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.

Minneapolis remains on edge after the ICE killing of Renée Good last Wednesday. As ICE and Border Patrol operations intensify—Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that “hundreds more” agents are being sent to the city—residents continue to spill into the streets, filming, heckling, and tracking federal vehicles, block by block. Following this drama closely is reporter Amanda Moore, who puts it simply: “Yeah, it’s chaos.” Over the weekend she captured confrontations she describes as “extremely violent,” including a St. Paul gas station scene where agents “busted out the window of a car.” (According the DHS, the man driving the car was a Honduran national with a final removal order.) Amanda says the mood is a mix of fear and fury, with residents watching arrests unfold up close and, at times, finding themselves surrounded by “masked men… banging on your windows carrying guns.” Her bottom line on the enforcement posture: “Everything is very aggressive.” Even the timing, she notes, might be a signal of escalation. Amanda says Sundays were normally a day off from the front lines—“you could do your laundry and watch TV.” With the ramp-up of federal agents, “I guess not anymore.” Check out her latest dispatch.

In the immediate aftermath of the ICE killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis last week, the Trump administration smeared her as a “domestic terrorist,” claiming that she had weaponized her vehicle. They labeled Good a “violent rioter” and insisted every new video angle proved their version of the truth: Good was a menace and the ICE agent a potential victim. That’s despite video evidence to the contrary, showing Good, by all appearances, trying to leave the scene of the altercation, while ICE agents acted aggressively. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, spent Sunday doubling down, insisting that Good had supposedly been “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.”  Last Thursday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz invoked Orwell’s 1984 to describe this break between what millions of people saw, and what Trump and his allies insisted had taken place: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he quoted. “It was their final, most essential command.” So, on Sunday, I joined the throng in Manhattan for one of many dozens of protests held around the country this past weekend. In the middle of Fifth Avenue, surrounded by raucous, defiant New Yorkers, I asked protesters the simple question: What did you see?  “I mean, it seems like the bottomless, self-radicalizing thing that the government is going through,” said Anne Perryman, 85, a former journalist. “Is there any point when they’re actually at the bottom, and they’re not going to get any worse? I don’t think so.” “I think there’s a small minority of Americans who are buying that,” said Kobe Amos, a 29-year-old lawyer, describing reactions to the government’s gaslighting. “It’s obviously enough to do a lot of damage. But if you look around, people are angry.” “I saw an agent that overreacted,” he added, “and did something that was what—I think it’s murder.” Protesters also described a growing resolve amid the anger sweeping the country. “This moment has been in the works for too long,” said Elizabeth Hamby, a 45-year-old public servant and mom. “But it is our time now to say this ends with us…Because we want to be a part of the work of turning this tide in a different direction.”

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.

A video reportedly filmed by the federal agent who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier this week was released on Friday by a conservative Minnesota outlet whose most prominent reporter is married to the city’s former police union head. Alpha News—notable in part for its sympathetic coverage of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted in 2021 of murdering George Floyd—has since Wednesday published a flurry of articles including “ICE shooting in Minneapolis: Minnesota attorney explains how presumed innocence has been ignored again” and “REPORT: Woman killed by ICE agent was member of ‘ICE Watch’ group working to disrupt immigration arrests.” Conservative commentators have seized on the 47-second clip to argue that it exculpates Ross and shows Good driving towards him. > 100 percent confirms they were left wing agitators intentionally trying to > provoke an altercation with law enforcement, and then they drove right at him. > > Any “conservative” who bought the media narrative on this case is permanently > discredited and there’s no coming back from it https://t.co/mTvu5KBOUi > > — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 9, 2026 Other viewers see the clip as further evidence against Ross. > I synced up the video from the Johnathan Ross and a bystander to help show > what was happening when he fumbled his camera. He was already out of the way > at that point and already had his gun drawn. It wasn't him being hit, it was > him shooting Renee Good. > > — RagnarokX (@ragnarokx.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T19:20:37.388Z Vice President JD Vance has shared the Alpha News video multiple times as of early Friday evening, writing in one post, “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Trump administration has maintained that Good was a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle” in order to carry out “domestic terrorism.” Visual investigations by publications including the New York Times, Bellingcat, and the Washington Post have refuted that account. Yet the fact that the video from the shooter’s perspective was released at all, and with such speed, is remarkable—as is who it was leaked to. Alpha News, founded in 2015, is a Minnesota outlet that has distinguished itself for years by running pieces that suggest Derek Chauvin suffered a miscarriage of justice. Its highest-profile reporter, Liz Collin, is married to former Minneapolis police union president Bob Kroll; in 2022, Collin published a book titled They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd. In 2020, the ACLU of Minnesota sued Kroll in connection with claims that Minneapolis police used excessive force against protesters, according to Minnesota Public Radio, leading to a settlement that barred Kroll from serving as a police officer in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, and two neighboring counties, Ramsey and Anoka, for the next decade. A 2020 article by Mother Jones‘ Samantha Michaels details decades of allegations against Kroll of extreme brutality, as well as another