Award-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges has written are very important and timely piece about how ICE, “our Americanized Gestapo,” is being birthed right before our eyes. Since early December 2025, ground zero of this birthing has been Minnesota, the U.S. state in which I live.
Here’s how my friend Ed describes what it’s currently like in the North Star State:
A friend from out-of-state asked me how I’m doing. I responded that everyday I feel more like I’m living in occupied territory. There are now more ICE thugs here than our police, and sometimes an individual "suspect" (usually a person of color) is surrounded by 50 of them. They are breaking into homes, abducting students – teenagers! – arresting protesters and spraying chemicals into their faces. And pumping three bullets into the face of an innocent woman. Fear, anger, apprehension are increasing. No one feels safe!
It’s in this context of rising brutality and unconstitutional actions by ICE agents in Minnesota and across the country that I share Hedges’s article in its entirety below with added links and images documenting the scene here in Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
I have seen the masked goons who terrorize our streets before. I saw them during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were “disappeared” by the military junta. Victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate of their loved ones.
I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt. I saw them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and once deported in handcuffs. I saw them in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. I saw them in Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried in mass graves.
I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported, and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming.
Terror is the engine that empowers dictatorships. It eliminates dissidents. It silences critics. It dismantles the law. It creates a society of timid and frightened collaborators, those who look away when people are snatched off streets or gunned down, those who inform to save themselves, those who retreat into their tiny rabbit holes, pulling down the blinds, desperately praying to be left in peace.
Terror works.
The iron doors have not yet shut. There are still protests. The media is still able to document state atrocities, including the January 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good [pictured at right with her son Emerson] in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross. But the doors are closing fast. ICE has deported over 300,000 people and detained nearly 69,000 others – as well as been involved in 16 shootings, including four killings – since Trump began his campaign against immigrants.
ICE, our Americanized Gestapo, is being birthed.
Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights, but economic, social and political rights – without them we are powerless. Resistance means organizing to disrupt the machinery of commerce and government. It means preventing arrests by patrolling neighborhoods to warn of impending ICE raids. It means protesting outside detention facilities. It means strikes. It means blocking streets and highways and occupying buildings. It means providing photographic evidence. It means sustained pressure on local politicians and police to refuse to cooperate with ICE. It means providing legal representation, food and financial assistance to families with members detained. It means a willingness to be arrested. It means a nationwide campaign to defy the state’s inhumanity.
If we fail, the dimming flames of our open society will be snuffed out.
Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible. Opponents of the regime, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist. They throw up temporary roadblocks, but they are soon purged.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago notes that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.”
“What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?” Solzhenitsyn asks. “Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
Czesław Miłosz, in The Captive Mind, also documents the creep of tyranny, how it advances stealthily, until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime’s self-adulating slogans but, as our leading universities did when they caved to false allegations of being bastions of antisemitism, embrace its absurdism.
Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population – often unconsciously – conform outwardly and inwardly. It conditions citizens to relate to those around them with suspicion and distrust. It destroys the solidarity vital to organizing, community and dissent.
The historian Robert Gellately, in his book Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, argues that state terror in Nazi Germany was effective not because of omnipresent state surveillance, but because it fostered a “culture of denunciation.”
Rat out your neighbors and coworkers and survive. If you see something, say something.
The worse it gets, the more established institutions, desperate to survive, silence those who warn us.
“Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges, people who are that and nothing more,” Solzhenitsyn writes of those who see what is coming. “And how they were laughed at! How they were mocked!”
The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose early warnings about the rise of fascism were largely dismissed, and who told fellow intellectuals to stop naively appealing to “the remains of a European conscience,” saw his books tossed into the bonfires in the spring of 1933 during the Nazi book burnings. So far, we have not burned books, but have banned nearly 23,000 titles in public schools since 2021.
The authoritarian state cannibalizes the institutions that foolishly aid and abet the witch hunts. It replaces them with pseudo-institutions populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens. Columbia University is a shining example of this willful self-immolation. Nothing is as it is presented.
There are increasing numbers of violent kidnappings by masked ICE agents in unmarked cars on our city streets. People are ripped from their vehicles and beaten. They are arrested outside schools and day care centers. They are raided at work, thrown onto the floor, handcuffed, driven away in vans and shipped off to concentration camps in countries such as El Salvador. They are seized when they appear at court for a green card application or interview to finalize a visa.
Once detained, they disappear into the labyrinth of over 200 detention centers, where they are moved from one facility to the next to hide them from family, lawyers and the courts. Due process, once a constitutional right afforded to everyone in the United States, no longer exists.
