For years, the politics of US immigration enforcement rested on an implicit bargain: this is about them, not us. The raids, the detention centres, the armed agents: these were tools pointed at a specific population. If you were a citizen, if you were white, if you were armed and law-abiding, you weren’t affected.
Minneapolis has shattered that bargain in the space of three weeks.
From twelve thousand kilometres away, I’m watching the United States tear up its founding document in real time.
The country is in a Cold Civil War. It’s fought on two fronts: online, where narratives are deployed within minutes of a killing to pre-empt sympathy for the dead; and on the streets, where federal agents operate as an occupying force in American cities.
“They stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.”
That’s what Trump said at Davos about America’s NATO and NATO-aligned allies in Afghanistan. Two decades of sacrifice dismissed with a casual lie.
Here’s what “a little back” looks like: