming the altercation, presumably to share with his bros on social media. It didn’t stop him from shooting a woman in the face.

3. None of this is new: as Mekka Okereke hammered in this post and elsewhere, ICE’s campaign of state violence is essentially what Black communities (and I think it’s worth adding our Native brothers and sisters) have confronted for decades. ICE is doing what local cops do to people like Manuel Ellis and Philando Castile everyday. They’ve been doing this to us your whole life. 

I want to dwell on this last point for a moment. 

I keep seeing people say they “can’t believe” this is happening in America. What they really mean is “I can’t believe this is happening to people who look like me.” The killing of Good and Pretti are unusual because they were filmed and the victims were middle class and white. Strip that away and the numbers tell a decades long story: according to Mapping Police Violence, in 2025 law enforcement  in Minnesota killed nine people. US police killed 1,314 people last year, and US police have already killed 82 people this year. 

In each of those data sets, Black people are 2.8x more likely to be killed by police. It’s no wonder why Minnesota, with its notable Somali immigrant population, became this administration's primary target of enforcement.

This is not a failure of training or technology—this is the plan—Minnesota is the plan. But they didn’t count on this much resistance.

This summer the GOP led Congress voted to authorize $170,000,000,000 for immigration enforcement, bringing the budgets for ICE and CPB within spitting distance of the US Army.

When you see the same agencies that murdered Good and Pretti reportedly building and acquiring warehouses that can hold up to 8,000 people, you can hopefully see the appropriate historical corollaries. 

When the kids marched in Ferguson and after the murder of George Floyd, they were trying to save us from this. Instead, we let them get beat by the cops and raised law enforcement budgets. 

What we’re seeing is the predictable outcome of a system built to intimidate, exert force, protect itself, and demand deference, being applied at scale.