“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism. “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”
The FBI, in an example of how justice is perverted, refuses to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis, blocking access to any evidence that would allow them to file criminal charges against Jonathan Ross.
Killing of unarmed citizens by the state is carried out with impunity.
ICE has more than doubled the size of its force since early 2025 — to 22,000 agents — hiring 12,000 new officers in four months from a pool of 220,000 applicants. It plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period to hire even more recruits, part of the $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE, to be spent over four years. Salaries for these new recruits, poorly trained and often haphazardly vetted, will range from $49,739 to $89,528 a year, along with a $50,000 signing bonus – split over three years – and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments.
ICE is building new detention centers nationwide in 23 towns and cities. It promises that once it is fully operational, it will go door-to-door as part of the largest deportation effort in American history.
ICE agents, intoxicated by the license to kick down doors while wearing body armor and firing automatic weapons at terrified women and children, are not warriors as they imagine, but thugs. They have few skills, other than weapons training, cruelty and brutality. They intend to remain employed by the state. The state intends to keep them employed.
None of this should surprise us. The repressive techniques used by ICE and our militarized police were perfected overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Occupied Palestine, and earlier in Vietnam. The ICE agent who murdered Good was a machinegunner in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families, does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah.
Aimé Césaire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in Discourse on Colonialism writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang.
Césaire writes:
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
During the interregnum between the last gasps of a democracy and the emergence of a dictatorship, the nation is gaslighted. It is told the rule of law is respected. It is told democratic rule is inviolate. These lies mollify those being frog-marched into their own enslavement.
“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!”
Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us. Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare. Maybe there are limits to extremism. Maybe the worst is over.
These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us.
Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily demonized – the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest genocide, antifa, the so-called “radical left,” Muslims, poor people of color, intellectuals and liberals. They strike down one group after the next. They blow out, one by one, the long row of candles until we find ourselves in the dark, powerless and alone.
– Chris Hedges
“The Machinery of Terror”
The Chris Hedges Report
January 11, 2026
“The Machinery of Terror”
The Chris Hedges Report
January 11, 2026
Related Off-site Links:
“ICE Has Gone Rogue”: Rep. Ro Khanna Demands Accountability As New Videos Show Minneapolis Chaos – Brad Reed (Common Dreams, January 13, 2026).
“Where Were You Born?”: ICE Demanding Citizens Show Their Papers in Minneapolis – Stephen Prager (Common Dreams, January 13, 2026).
ICE Using Private Data to Intimidate Observers and Activists – Jon Collins (MPR News, January 13, 2026).
ProPublica Finds More Than 40 Cases of Immigration Agents Using Banned Chokeholds and Other Moves That Can Cut Off Breathing – Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk (MPR News, January 13, 2026).
Twin Cities Students Walk Out, Decry ICE as Surge Continues – Elizabeth Shockman and Kyra Miles (MPR News, January 13, 2026).
Trump Vows “Reckoning and Retribution is Coming” to Minnesota as ICE Brutality Mounts – Brad Reed (Common Dreams, January 13, 2026).
Rep. Ilhan Omar Warns That Trump Aims to Provoke Enough Agitation in Minnesota So He Can Declare “Martial Law” – Jon Queally (Common Dreams, January 11, 2026). The Great Unraveling – Marianne Williamson (Transform, January 8, 2026).
The Pathology of Power: How America Learned to Love State Violence – Tim Hjersted (Films for Action, January 9, 2026).
Can the Left Resist in the Face of Increasing Repression? – Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report, January 8, 2026).
The Playbook of Every Successful Nonviolent Struggle – Jamila Raqib (Waging Nonviolence, November 21, 2025).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Omar Fateh: “Folks Are Waking Up”
• Doing What We Can to Stop Unjust Arrests of Immigrants
• Susie Hayward on What’s Happening in Minneapolis
• “It Was Murder”: 12 Powerful Responses to the Death of Renée Nicole Good
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like”
• Derek Johnson on the “Courage to Call Fascism by Its Name”
• An Incident That Feels “Ripped from a Dystopian Novel”
• James Greenberg: “I Am in Mourning for America”
• Karen Salmansohn on the “Duel Citizenship of Being Alive”
• “Most Revolutions Succeed Not Through Violence But Through National Strikes”
• Chris Hedges on the End of the American Empire
• Brent Molnar on the MAGA Cult and Its Intentions
Images: Photographers unknown.
