President Donald Trump said Thursday morning that the government will no longer livestream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan. The firing squad killing, scheduled for December 3, will be the first such execution carried out by the military since 1945. “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week that the execution of Hasan, who opened fire on dozens of people at a military installation in 2009, would be publicly streamable. Since then, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has come out in support of the plan (“no one has to watch it” if they don’t want to, Mullin said). The execution livestream’s supporters also include weapons-tech titans such as Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, who wrote that to “revel in the death of those who truly deserve it…is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order.” Eight in ten Americans, according to a poll released by ABC News today, disagree. So do 72 retired US generals, who wrote a letter calling the idea of an execution livestream “barbaric.” Parenting experts have voiced fears that children might inadvertently witness a man’s death via YouTube autoplay or memes. Though Trump called off the Pentagon’s plan to broadcast the shooting, he was clear that Hasan “will die as scheduled” on December 3rd. The United States has executed 31 people in 2026 so far. It’s one of a few dozen nations that have the death penalty on the books—most of which do not actually carry out executions. According to Amnesty International, only 17 countries, including the US, executed anyone in 2025. “The execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose,” Trump wrote on Thursday. “They deserve to witness JUSTICE!”

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Ms. Magazine. The brutality we are witnessing in Minnesota, at the hands of thousands of poorly trained, heavily armed and trigger-happy men who have full reign to hunt and harass anyone who is non-white, is nothing short of state-sponsored terror. It is a horrific illustration of what unfettered power does in the hands of leadership that celebrates and demands violence, especially from men.  Make no mistake: The thousands of new recruits to ICE, driven by a $100 million “wartime recruitment” push, were selected with violence in mind. Recruitment ads targeted male-dominated places and spaces where violence is either required or valorized: gun shows, military bases and local law enforcement, along with UFC fight attendees and people who spent time browsing for tactical gear and weapons. > Recruitment ads make it clear that ICE is the place to scratch the violent > itch. The content of those ads makes it clear that ICE is the place to scratch the violent itch. Recruitment posters and slogans focus on ideas of national defense and sacred duty, positioning immigrants as an existential threat by imploring applicants to “defend the homeland” against an incursion of “foreign invaders.” Veterans get a special nod with phrasing like “your nation calls once more.” The work of detaining immigrants is depicted as an epic, heroic quest, with frontier imagery and cowboy-hat clad horsemen alongside language like “one homeland, one people, one heritage.” The ads also dehumanize and fearmonger with racist dog whistles, warning that “the enemies are at the gates” or telling applicants to join ICE to “destroy the flood.” One DHS ad uses the phrase “we’ll have our home again,” which is a lyric from a white supremacist song. Much of this rhetoric evokes the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which mobilized white supremacist terrorist attacks in El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo in recent years with false claims of an orchestrated effort by Jews and feminists to promote immigration, reduce white birthrates, and eliminate white majority societies. It’s not only the homeland that’s being defended in this framing. It’s also the nation’s white women, who the administration has continually depicted as the victims of unfettered crime at the hands of undocumented immigrants. This is why we see Trump administration officials constantly invoking the names of a handful of young white women, like Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray, who were killed by immigrants—even though thousands more women have died at the hands of their lovers, partners or strangers who are citizens. Last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt railed in response to a journalist’s question about ICE, describing the “brave men and women of ICE” as “doing everything in their power to remove those heinous individuals and make our communities safer.”  False crime statistics about sexual violence have always mobilized white supremacist violence from the extremist fringe, from the KKK’s campaign of racial terror, to recent mass shootings. During his attack, the terrorist who killed nine Black worshippers in 2015 in a Charleston church told his victims he was doing this because “y’all are raping our women.” Now, we are seeing those same false claims mobilize state-sponsored violence. The administration is recruiting, training and deploying federal agents who believe they are on some sort of noble, patriotic and manly quest, flying on horseback across the open land to rescue white women and restore the nation to its righteous place. > Protection isn’t the only way that gendered narratives mobilize violence. What > we are seeing in Minnesota is also about punishment. But protection isn’t the only way that gendered narratives mobilize violence. What we are seeing in Minnesota is also about punishment. Replacement conspiracies frame women—especially feminists—as the problem, arguing they are conspiring to have fewer babies, promote abortion, reduce white birth rates and accelerate demographic change. Women who refuse to submit to male authority, refuse God-given heterosexual relationships or reject their ‘natural’ roles as reproducers of the nation are seen as the enemy.  This is why, after an ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good in the face after she dared to protest his authority, he lobbed the phrase “fucking bitch” as she was dying. In the days following Good’s killing, a local protester reported that another ICE agent sneered at her, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch.” Another woman was warned to stop obstructing agents because “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” This is how men who cannot tolerate a woman’s disrespect put her in her place: with violence or the threat of it. The shootings of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent and Alex Pretti by CBP agents—coming on the heels of numerous deaths of ICE detainees in recent months—are a predictable outcome of the institutional norms and social hierarchies the administration is valorizing.  As thousands of amped up men are deployed in the streets and taught there are no consequences for killing anyone who refuses to submit to their authority, we should anticipate more violence to come. After all: The violence is the point. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a scholar at American University, where she is the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). She is the author of several books including, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism.

