Trump’s Violent Crackdowns On U.S. Cities Are Still Happening. Don’t Look Away

By Asawin Suebsaeng|Zeteo Photos: Wikimedia Commons In January, even the Trump White House was forced to acknowledge that its hyper-violent, televised and livestreamed crackdowns on blue cities, immigrants, and U.S. citizens had grown sharply unpopular. After the carnage in Minnesota, Team Trump flipped out that their policies were killing them in the polls in an election year, sidelined wannabe stormtroopers like Greg Bovino, and forced themselves into a brief period of strategic retrenchment. The White House began begging Republican politicians to downplay terms like “mass deportation” – you know, the things Trump ran on in 2024. And orders were handed down from the highest levels that, as one White House official describes it to me, “We need better PR.” For a moment, Trump’s demand for a kinder, gentler, less visible fascism held. At least some of ICE and DHS’s highly public militarized violence got shoved in the penalty box, even if everyone knew it was all just for show and that Team Trump planned to rev things up “after the midterms” anyway. But for many of Trump’s nativist allies, that wasn’t good enough. They launched a pressure campaign, demanding the administration ratchet things back up before Election Day in November. To some extent, the campaign worked. If they wanted blood, they got it. Still, sources in the Trump administration tell me that they want to have their crackdowns and their mass deportations but without the viral videos that sprang out of places like Minnesota early this year. Because of this, the sources say, officials at the White House, DHS, and elsewhere have spent a significant amount of time planning where to launch operations out of the public eye. ICE arrests are surging. Escalations are happening nationwide. Even as federal judges have ruled more than 15,000 times against attempts to lock up people the Trump administration wants to deport, it’s all being met with a fraction of the media attention we saw when Trump tried to turn the Twin Cities into a killing field. At least for now, Team Trump appears to be succeeding at making their armed and masked secret police, well, more secret – even as the body count rises. Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo – who appears to have had no criminal convictions in the U.S. – was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Houston, Texas, as Araujo was apparently just driving a crew to a construction site. On Thursday evening, a DHS spokesperson said Araujo was not the intended target, and the man the agents sought wasn’t in the van at all. Araujo’s family is demanding answers. I’m not even going to transcribe ICE’s justification here because they lie so constantly about people they’ve killed or abused it is downright irresponsible to take them at their word without independent corroboration. Indeed, it seems witnesses to the killing are being pressured to disappear themselves. But it’s not just immigrants feeling the brunt of this administration’s terror. American citizens in Democratic-dominant metropolitan areas this president considers enemy territory won’t be spared. Trump’s federal so-called “anti-crime” task force in Memphis, Tennessee, has increased its kill count, including this month’s fatal shooting by National Guard soldiers of Tyrin Johnson. His grief-stricken family is also demanding answers. Whether this was or wasn’t a justifiable use of lethal force is on a theoretical level largely irrelevant. U.S. troops have no business being in Memphis, policing its streets or killing anyone. Since last year, sources in and close to the Trump White House have said the president and his team are committed to normalizing the presence of troops on American streets, thereby to edge the U.S. in a direction where it’s more acceptable to see soldiers cracking down on immigrants, supposed criminals, and so forth. (It seems quaint to say it now, but in our schools, we were taught that to be an American means that the president doesn’t get to sic the military on you just because he feels like it.) Solidly liberal Memphis is a test run, and the body count is growing. Trump’s ethnic cleansing operations are spiking; the U.S. military is policing and patrolling an American city just because Trump said so; Trump’s administration is vowing more of this; and agents of the state are killing in the streets. We are in an emergency, and a dire one. It’s just that the Trump administration has gotten a little bit better at trying to hide it. We – in the media, and elsewhere – don’t have to let them get away with it.