lawsuit—filed by Medaria Arradondo, then the city’s chief of police—who accused Kroll of wearing a white power patch and referring to a Muslim congressman as a “terrorist.” (Collin’s book, in an excerpt published by Alpha News, decries protests against her husband: “‘Bob Kroll is a racist’ was a popular theme,” Collin writes.) It’s unclear how Alpha News obtained the video apparently taken by Ross as he killed Good. Collin and Alpha News’ editor-in-chief did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the video, Ross exits a vehicle and begins circling Good’s SUV before pointing the camera at Good, who says, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Ross films the rear of the vehicle and the license plate. The camera pans to Good’s wife, also filming, who speaks to Ross—saying, among other things, “Go home.” An agent instructs Good to “get out of the car.” Good reverses before appearing to turn away from Ross and drive away. Simultaneously, the angle of the video shifts quickly, no longer pointing at Good, and several gunshots are audible. The camera briefly refocuses on Good’s car, turning away moments before it runs into a nearby vehicle.  In the background, a voice says, “Fucking bitch.” 

Amanda Moore is a journalist who has been covering the rise of ICE across the US for months, writing news articles and posting clips of confrontations to her social media feeds and, in the process, becoming one of the most prominent chroniclers of Trump’s immigration crackdown from the front lines. Amanda will be filing stories for Mother Jones over the coming weeks and months about ICE and its operations, and I spoke to her as she arrived on the ground in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother who was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday, sparking mass protests. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. James West: Tell me exactly where you are, what you’re seeing, and what the mood is like on the ground. Amanda Moore: I’m here outside of the Whipple Building. It’s a federal building. It’s where ICE has been staging since they got here. As you can see, there are now a bunch of federal Border Patrol agents. This morning, there were some protests that were larger than the previous ones that have been at the building, and protesters actually worked to block the driveway. So now we can see all of the Border Patrol agents are here because they came out to guard the facility. Amanda, you’ve been around the country for months covering escalating tactics used by ICE at these types of facilities, and you’re drawing comparisons between what you’re seeing there and other facilities like Broadview in Chicago. > “Once again, I was getting tear-gassed at 7 o’clock in the morning.” The first month at Broadview was extremely violent. People were being tear-gassed by 7 o’clock in the morning. They were picking up protesters and flinging them to the ground like rag dolls. And today, here at the Whipple Building, reminded me of Broadview. Once again, I was getting tear-gassed at 7 o’clock in the morning. You know, protesters were not really prepared for what was coming in the same way. They don’t expect it so early in the morning. And eventually, in Broadview, that kind of petered off because local police took over, and they no longer had Border Patrol out front. So as long as Border Patrol is guarding the facility, it seems to be a pretty similar pattern. One of the accelerants on the ground where you’ve been previously, Amanda, seems to be whenever the Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino rocks up. What vibe does he bring into a scene anytime you’re on the ground? Well, Bovino is the show, right? So when he comes into town, all the cameras are on him, and all the protesters know who he is—or if they don’t know, they learn very, very fast. And so he’s kind of in charge, and it’s the culture of Border Patrol under his direction that leads to some of that violence that we experience.  With Bovino himself, there’s obviously now a court record in place where even the courts aren’t believing the types of stories that federal law enforcement is bringing about some of these protesters. > “If a rock is kicked…in Bovino’s direction, then Tricia McLaughlin will tweet > that video and say a rock was thrown.” Yeah. In Chicago, in federal court, the judges began to just completely discredit everything that Border Patrol had to say. And so it’s this escalation that’s based on a reality that does not exist—one that’s not reflected in any of the video, photos, or the eyewitness experiences. If a rock is kicked on the ground in Bovino’s direction, then [DHS spokesperson] Tricia McLaughlin will tweet that video and say a rock was thrown—and that’s clearly not the case. This scene is one that attracts counter-protesters as well as pretty hardcore protesters against ICE. When these two forces meet, what do you typically see, and what should people be prepared to see as this type of confrontation unfolds over the next couple of days? We actually had some pro-ICE protesters here this morning. They came. One had an American flag. I believe one of them is still standing around in front of Border Patrol somewhere. And he was very direct. He said, we’ve already executed one of you, and basically, we’ll do it again. A lot of the pro-ICE protesters, they seem to be here to antagonize, not necessarily to really show support. It’s a lot of instigation, and many times it’s being done under the veneer of journalism, which, of course, that’s not. Tell me how you prepare for these types of excursions into the fray when you’ve been covering this. What are some of the challenges? What should our viewers expect to see from you in the coming days as you are on the ground in Minneapolis? A primary challenge would be tear gas. There’s a lot of it—they really go through it—and pepper balls. So you have to have safety gear. You have to have goggles and masks and helmets and all that stuff. But a real issue, I think, is going to be when you’re at these events, every agent in front of you has a gun, and you can guess that several people behind you have guns as well—especially when they’re in the neighborhoods, when protests pop up during a raid, not necessarily at the facility. And [Minnesota] is an open-carry state, so that comes into play here in a way it didn’t necessarily in most of Chicago. But there’s really only so much you can do. The agents can be very friendly to the press. They can be very willing to talk, or they can shoot you with a pepper ball when you try to ask them a question—you can never predict. So it’s a little bit of a guessing game.

