I saw a short clip of an interview with Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz that encapsulates some worries I have. (I saw it on twitter and googling for it I found this https://www.reddit.com/r/ThoughtWarriors/comments/1qoyrqc/tim_walz_im_gonna_give_homan_the_benefit_of_the/) Walz says that he worries about “this nightmare” going “somewhere else,” which makes sense and of course no one wishes “this nightmare” on anyone. The problem is that Walz and his ilk wish a different nightmare on some people, and worse yet - and in this one particular way they’re actively worse than Trump and similar monsters - they do so without saying it directly, which means people can come to agree with them without realizing the ramifications. Walz says that ICE should coordinate with local law enforcement and "pick these people up when they're not suspecting it in the middle of the night where no shots are fired.” Certainly border enforcement without gunfire is better than border enforcement with gunfire, all things being equal, but the point is that all things are not equal. The emphasis here is on detaining and deporting in an orderly fashion with a clear implication that detention and deportation are legitimate activities and that this orderly approach will allow those activities to be conducted more effectively. This is fucked up in my view, as someone who thinks deportation as such is wrong. (https://littlevillagemag.com/letter-to-the-editor-deportation-is-wrong-period/)

If views like Walz’s win out, it’s entirely possible that violence against immigrants increases. That is, there’s a chance that the specific form that the end to “this nightmare” takes, instead of shifting “somewhere else” as Walz means it, is less of an end to violence and more of a fine tuning of violence so that it’s only done to immigrants away from public attention. As Walz notes, that’d be a smart approach for the Trump administration. The current approach, he points out, has been a political disaster for them, whereas a presumably the approach he endorses - night raids and all - would not be a disaster for the administration. Obviously this is not a perspective that emphasizes justice for migrants. This is a perspective which recommends a nightmare for many. It’s a vision of, and recommendation of best practices for the organized inflicting of, that nightmare, and as I tried to say a vision in which that awful reality is not publicly recognizable as a nightmare.

Here’s one way to understand this, which I think is wrong but understandable: once ICE started shooting white people and disrupting ordinary social life for white people, ICE became controversial, and once ICE goes back to just hurting brown people in ways that don’t disrupt ordinary social life it will be come uncontroversial. I think this is a reasonable summary of at least some elite responses to what’s going on, but I think for most ordinary people what’s actually happened is not that. (By the way, I know it’s a wide range of agencies, not just ICE, I mean the term as a shorthand and I think most people do - when people say ‘fuck ICE’ they don’t mean just that one agency, they mean all such agencies, generally speaking, though the Democrats will definitely play on the semantic ambiguity here if push comes to shove such that they feel like they have to act).

Instead, I think what’s going on is something more like the following: people with solidaristic leanings saw large scale threats to other people - immigrants - who they know personally or who they imagine as closely proximate like neighbors, fellow residents of the same city, and saw more of the violence of the state presented to them via traditional media, distant (meaning, by strangers) social media, proximate (meaning, by people they know personally) social media, and - on the ground in Minneapolis - their own immediate experiences. They started to act, that action spread, and the lived experiences of the doing of that action deepened people’s solidaristic leanings. (This isn’t a beliefs then actions situation anymore than it’s actions then beliefs. Both/and, kinda thing. People thinking and feeling and acting in a virtuous circle deepening all of the above, in context of relationships.) The state repression has amplified some of that by increasing the outrage and providing an easily hatable antagonist in the form of ICE agents.

This is all to say, I think people have been undergoing real transformations of multiple kinds, or a single complicated multifaceted process - a moral element regarding solidarity, another related moral element regarding less willingness to submit to certain state authorities and a willingness to be brave, some analytical elements, growth and deepening of relationships and skills as well, a huge collective learning process. I wrote a bit about this a while back on here trying to make sense of some of this via some of Don Hamerquist’s writing on what he called epistemological breaks - buttondown.com/nateholdren/archive/a-letter-on-epistemological-breaks-morality-and/ The degree of that break has been deeper than I expected, and also more localized. It’s beautiful and inspiring really. (Having said that, I’m aware that it’s also an incredibly awful experience that will haunt people a long time. I want to be very clear that I am not at all trying to imply that the positive elements make any of the brutality worth it - I’m not reaching for silver linings here. What’s happening in Minneapolis is appalling and I am absolutely not trying to say that it’s worth it or to do a if you want an omelette you have to break some eggs’ kind of think.)