As US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has drawn a lot of attention for promoting pseudoscience and disproven theories, especially on vaccines. He is using that playbook on another major public health issue: gun violence, which remains the leading cause of death for kids in America. When it comes to school shootings and other mass shootings, here’s what RFK Jr. wants you to believe: It’s not the guns, he argues, it’s the pills. The fringe theory that antidepressants can cause people to turn violent has been around for decades, focused primarily on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, which are the most common class of these drugs. But extensive research by mental health and violence prevention experts has found no credible evidence that antidepressants cause or contribute to mass shootings. As I wrote recently, the history of how this failed theory gained attention online is also telling: > The generalized claim that SSRIs can make people violent—and that they > supposedly gave rise to the shootings epidemic—traces in part to an > unscientific anti-Prozac campaign in the 1990s from the Church of > Scientology and gained some traction in online forums after the Columbine High > School massacre in 1999. Disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who helped > create a miasma of lies claiming that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook > Elementary School was faked, has also peddled the theory. > > > > Proponents of the SSRI theory use anecdotal, often unconfirmed details about > shooters’ health histories to argue causation. But multiple studies from > experts in psychiatry, law enforcement, and public health show that the theory > has no merit. Data on shooters spanning more than a decade from the FBI’s > Behavioral Analysis Unit has been used specifically to examine the claim that > psychiatric drugs are at the root of school shootings; independent > researchers concluded from the FBI data that “most school shooters were not > previously treated with psychotropic medications—and even when they were, no > direct or causal association was found.” In the above video, I show how RFK, Jr. has been using his top government post to continue spreading the failed theory—a misinformation campaign in which he makes at least a half dozen false or misleading claims about guns, psychiatric drugs, and mass shootings.

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Shannon Bream that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not, nor are they planning to, investigate Jonathan Ross—the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in her car in Minneapolis earlier this month.  “We don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody or putting his life in danger,” Blanche, formerly Donald Trump’s personal attorney, said. The Trump administration began asserting immediately after the killing that Good was a “rioter” who committed an “act of domestic terrorism,” continuing a long pattern of responding to deadly tragedies by making baseless and false claims. “We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate and that is not the case here, it wasn’t the case when it happened, and it’s not the case today,” Blanche insisted. “If circumstances change, and there’s something that we do need to investigate around that shooting or any other shooting, we will,” he said, adding, “but we are not going to bow to pressure from the media, bow to pressure from politicians.”  > BREAM: Is the FBI investigating the ICE agent who shot Renee Good?BLANCHE: > What happened has been reviewed by millions of Americans bc it was recorded. > We investigate when it's appropriate. That is not the case here. We are not > going to bow to pressure. So no, we are not investigating. > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-18T16:24:27.784Z Blanche used a remarkable rationale. He said that the FBI didn’t need to investigate, in part, because “what happened on that day has been reviewed by millions of Americans because it was recorded on phones when it happened.” Such footage appears in video investigations, including from the New York Times and Bellingcat, that undercut the administration’s message that Ross was acting in self-defense. The Times found that “the visual evidence shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over” and “also establishes how Mr. Ross put himself in a dangerous position near her vehicle in the first place.” As Mother Jones reported last week, many Americans do not buy the Trump party line about what eyewitness videos show.  While the Department of Justice and FBI decline to investigate Ross, they have reportedly been investigating Good’s wife, Becca Good, as well as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. And they also shut out state and local law enforcement: The day after Ross killed Good, Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension announced that the US attorney’s office was preventing it from participating in any investigation.  The Trump administration’s investigation into Good’s family—and lack thereof into the shooter—prompted the resignation of several federal prosecutors in Minnesota, with more poised to resign soon, according to reporting from my colleague Samantha Michaels. On Friday, the DOJ announced it is investigating Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey, alleging that they are conspiring to impede federal immigration agents.  “This is an obvious attempt to intimidate me for standing up for Minneapolis, our local law enforcement, and our residents against the chaos and danger this Administration has brought to our streets,” Frey said in a statement to CBS News. “I will not be intimidated. My focus will remain where it’s always been: keeping our city safe.”  Days earlier, Blanche had accused the two men of “terrorism.” “Minnesota insurrection is a direct result of a FAILED governor and a TERRIBLE mayor encouraging violence against law enforcement. It’s disgusting,” he wrote on X on Wednesday. “Walz and Frey – I’m focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary. This is not a threat. It’s a promise.” On Friday, Walz responded to the DOJ probes into him and Frey: “Weaponizing the justice system against your opponents is an authoritarian tactic.” “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good,” Walz continued, “is the federal agent who shot her.”

More resignations of federal prosecutors are expected at the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota amid ongoing frustration over the Trump administration’s response to the fatal shooting of Renée Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. “I have heard there may be more people leaving, people I would consider senior and respected career prosecutors,” said Anders Folk, a former acting US attorney in Minnesota, who left the office in 2021 to work for the Justice Department in Washington, DC, under former President Biden. Minnesota Federal Defender Katherian Roe, in a staffwide email obtained by the Sahan Journal, also wrote that “more resignations are anticipated” at the US Attorney’s Office. “It’s a sign that something is not right” there, added Folk, who is still in touch with colleagues in the office and is now running for Hennepin County Attorney. Already this week, at least five federal prosecutors in Minnesota announced their resignations. Among them was the office’s second-in-command, Joseph Thompson, who was overseeing the welfare fraud investigation involving Somali immigrants that President Trump used as a pretext to send his immigration force to Minneapolis. The prosecutors did not give a reason for their departures, but their announcements came shortly after the Justice Department ordered the office to investigate Good’s wife rather than focus on the shooter and the shooting. “It’s a big deal, and this is fairly unprecedented,” Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor now based in Los Angeles, said of the resignations. “You have so many leaving, and frankly on principle: We are living in unique times where prosecutors are being asked to do things they’ve never had to do before. That’s not what they signed up for.” Five senior prosecutors at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in DC—a unit that investigates police killings—also resigned this week. Since Trump’s reelection, the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office has seen a steady stream of departures. Nearly 50 out of about 135 staffers have left their positions, according to a person with knowledge of the departures who did not want to be named, and who confirmed that more resignations are likely. Some of the office’s attorneys left earlier this year as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was working to downsize the federal workforce. Others quit in December, after ICE launched its Minneapolis surge. > “They’ve had a major brain drain, and I don’t know who’s going to be left to > do the cases.” The administration’s response to the Good’s death on January 7 appears to have been the last straw for some of the prosecutors. The 37-year-old mom, who had partly blocked a neighborhood street with her vehicle, was fatally shot in the head and chest by ICE officer Jonathan Ross. The killing, which has sparked nationwide protests, was captured on video by multiple bystanders, and also by Ross, who recorded the encounter on his phone. In his footage, a male voice, which the New York Times has verified was Ross, could be heard calling Good a “fucking bitch” after he shot her. The Justice Department has defended Ross, accusing Good of trying to run him over, and ordered the US Attorney’s Office to focus on Good’s wife, who was on hand protesting the ICE operation. But a frame-by-frame video analysis from the Times clearly shows that Ross shot Good as she was steering her vehicle away from him, and that he was not run over, as Trump and other federal officials claimed, or struck by the vehicle in a substantial way. The administration quickly excluded the Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from its investigation, making it harder for state authorities to gather evidence. As staffers at the US Attorney’s Office watched the video footage, some were crying or otherwise visibly emotional about the death and the Justice Department’s response, according to the person with knowledge of the departures. Since Operation Metro Surge began in the Twin Cities, federal immigration officers have reportedly arrested more than 2,400 people. To deal with the influx of cases, given its reduced staff, the US Attorney’s Office is receiving help from military attorneys known as Judge Advocates General. Several JAGs are already stationed at the office, and the Pentagon, according to CNN plans to send about 25 more. As videos spread showing brutal ICE encounters in the Twin Cities—officers dragging a disabled woman out of her car as she tried to drive to a doctor’s appointment; carrying away an unconscious man in handcuffs; throwing a flashbang at a car with six children, and more—protesters are calling for accountability and yelling at the masked federal officers to get out of their neighborhoods. But to file civil rights cases against ICE agents or any other law enforcement, prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office would need approval from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys in DC. And that “feels impossible,” said the person with knowledge of the resignations, “when you can’t even get an investigation for a woman who was shot point-blank in the head.” Folk, the former acting US attorney, told me that he’s never seen anything like the recent spate of resignations in Minnesota. It’s unusual, he said, for so many career prosecutors, as opposed to political appointees, to leave at the same time. “It’s deeply concerning to many members of the legal community here,” Folk told me, and he worries about the consequences for other investigations, including the ones looking into fraud in state welfare programs and the assassinations of former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, last year. At least some of the attorneys who resigned this week had planned to use their accumulated leave to stay on longer and help with the transition, but the Justice Department fired them after they announced their intentions, abruptly blocked their credentials, and had them escorted our of the building. The Minnesota US Attorney’s Office had fewer than 30 prosecutors prior to the latest departures—that’s less than half of what the full head count should be, Folk said. Former federal prosecutor Levenson added that it might be difficult for the office to hire new attorneys, given the explosive political environment. “People of the caliber you used to get at US attorney’s offices aren’t interested in the job; they’ve had a major brain drain, and I don’t know who’s going to be left to do the cases,” she said. “This will have an impact for years to come.”

Once again, the response was quick, fuming, and filled with falsehoods. On January 7, about five hours after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis fatally shot a woman in her SUV, President Donald Trump addressed the reckless killing in a social-media post: The victim, he said, “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive.” Those were lies. Trump shared murky slow-motion footage from a distant door camera, but clearer videos from eyewitnesses had already gone viral and showed the reality. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good, an American citizen and 37-year-old mother of three, point-blank through the windshield and open driver’s-side window as Good tried to turn her slow-moving vehicle away from him. Ross then reholstered his gun and walked down the street toward where the SUV had crashed, eyewitness video showed. (Moments later in that same video, Ross can be seen even more clearly walking back up the street and showing no signs of serious injury. Trump officials have since claimed that Ross suffered from an unspecified degree of internal bleeding.) Trump’s post culminated with him blaming Good’s death on what he said was a sprawling conspiracy targeting ICE agents: “We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!” Just over a week later, amid tense protests and further violence by ICE in Minneapolis, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. Trump’s vitriol, though often seen as “unhinged” by critics, is methodical and by design. He uses any violent national tragedy as political ammo. During his first year back in the White House, he has seized upon assassinations, mass shootings, and other deadly traumas to stoke partisan division and justify extreme policies and actions. Fact-finding in the aftermath of a tragedy does not matter to him—only setting the narrative does. > “He only speaks in one key, and that key is division.” His top officials back him in lockstep. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared shortly after Good’s killing—before any investigation—that Good had committed “an act of domestic terrorism.” Noem’s description of what happened with the ICE agents defied reality: “A woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.” Vice President JD Vance blamed the deceased victim for “an attack on the American people,” declaring it “classic terrorism.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that Good’s death was “a result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country.” The brazen lying and demonization were familiar, the latest in a pattern from Trump that has included his response to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a mass shooting at a Mormon church, a terrorist attack on National Guard soldiers, and even the shocking murders of Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. (Details on these and others below.) Most modern presidents have sought to console and reassure the country in the face of national tragedy, but Trump’s behavior stands alone, says Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “He seems incapable of trying to unify people or issue words of healing,” Dallek says. “I can’t think of a single instance in which he tried to calm tempers. He only speaks in one key, and that key is division.” Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush stated that true Islam “is peace” and urged Americans not to vilify millions of Muslims who were making “an incredibly valuable contribution to our country.” After the devastating gun massacre at a historic Black church in South Carolina in 2015, President Barack Obama called for national soul-searching and emphasized the power of goodness and grace over racist hatred. You have to go back half a century, to “law and order” hardliner Richard Nixon, to find a more combative approach, Dallek notes. Yet even though Nixon was bilious and conspiratorial against the political left, he was more measured in his public reaction to national trauma and less willing than Trump to disregard reality. Nixon’s messaging included victim-blaming after four students were shot dead by national guard troops at Kent State University in May 1970—but he also acknowledged that most in the protest movement were “very peaceful” and said he would withhold judgement about the shooting until after a factual investigation. Trump’s tactics have been effective for helping him maintain a minority base of fervent supporters, says Dallek. “They can all get behind this idea that whatever is happening within MAGA is much less worse than the threat of ‘the radical left.’” He adds: “It justifies, after the fact, his very aggressive and even extremist policies, including the unleashing of ICE on blue cities and states. The narrative he creates says to all his supporters that what he’s doing is ‘destroying the enemy within,’ that he’s taking care of the scourge that he promised to address. I think it’s a mistake to discount just how powerful that can be.” Trump provokes so much news and controversy for the public to process that his exploitation of violent tragedies tends to fade quickly from consciousness. The rhetoric has an intended effect, then attention is gone. But scrutiny of recent disasters reveals the clear pattern by which Trump has built up a leftist bogeyman (including designating antifa a domestic terrorist group) and has further cultivated contempt for immigrants and political adversaries. “WITH GOD AS MY WITNESS” When Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, the Trump White House emphasized blame, rapidly and without evidence, on a broad conspiracy. Law enforcement authorities announced in the initial aftermath that the suspect charged in the killing, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, likely acted alone—and no evidence to the contrary has emerged in the more than four months since. Nevertheless, top Trump aide Stephen Miller hammered home the preferred narrative on Kirk’s former podcast, in a conversation with Vance that was live-streamed from the White House five days after the killing. “It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Miller said. “And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks…and we will do it in Charlie’s name.” Attorney General Pam Bondi pushed broader blame in an interview with ABC News: “Who killed Charlie?” she asked. “Left-wing radicals, and they will be held accountable.” On Newsmax, Dan Bongino, then the FBI deputy director, leaned into talk of investigating a possible conspiracy. > “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent.” Inside a Phoenix stadium 11 days after the killing, Trump led the memorializing of Kirk as a persecuted martyr. He said that Kirk had faced “menacing hate” everywhere on his campus tours from “rage-filled radicals.” He denounced “antifa terrorists” and claimed that “many of these people” allegedly targeting Kirk were highly paid “agitators.” In an especially dark turn, Trump went off script after saying that Kirk was a “noble spirit” with a forgiving view of the political opposition. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump added, waxing sardonic. “I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them.” “ANOTHER TARGETED ATTACK ON CHRISTIANS” Later in September, a man committed a mass shooting and arson at a Mormon church in Michigan and was quickly killed by police. Less than three hours afterward, Trump commented on social media: “The suspect is dead, but there is still a lot to learn.” In that same post, however, he declared a motive: “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America.” Asked the next morning about motive on Fox & Friends, Leavitt said she’d learned from FBI director Kash Patel that all they knew so far was that the killer “hated people of the Mormon faith.” Further media reporting on the perpetrator, who killed four victims and injured eight others, soon complicated the Trump narrative of a war on Christianity. Friends said that 40-year-old Thomas Sanford was a right-wing Republican. Social media posts showed he’d backed Trump for president, and recently a Trump sign had been displayed on his home. His grievance with the Mormon church appeared to hinge specifically on a rough breakup he’d gone through years prior with a Mormon girlfriend. He was an ex-Marine who’d served in Iraq and had a history of substance abuse. He had a young son with a rare genetic disorder, a source of emotional and financial strain. Sanford, in other words, was like many other suicidal mass killers: his pathway to violence was complex, with no clear ideological explanation. The Trump White House said nothing further. Media coverage dwindled. But there was evidence from the start that some people had perceived the source of the massacre the way Trump wanted: As a Wall Street Journal reporter described from near the scene that day, “I’ve heard people yelling out car windows about radical leftists.” “SO WHACKED OUT” Depending on who the victims are, Trump’s divisiveness has taken other forms—including what he doesn’t say or do in the aftermath. Back in June of last year, when a man in Minnesota hunted two Democratic state lawmakers at their homes, fatally shooting former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Trump