In Minnesota, armed and masked agents are ripping families apart. They are seizing parents while they wait with their child at a bus stop, going door to door seeking undocumented migrants and breaking car windows to drag people out. Last Wednesday an officer shot dead Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen. Her killing is a tragedy for all who loved her, and most of all for the three children left motherless. It also marks her country’s crossing of a Rubicon.

Where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) once preferred to keep a low profile, it now seeks publicity and confrontation – pumped up on billions of dollars in funding, the aggression and brazenness of the administration and the licensing of bigotry.

While statistics show that violent and property crime rates have plunged since the 1990s, Mr Trump has conjured a threat of American carnage, and an enemy responsible: undocumented migrants – and, increasingly, those who stand with them. Fear is an instrument. The administration will struggle to meet its target of removing 1 million undocumented migrants a year unless people are frightened into “self‑deporting”, and sympathisers are frightened out of offering support. Most Americans – and the majority of independent voters – think Mr Trump’s deportation drive is excessive. But Republican-aligned voters disagree, and a third think he has not gone far enough.

Undocumented migrants are frightened to leave their homes, fearing they may not see their families again. US citizens of colour are increasingly affected, with a September supreme court ruling seemingly interpreted by ICE as allowing detention solely on the basis of race and ethnicity. Racism, militarisation and the impunity of law enforcement are familiar themes: police killed 1,379 people in the US in 2024, and victims were almost three times more likely to be black than white. But this drive is all the more shocking because being an undocumented migrant is a civil not a criminal offence and ICE officers have limited detention powers. It is not clear that they even had the authority to demand that Ms Good leave her car.

In smearing her as a “deranged leftist” and “domestic terrorist”, investigating her widow, and claiming that there is “absolute immunity” for the officer who shot her, the administration is not only willing to vilify the apparently unlikely Republican target of a white middle-class mother, but is exposing its broader political agenda. That videos lay bare the lies is irrelevant. Opponents need not believe – only comply.

In Trumpism, rules and restraint are portrayed as a corruption of the people’s will instead of the essence of American democracy. A man who pardoned supporters for an actual insurrection seeking to keep him in power now threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests. In October, the president told generals: “It’s a war from within.” ICE has been transformed into a paramilitary force apparently answerable only to Mr Trump. Imagine its potential uses in future.

Little wonder that Minnesotans say this feels like an invasion, and the state’s governor, Tim Walz, describes it as an occupation. The communities who are now defending and supporting each other are not only challenging the demonisation, mistreatment and removal of undocumented migrants. They are pushing back against the fear on which Trumpism feeds and the manufacturing of a crisis which would consume many more victims.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in ourletters section, please click here.