So, I don’t think everything dies down immediately if ICE’s actions become less immediately disruptive and I don’t think this is a situation where people are just acting on clearly defined interests in any straight forward way. I think instead we’ve seen something like a rapid expansion of, I don’t know, something like a scattered publicness (by which I mean a kind of living in common and in connection with each other, maybe something like ‘lived neighborliness and the elements of social life that feed and are fed by that’) into a larger publicness, tightly braided with a process of politicizing some areas of social life often taken for granted (certainly by relative elites, who periodically try or have some of their specialist flunkies try to get the rest of the population to also take those areas of social life for granted; in this effort they have the advantage that a lot of the ordinary authoritative institutions of social life point in the same direction). That’s not primarily a politicization at the level of imagination - ie, not so much people going ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’ so much as at the level of practice - people going ‘let’s act different right now,’ for better and for worse (mostly but not solely for better). My hunch is that the practice is mostly defensive - ‘ICE fuck off, leave immigrants alone,’ is the implication - and the implied imagination isn’t fully coherent, with elements of what I’ve elsewhere called a moral economy struggle (basically, leave the old deal intact) and with elements that are very radical in implications (that state repression is illegitimate as such, that borders are illegitimate). I think trying to further draw out, make explicit, and make durable the imagination will be important in the long term, while obviously in the short term it is deeply urgent to resist the repression. Unfortunately there are a great many examples past and present of how short term urgencies result in long term importances being neglected.

Have said all of that, I think Walz and his ilk are onto something in a sense (an evil sense!), in that if border enforcement moves to night time raids without any shots fired as he suggested, he’s right that it will reduce political costs for the administration. And the conditions that generate political costs also encourage the kinds of individual transformations and collective learning that seem so obviously to be happening here. Another way to say this is that the current deployment of ICE is creating a problem of relative governability in the short to medium term and I suspect it’s radicalizing a lot of people for the long term. What Walz is proposing is conducting the repression of immigrants in a way that doesn’t create such problems. That is, he calls for both repressing migrants and restoring governability, in tandem. I suspect that effort will succeed - I don’t think Trump and co can sustain their hold on power and the reins will eventually pass back to the Dems, though ‘eventually’ can take a long time and a great many people will get hurt between now and then. To give that a name, just to save time and make for shorter sentences, I’ll call it a sequence. We’re in one sequence now. When border enforcement techniques/tactics change, that will be a different sequence.
Border enforcement is violence per se, it’s always nightmares for many people. In this post I’ve tried to say - I’ve been trying to figure out how to say that - in the present sequence, the manner of deployment of state violence is creating one kind of nightmare for one set of people. It’s doing so in a way that is encouraging a politicizing response. That response has two conceptually distinguishable elements: one is concrete and particularistic, it’s opposition to this particular nightmare. The other is more general and universalizing, it’s opposition to state violence and borders as such, it’s solidarity across literal and imaginative boundaries that state actors, including the monsters in both parties in their own specific ways, wish ordinary people would respect more. That is, part of the problem for the state is that many people are far better people than the state wishes they were; that goodness is creating problems for the successful (in the state’s terms) application of violence. While conceptually distinguishable, these are closely braided together in lived reality. Part of the Dems’ project will be to unbraid them.

Part of what I’m fumbling for here is that currently the specifics of “this nightmare” in Minneapolis and similar deployments have created a situation where the nightmare is relatively public in an important sense or multiple senses: it’s perceptible broadly, it’s of shared concern, it’s tied to a common ‘we’ that experiences this nightmare together as a collectivity, and it’s promoting some sense of collectivity. For now, I’ll call it a counterpublic, maybe a practice of counter-publicking? And as I tried to say, this is tied in complicated ways - both cause and effect, reinforcing feedback loops kinda thing - with politicization of the border and its enforcement as legitimate or illegitimate. In all of this, a significant driver of the politicization and the construction of a counterpublic is the specific deployment of state violence underway: “this nightmare” in the limited sense Walz uses the term. This is part of the danger that Walz and co represent. This specific deployment is part of the fuel for the growth of the tremendously important moral and political advance that is the growing popular skepticism of ICE and state violence and the growing solidaristic sensibility that is part of what is so beautiful about the resistance underway.