was notably muted as a search was underway for the suspect. Trump offered only a brief, uncharacteristic written statement, posted by Leavitt on his behalf, in which he denounced the violence generally and said that the DOJ and FBI were fully on the case. After the suspect was captured and evidence emerged that he was a Trump supporter who held extreme far-right views, Trump began using media interviews to trash Gov. Tim Walz as “grossly incompetent” and “a terrible governor.” Normally after such a rare, high-stakes catastrophe, a president would offer support to regional leaders directly impacted, but not in this case. Trump sowed uncertainty in the media about whether he would reach out to Walz, and when asked again three days after the assassinations, he scoffed. “I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him,” he said. “The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess.” Three months later, when asked by a reporter why he hadn’t ordered US flags lowered in honor of Hortman—as he had just done for Kirk—Trump said he was “not familiar” with who Hortman was. He added that he “wouldn’t have thought of” lowering flags for her and blamed Walz for not making the request. Earlier this January, Trump promoted a delusional conspiracy theory on social media suggesting that Walz himself was behind Hortman’s killing. “WE DON’T WANT THEM IN OUR COUNTRY” After an Afghan national gunned down two National Guard members in a terrorist attack just before Thanksgiving in Washington, DC, Trump unleashed a broad tirade against immigrants. The shooter had first been resettled in the US in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, a program for some who’d fought alongside the US military in Afghanistan. But although the shooter had later been approved for asylum under the Trump administration in 2025, Trump railed against his predecessor, vowing to “re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden.” In those same remarks from Mar-a-Lago the day of the attack, Trump went on to demonize “hundreds of thousands of Somalians” in Minnesota (overstating and misnaming that population). He blamed them for “ripping off billions of dollars” and alleged they hate America. Trump soon amped up his dehumanizing rhetoric as ICE began aggressive operations targeting Somalis and others in the Minneapolis region. During a Dec. 2 cabinet meeting broadcast live, the president laced into Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whom he has vilified for years: “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work.” He said further of the Somali community, “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.” Trump’s team applauded as Vance pounded the table enthusiastically. “A VERY SAD THING HAPPENED LAST NIGHT” Trump’s reaction to another high-profile tragedy late last year seemed especially revealing. It is difficult to conceive of any purpose—other than to express vengeful satisfaction and provoke outrage—for his response to the news that Rob and Michele Reiner had been stabbed to death in their home, and that their long-troubled son Nick was the suspected killer. Trump’s victim-blaming post on social media was bizarre, degrading, and grim: “A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME… He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.” The outrage came indeed. (“We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House,” wrote conservative columnist Bret Stephens.) This pattern of conduct from Trump may be pushing the nation farther down a dark path, says Dallek, the historian. One concern is that the more violent events we have, the more divided the country could become. “Because the interpretation of those events by different factions is so in conflict, each violent episode worsens the atmosphere. It inflames people on all sides, and it’s impossible at that point for reason to triumph over the fury that people feel, in some cases justifiably.” > Trump has made clear repeatedly that he may further attempt to use the > American military against Americans. The risk has heightened around the killing of Renee Good and as ICE and Border Patrol operations have grown more lawless and violent. In Dallek’s view, Trump’s signals have been disturbingly clear: disinterest in the real facts of what’s happening on the ground, a total absence of accountability, and the White House doubling down on claims that it is their militarized deportation forces, not communities, that are under siege. “To all ICE officers,” Miller declared on Fox News this week, “you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” “It creates a kind of permission structure,” Dallek says. “I think the leaders of the Trump administration have told ICE and Border Patrol to take off the gloves, to be very aggressive. Now we are seeing the results of that message on the streets of American cities.” Trump’s latest threat has long been building. Though the federal courts recently thwarted some of his extended deployments of National Guard troops, he has made clear repeatedly that he may further attempt to use the American military against Americans. “We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” he told reporters in the Oval Office last fall. “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.”

A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

If the ICE officer who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week is not prosecuted criminally, or even if he is, can he also be sued? Legal experts have different takes. Last week I spoke with a police misconduct attorney in Minnesota who seemed hopeful about the odds that Good’s family might face in court. Others I spoke with were somewhat less optimistic. Winning lawsuits against cops who kill “is challenging by design,” as Michelle Lapointe, legal director of the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights advocacy group, wrote on the group’s website. To flesh that out, I caught up with Lauren Bonds of the National Police Accountability Project, a national group that works with civil rights attorneys to file lawsuits over police misconduct. Our conversation below, edited for length and clarity, explores the legal hurdles to beating an ICE officer like Good’s killer, Jonathan Ross, in civil court. It’s notoriously tough to sue police, but it’s even harder when the officer is federal. What are the challenges? You’re absolutely right: All the problems you have with suing a regular law enforcement officer exist, and then you have additional barriers. There are two distinct pathways to sue a federal officer for misconduct or excessive force: One is a Bivens action—a court-created pathway that allows you to sue federal agents for constitutional violations. And then there’s the Federal Tort Claims Act, a statutory provision that allows for these lawsuits to move forward. The problem with Bivens is it’s been really, really narrowed in recent years by this particular Supreme Court. First there was Hernandez v. Mesa, a 2020 case where a Border Patrol agent shot and killed a child on the other side of the border in Mexico. And the court said it didn’t fit within the narrow confines of Bivens. And then there was a case in 2022, Egbert v. Boule, that foreclosed any new Bivens action: Basically the court said that this type of civil rights violation is something you can pursue under Bivens, but if it’s anything new, we’re not going that far. The Federal Torts Claims Act (FTCA) is where more people are going to get relief for violations by federal officers. It basically says that any tort that you would suffer under state law [such as false arrest, assault, or battery] you can sue the federal government for—with vast exceptions: There’s one that comes up a lot for law enforcement cases, the “discretionary function” exception, which says an officer can’t be sued for anything that he or she needs to use discretion for. Courts have done a good job of interpreting that to mean discretion in terms of policymaking decisions, but some courts get it wrong. So those are the two pathways—they’re both narrow, and they’re both complicated. There’s the issue of qualified immunity for police officers, or even sovereign immunity for the federal government, right? Sovereign immunity [a legal principle that says the federal government can’t be sued without its consent] wouldn’t come up in an FTCA case, because it’s a statute in which Congress waived sovereign immunity and agreed to be sued under certain circumstances. It does come up as a defense when [the government is] saying, Oh, this case falls within an exception, but they can’t assert it otherwise. If you were to file a constitutional claim under Bivens, they could invoke qualified immunity, another protection that law enforcement officers have; it asks whether there is case law in the circuit that would have put the officer on notice that their conduct was unconstitutional. [If not, the officer is essentially off the hook.] A lot of courts have taken that requirement to an extreme place, basically saying it’s got to be identical facts—like there are cases that have been thrown out on qualified immunity because a person was sitting with their hands up versus standing with their hands up. That level of granularity has been applied to defeat civil rights claims. And so it’s a difficult barrier to overcome. Given how hard it can be to sue, what about criminal charges? It’s definitely possible. There isn’t any immunity from criminal prosecution that federal officers are entitled to, none that I’m aware of anyway. I know this issue came up when some ICE raids were planned to take place in San Francisco back in early fall, with the DA of San Francisco asserting that she did have authority to pursue criminal action against ICE agents if they broke California laws. What about the Supremacy Clause? It protects federal officers from state prosecution if they were performing their federal duties, right? The Supremacy Clause protects federal officers when they’re engaged in legal activity, and so if their conduct is illegal, they wouldn’t be protected. So in Minneapolis, if the officer engaged in a Fourth Amendment violation, he’d be beyond the protection of the Supremacy Clause. This issue has come up with California, too. The Trump administration is suing California over new state legislation that would create a crime for wearing a mask and obscuring your identity if you’re a law enforcement officer. And it’s suing Illinois [for a state law that allows residents to sue ICE agents in certain circumstances]. Those lawsuits have asserted that the Supremacy Clause makes these [state] laws unconstitutional—that you can’t take any action against federal law enforcement officers under state law. Have you heard of cases in this past year of ICE officers being sued or prosecuted for misconduct? I haven’t seen any prosecutions yet. In terms of lawsuits, we’ve seen an increase in FTCA cases against DHS agents. Regarding the recent killing in Minneapolis, what do you see as the main path to accountability, and the main challenges? There’s going to be all the standard barriers that we talked about, including the Supremacy Clause defense, particularly because you have so many high-ranking federal officials, including the president and Secretary Noem, who are saying that this shooting was the right thing to do and was consistent with him carrying out his obligations. On the civil side, this could be a potentially difficult Bivens or FTCA case. I would note, since we’re on the heels of January 6: Ashli Babbitt, the woman who died during the Capital insurrection, filed a FTCA case, or her family did, and got a $5 million settlement from the government. It’s hard to factually distinguish these cases. The federal government has authority to settle a case like that, but since the Trump administration is taking a very opposing position against Good, the woman who died in Minneapolis, I would be surprised if they would be willing to put money on the table.

Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective.  “At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attributed to the Taser. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like that could never happen.  This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn what the company that makes the Taser knew about the dangers of its weapon and didn’t say. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2025.

After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis this week, firing his weapon as she attempted to drive away, protesters have amassed around the country, many wondering: Can that officer be taken to court? The Trump administration, predictably, says the agent, Jonathan Ross, is immune from prosecution. “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Thursday. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.” But what do independent attorneys say? After the shooting, I reached out to Robert Bennett, a veteran lawyer in Minneapolis who has worked on hundreds of federal police misconduct cases during his 50-year career. “I’ve deposed thousands of police officers,” he says. “ICE agents do not have absolute immunity.” Bennett says the state of Minnesota has the right to prosecute an ICE agent who commits misconduct. But, he adds, that might be difficult now that the FBI has essentially booted the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension off the case—blocking access, the BCA wrote, to “case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.” In the conversation below, edited for length and clarity, Bennett discusses how the shooting in Minneapolis unfolded and the legal paths forward. When you watched the videos of this shooting, what did you see? You saw what could be easily identified as four ICE officers. And they’re all experiencing, to a greater or lesser extent, the same set of operative facts, the same factual stimuli. But only one officer, seeing the set of circumstances, picked up his weapon. None of the other officers did. That’s a bad fact [for Ross]. Also, the officer walked in front of the car, which counts against him in the reasonableness analysis. If you look at the recent Supreme Court case of Barnes v. Felix, that’s problematic for the ICE agent. What happened in Barnes v. Felix? It’s a shooting case where the officer walked around the car, [lunged and jumped onto the door sill], and put himself in harm’s way. You can’t bootstrap your own bad situation [to] allow a use of force. What did the court find? They sent it back to the trial court to consider it. But there’s good language in there. You said it’s bad news for the ICE agent, Ross, that his colleagues didn’t pull their weapons. Can you talk more about that? Sure, we’ve had several other cases. There was a tactical semicircle, a bunch of officers aiming their guns at a couple fighting over a knife; one officer out of the eight or nine fired his weapon, none of the others perceived the need to. And that’s important because it suggests the officer who fired wasn’t reasonable, right? Under federal law, an officer can only use deadly force if they had a reasonable fear that they could otherwise be killed or harmed. It’s an objective reasonableness standard. So it’s not whether you were personally scared out of your wits and fired your gun. It’s: Would an objectively reasonable officer at the scene have fired his weapon, believing he was in danger of death or immediate bodily harm? In Ross’ case, there was a previous incident—Ross had shot [with a Taser] through a window before at somebody in the car, and the guy hit the gas, and Ross had stuck his arm through the broken window, and he got cut [and dragged about 100 yards]. And so he was supposedly reacting to that. He’s not an objective officer at that point. The Trump administration has suggested that Ross is immune from prosecution as a federal officer. Why do you say he’s not? There’s plenty of case law that allows for the prosecution of federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE. And it’s clear under the law that a federal officer who shoots somebody in Minnesota and kills them is subject to a Minnesota investigation and Minnesota law. Now, the feds just took that away this morning, and they’ve already decided who’s at fault. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was going to do an investigation to find out. But I can tell you, the federal code provides that when there is a state criminal prosecution of a federal officer in Minnesota or any other state, the officer has the right to remove the case to federal court. So if Ross was charged in Hennepin County, he could remove the case to the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, have a federal judge deal with his case. The code is explicitly predicting such a prosecution could take place. If there was immunity of an absolute nature, you wouldn’t need that section, right? The administration seems to argue that Ross is protected under the Supremacy Clause, which essentially says that states can’t charge a federal officer if the officer was acting within the scope of his duties. Do you think killing people is acting within the scope of their duties? What if they decided to kill the 435,000 people in the city of Minneapolis while they were here, would the Supremacy Clause give them a free pass? I don’t think so. Also, if there was an actual independent investigation, and you apply the actual federal case law to this, and you concluded that Ross violated her rights by using excessive deadly force, he could be indicted federally. Now, nobody believes that would ever happen now: For a guy who talked a lot about rigged things, this [investigation] is rigged. Kash Patel took over the autopsy, so who knows, maybe they’ll say she died of a heart attack when she was backing up. If the officer isn’t charged criminally, the other route is a lawsuit. What are the challenges there? My team and I think there are ways to do it. I hope that her mother, or her next of kin, calls us and we’ll figure out a Bivens action or a Federal Tort Claims Act case, or something else. If you look at this case carefully, it has all the hallmarks of cases we’ve either won or settled for amounts of money no reasonable person would pay us if we weren’t going to win. It is essentially a garden variety unjustified use of deadly force case. And that’s based on the facts we know now; I bet the case is going to get better.