Again, still, I’m fumbling. Trying again: I think when this sequence eventually ends and we get a different sequence with policies more in line like Walz suggests (and which were in place under Obama and Biden to an important degree), the fires lit by what the Dems call “Trump’s ICE” will continue to burn - I don’t think Dems in power and doing less of “this nightmare” means solidarity and resistance end, I think the people transformed during this sequence will remain transformed. At the same time, the sort of shotgun and spectacle approach taken by ICE under “this nightmare” has some weaknesses. Walz identified some of them by noting that this has created political liabilities for Trump. Equally or more important is that the current approach means communities can mobilize to push back. Walz’s more surgical, less visible, quieter approach of night time raids would be harder to push back on and disrupt. Furthermore, in that kind of sequence there would at least initially be less fuel for spreading the fires of growing resistance and solidarity. To put it another way, Trump and co’s current approach to border violence has helped contribute to a still ongoing cascading process of politicization. Walz and co’s approach, once they’re in power again, will make less of a contribution to such processes.
At that point justice for migrants will either be less well served by popular resistance or popular resistance will need to find more sources to feed such cascading processes of politicization. That will have an on-paper element - words and analysis, ‘ideology’ in a very narrow, limited everyday sense of the term - and a practical element. By the former I mean the simply point that there will be an important need to draw out lessons, shore up commitments to solidify/make more permanent and far-reaching the transformations people have undergone via these experiences, and so on. By the latter I mean that resisting ICE practically will change as the concrete particulars of their deployment change. I do think people in Minneapolis and other places who have faced these ICE surges will be changed by these experiences for the long term and their resistance is incredibly inspiring. I just mean to say that the specific forms of resistance they can practice will change once ICE shifts from the current approach, or in the shorter term when ICE takes the same approach in a different place. I think trying to find pathways for people who resist in their community to support resistance in other communities, and to do more than resist - to begin to identify where the gears of the border violence machine are physically located, how they work, how to stop them temporarily and eventually permanently - will also be pretty important coming out of these events. (Having typed that it all reads as obvious, too general, and very armchair; I’m genuinely sorry, I make no assumption of importance on my part, I’m just another nobody distressed by the hellscape and trying to think about the hellscape’s current patterns and possible short term future variations in those patterns.) And perhaps also obvious, I think the movement will need to figure more of how to - ugh, I’m so sorry - seize the means of production of politicization. I’ve said that “Trump’s ICE” is providing some fuel for a cascading process of politicization. The movement needs to figure out how to make the fuel for itself, so to speak.

One final thought: I think there’s an additional danger posed by Walz and co, which I don’t have time to get into here at any length or adequacy. This danger is is a pressure for opposition to ICE to move from active resistance - in the sense of actively trying to reduce the numbers of people detained and deport, of actively trying to make ICE’s success rate at its evil task go down, ideally to zero - to essentially symbolic and communicative forms - ‘make your voice heard, speak your mind’ etc kinds of things. The latter certainly have a place, but 1) the people in power now are not amenable to hearing any of that, their minds won’t change and the fact of the matter is that the Dems are on the same page on the fundamentals (Harris campaigned on being tough on immigration; the Obama and Biden administrations both deported a lot of people; being anti-immigrant and anti-immigration is in fact a significant bipartisan consensus at the top of official power in the US, a fact sometimes unfortunately obfuscated by the disagreements they have among themselves over how to best practice being anti-immigrant), and 2) a big part of the importance of the latter is in moving people to the former. That is, part of why speaking out matters is for the sake of helping get more people on the road to active resistance beyond speaking out and to supporting those who engage in active resistance. (I continue to think slavey and abolition are useful analogies for thinking about this: it mattered that abolitionists raised their voices, but the reason why it mattered is not that anyone in public office would really listen, rather it matter because in speaking out they helped foster active resistance that helped free real people from slavery in the short term and made slavery as an institution less tenable in the long term.) This means that encouraging people to raise their voices instead of actively resist is to encourage going backward away from justice.

One last thing: I read this article by Adam Hanieh and Rafeef Ziadah, "Misperceptions of the Border” -- https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/31/3/article-p33_2.xml?&ebody=full%20html-copy1 I recommend it highly. It gives a Marxist account of borders as violent and racializing. (Hanieh and Ziadah are co-authors of the book Resisting Erasure - https://www.versobooks.com/products/3410-resisting-erasure - which is very good on Palestine and also has a long analytical reach such that what we learn about Palestine also illuminates a lot of the rest of the world. The other co-author of that book is Rob Knox, whose work is really great and I’ve mentioned repeatedly here at Open Mode. Check it out.)
Alright, I’m out. Keep on keeping on, dear friends and gentle hearts.