The military assault on Venezuela, the shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent, the launch of the White House’s new revisionist website about January 6—these three events convey a powerful and unsettling message from Donald Trump and his crew: Violence is ours to use, at home and abroad, to get what we want. In each episode, the Trump administration has employed or embraced violence that seemingly violates the law and extends beyond ordinary state powers. The US military attack on Caracas and kidnapping of its repressive and fraudulently elected president, Nicolás Maduro, violated the Constitution and international law. Absent an imminent threat from Venezuela—and none existed—Trump did not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally launch an act of war against the country. Yet he deployed the tremendous force of the United States’ war machine to dethrone and abduct Maduro, contending that he was some sort of drug lord. But that’s not a legitimate justification for a military attack. > This was more than a hint: Mess with ICE, and this could happen to you. The horrific killing in Minneapolis of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was unwarranted and arguably criminal. The initial videos make it look like murder. Yet the Department of Homeland Security, before it could investigate, quickly defended and justified the officer’s actions. It claimed that Good was one of a group of “violent rioters” who “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted to “run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” The department called this “an act of domestic terrorism” and maintained the ICE officer, “fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots.” In other words, this was right thing to do. On those videos, though, it did not seem like Good was aiming to mow down ICE officers with her car. She was trying to flee the ICE agents. When the officer shot at her, the car was moving away from him. Initial reporting indicated the officer did not follow ICE protocol. Still, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem praised the officer for acting so fast and stated, “This goes to show the assaults that our ICE officers and law enforcement are under every single day.” That is, well done, sir. Trump affirmed the sentiment in a social media post in which he falsely stated the victim was “a professional agitator” who “viciously ran over the ICE officer” and blamed the shooting on the “Radical Left.” Neither Noem nor Trump expressed any concern or any sympathy for Good. They were saying that ICE had the authority and justification to use lethal force in this situation. It was more than a hint: Mess with ICE, and this could happen to you. The day before the ICE shooting, the Trump White House honored—yes, honored—the January 6 rioters. It unveiled an official White House website that ranks as one of the most excessive acts of government gaslighting in modern American history. The site hails Trump for issuing “sweeping blanket pardons and commutations for nearly 1,600 patriotic Americans” who were in the mob that assaulted the Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory. The site denounces Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the House select committee that investigated the riot for having fabricated “an ‘insurrection’ narrative” and pinning “all blame” on Trump. This site is loaded with absurd falsehoods about January 6. It maintains that the “Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump…In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election.” And it presents an utterly phony timeline of the day, asserting that when peaceful “patriots” marched to the Capitol, police officers responded with “provocative tactics” and “violent force” that “turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos”—and that Trump repeatedly called for calm. None of that is true. In fact, once the melee began, 187 minutes passed before Trump urged his supporters to withdraw from the Capitol. The website is a laughable fraud. But it’s troubling beyond being an Orwellian assault on the truth. This site signals that Trump and his team not only accept the violence of that day; they celebrate the domestic terrorists who were part of the marauding horde. These are our people, the White House is declaring. These violent thugs are with us—and we’re with them. The Trump gang’s embrace of violence is not subtle. On Monday night, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, spelled it out on CNN. Asked by host Jake Tapper if the Trump administration might use military force to seize Greenland, he refused to rule it out, and remarked, “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” He then shared what might be called the Trump Doctrine: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” In short, might makes right. This was a not-too-veiled threat against…well, everyone, including foreign governments and all people within the United States. If the Trump administration has the power to do something, it will. Implied in this stance is the exercise of violence. Either in Greenland or in the homeland. Those who do not bend to Trump’s will—or Miller’s—can expect to feel their violent wrath. In those two sentences, Miller was saying that there is no rule of law. The world, instead, is governed only by force. That means violence. This ugly and dark stance is an attack on the fundamental concept of rules-based civilization. It is profoundly anti-democratic. It ignores such niggling matters as rights, societal order, and the public good. All that counts is who has the bigger or better club to swing. An essential element of a police state is the excessive use and threat of violence, and in the past few days the nation has seen such displays. As Trump reaches the end of the first year of his return to power, he and his lieutenants are demonstrating their willingness to deploy force beyond its legitimate use to achieve their aims. The warning is clear and intentional: We are violent. Beware. If you appreciated this article, please check out David Corn’s Our Land newsletter at davidcorn.com.

If you had to describe the last decade or so of political life in America, the list would likely include the following: The Black Lives Matter movement. The death of George Floyd. America’s first Black president. The rise of the MAGA movement. The election and reelection of Donald Trump. A resurgence of white nationalism. An erasure of Black history. America in these last 10 years has experienced generational political upheaval, clashes over race and identity, and a battle over the very direction of the country itself. Few writers have charted these wild swings better than staff writer for The New Yorker and Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb. And for Cobb, it all started when he was asked to write about an incident that was just beginning to make national news: the death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black 17-year-old in Florida. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “At the time, I thought of Trayvon as this particularly resonant metaphor. But I didn’t understand that he was actually the start of something much bigger,” Cobb says. “I’m still kind of hearing the echoes of that moment.” Cobb recently released Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012–2025, a collection of essays from more than a decade at The New Yorker, that all begin with that moment of national reckoning over Martin’s death. On this week’s episode, Cobb looks back at how the Trayvon Martin incident shaped the coming decade, reexamines the Black Lives Matter movement and President Obama’s legacy in the age of Donald Trump, and shares what he tells his journalism students at a time when the media is under attack. 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: Tell me about that time when you started writing and reporting on Trayvon’s death and how it’s evolved into where it is today. Jelani Cobb: That was a really striking moment, I think, partly because of the contrast. There was a Black president. We had seen circumstances like Trayvon’s, decades and centuries. We had never seen that in the context of it being an African-American president. The first thing that I ever wrote for The New Yorker was a piece called Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope, and it was about exactly that contradiction. The fact that we could be represented in the highest office in the land, that we could look at Barack Obama and see in him a barometer of our progress, even though lots of things people agree or disagree with about him politically, but the mere fact that he could exist was a barometer of what had been achieved. And at the same time, we had this reminder of the way in which the judicial system can deliver these perverse outcomes, especially when there are cases that are refracted through the lens of race. At the time I thought of Trayvon as this particularly resonant metaphor, but I didn’t understand that he was actually the start of something much bigger, because Black Lives Matter is an outgrowth. The phrase, the framing, that language, Black Lives Matter, came out of the aftermath of the verdict that exonerated George Zimmerman, who is the man who killed Trayvon Martin. And in a weird kind of bizarro world response, Trayvon Martin’s death was also cited as the impetus for Dylann Roof, who three years later killed nine people in the basement of the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and he said he had been radicalized by the Trayvon Martin case. And it went from there. Really both of those dynamics, those twin dynamics of this resurgence of white nationalism and this kind of volatile Christian nationalism and this very dynamic resonant movement for black equality or for racial equality, and almost the kind of crash the path that those two were put on in that moment. Yeah. Three or More Is a Riot, is a collection of your past essays. After you were finished putting all this together, I’m just curious. What did you learn about the things that you had written, and also what did you learn about yourself? Because I think when I look back at old writing that I did I see myself in where I was, versus where I am today. Yeah, I think writing is either intentionally or unintentionally autobiographical. You’re either putting it out there and saying, this is what I think at this moment about these things, or time does that for you. If you come back, you can go, oh wow, I was really naive about this, or I really saw this very clearly in the moment for what it was. When I was combing back through these pieces, one conversation came to me, which was a discussion I had with my then editor, Amy Davidson Sorkin at The New Yorker. After I’d filed the first piece on Trayvon Martin, she said, “Why don’t you just stick with the story and see where it goes?” In effect, I’m still doing that. I’m still kind of hearing the echoes of that moment. There are 59 pieces in this collection, some of them short, some of them lengthy, but in looking at each of these pieces, I started to plot out a path. And that’s why the subtitle for the book is Notes on How We Got Here: 2012 to 2025, because I started to plot out a path seeing the rise of Trumpism and the MAGA movement, seeing the backlash to Barack Obama, the mass shootings, the racialized mass shootings in El Paso and Pittsburgh and Buffalo, all of which I had written about, and the way that these things were culminating into a national political mood. Yeah, yeah. I’m curious. I can remember when Obama was elected, I was volunteer/working with young black men, or boys at the time. Now they’re all grown up. But I was mentoring a group of black kids that were in a very poor neighborhood, and they were struggling to get by. The parents were. A lot of them had single parents, not for the reasons that most people prescribe. A lot of them had single parents because their other parent had passed away, and they were just trying to get by. I remember when Barack Obama was elected, I felt like this sense of hope, and also a little bit of relief because I’d been telling these boys that they could be anything they wanted to be. And deep down inside, I felt like I had been selling them a lie, but I’d been selling them a lie for a higher purpose, like for them to reach for something bigger. And when Barack Obama got elected, I felt like, okay, I’m not lying anymore. This is a good thing. I felt hopeful. Over his first term, though, what I began to realize with working with these young men is that nothing in their life was changing. Nothing at all. Everything that was changing in their lives happened because of what they were doing, but nothing changed when it came to national politics or what the president can do. I guess the question I have in saying all of that is how do you look back at the Obama years? Do you feel like in this weird way that it was a dream that never was really actualized, or was it a dream that was actualized? Did we see progress through that? You know what’s interesting, and I hate to be this on the nose about it, but I actually kind of grapple with that question in one of the essays called Barack X. It’s a piece I wrote in the midst of the 2012 election because he was running for reelection, which didn’t have the same sort of resonance because we already knew that a black person could be elected president. We had seen that. And that motivation was different, and it was this question of whether or not people would stay the course, whether people would come out. Incumbency is a powerful advantage in American politics, but there’s also, even at that point, you could see these headwinds forming around Obama. In that piece, I grapple with the question of not only what Obama had done, but I think more substantively what it was possible for him to do in that moment. It became this question for history I think. It takes 25 years after he’s left office to have a fair vantage point on what he reasonably could have done versus what he actually did. And the reason I say that is substantively, I think a lot of us felt that way, that things weren’t changing, that we were still grappling with the same sort of microaggressions at work, sometimes even worse. We were dealing with police who were behaving in a way that they were, and at the same time, this is the President of the United States who was called a liar while addressing Congress. This is a person who got stopped and frisked essentially, and had to show his birth certificate to prove that he was eligible to vote in the election he actually won. Not the question of whether he was eligible to be president, it was a question of whether or not it was even legal for him to vote in that election if he wasn’t a citizen. And so when you stacked all of those things up, and you saw the entrenched opposition that had determined that their number one objective from the time that he was elected was for him to be a one-term president. That’s what Mitch McConnell said. That’s what the other kind of aligned forces in the Republican Party. Where the standard thing is, even if it’s just boilerplate, even if it’s just kind of standard political speech that they say, well, we’ll work with the president where we can, but we’ll stand by our principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s not what they said. Yeah, normally they’re just like, well, we’re going to work for the good of the American people, and if the president lines up with us, we will be happy to work for him. Yes, yes. Exactly. Mitch was very clear. That’s not what they said about him. And so balancing those two things, figuring out what the landscape of possibilities actually was, and then inside of that, what he achieved or failed to achieve relative to those things. So when Barack Obama was running for election, I just didn’t believe it was going to happen, until the day it happened. I was in disbelief. I was shocked. On the flip side, all the black lash that we have gotten ever since his presidency ended, and during his presidency really, all the black lash, I was completely, yeah, that’s par for course with America. It’s so unsurprising to me. You can just look back to Reconstruction and see how all that ended to kind of understand where we’re going. One of the things that Obama did in his political rhetoric period, was that he frequently denounced cynicism. He didn’t talk about racism very much, but he talked about cynicism a lot. And in fact, he often used the word cynicism in place of the word racism, that someone would do something racist, and he would say it was cynical. And it made sense because as the black president, you can’t be the person who’s calling out racism left and right. It just won’t work to your advantage politically. At the same time as his presidency unfolded, the people who he had called cynical, or at least people who were skeptical or maybe even pessimistic, began to have an increasingly accurate diagnosis of what he was up against. I like to think that before he was elected, Barack Obama knew something that nobody else in black America knew, which was namely that the country was willing and capable of electing a black man to the presidency of the United States. But after he was elected, I think black America knew something that at times it seemed like Obama did not, which is that people will stop at no ends to make sure that you are not successful. My father grew up in Jim Crow, Georgia, and he had the standard horror stories that everyone who grew up in Jim Crow had. And the message that he would give me is never be surprised by what people are willing to do to stop you as a black person, especially if you make them feel insecure about themselves. And it seemed like as the Obama presidency unfolded, that sentiment that he had dismissed as cynical became more and more relevant as the backlash intensified, as he was denied the unprecedented denial of a Supreme Court appointment, which was astounding. The tide of threats against his life that the Secret Service was dealing with. All of those things, when you pile all up together, it begins to look like a very familiar pattern in the history of this country, especially as it relates to race. I was definitely taught those same lessons. Definitely. My father is a Baptist preacher who loves everybody, but was also very clear. You’ve got to work harder, you’ve got to be better, and don’t be surprised. And I feel like that is the thing that has stuck with me all these years. It’s interesting, the right-wing political commentator, Megyn Kelly, recently said that basically that everything was good, and then Obama came and kind of broke us. Oh, yeah. And I just thought it was such a telling statement. Well, it’s a very cynical statement to borrow a line from Obama. Yes, it was a very cynical statement, and kind of telling on herself in the sense of, I think that that’s where the backlash is coming from, the idea that we had this black man as president, and now we have to get this country right. Yeah. Well, the other thing about it, there was a kind of asymmetry from the beginning. There was this congratulation that was issued to white America or the minority of white America that voted for a black presidential candidate. And on the basis of this, people ran out and began saying, which is just an astounding statement to even think about now, they ran out and said, this was a post-racial nation. Yeah, I remember that. But the fact that it was, and I would point this out. A minority of white voters in 2008 and in 2012 voted for a presidential candidate who did not share their racial background. In short, a minority of white voters did, but the majority, the overwhelming majority of black voters had been doing since we’ve been allowed to vote. Since we had gotten the franchise in our newly emancipated hands, we had been voting for presidential candidates that did not share our racial backgrounds. No one looked at black people and said, oh, they’re post-racial. They’re willing to look past a candidate’s skin color to vote for someone. In fact, it was more difficult for African-American presidential candidates to get support from black voters than it was for white candidates to do so, which is the real kind of hidden story of Barack Obama’s success. One of the lesser kind of noted things was that Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary with an overwhelmingly black electorate, but he won it after Iowa, after he had demonstrated that he had appealed to white voters. And I’ve long maintained that if those two primaries had been reversed, had they had been South Carolina first and then Iowa, he might’ve still won Iowa, but it is doubtful that he would’ve won South Carolina. So the Black Lives Matter movement, it was like the rebirth of the civil rights movement, so to speak. But right now, we’re living in an era where Black Lives Matter signs are literally being demolished and black history… I’m a Floridian. I’m talking to you from Florida right now, and I could tell you the assault on black history specifically in schools is real. Do you feel like Black Lives Matter as a movement failed? Do you see us coming back from this as a country, like being able to really talk about the history of this country, because it feels like we’re just running away from it now? There’s an essay that I’m going to write about this, about what black history really has been, and what Black History Month really has been, and why Dr. Carter G. Woodson created what he then called Negro History Week in 1926 and became Black History Month in 1976 to mark the 50th anniversary. But they had very clear objectives, and these were explicitly political objectives that they were trying to create a landscape in which people would spend a dedicated amount of time studying this history for clues about how to navigate through the present. That first generation of black historians went through all manner of hell to produce the books, to produce the scholarly articles, to produce the speeches, to create a body of knowledge that redeemed the humanity of black people, and specifically made a case against Jim Crow, against disenfranchisement. They understood that history was a battleground, and that people were writing a history that would justify the politics of the present. And so when you saw that black people had been written out of the history of the country, that slavery had been written out of the history of the Civil War, that the violent way in which people were eliminated from civic contention, had been whitewashed and airbrushed, and that what you saw in the day-to-day was segregation, poverty, exploitation, the denial of the franchise, the denial of the hard-won constitutional rights, there’s a reason, for instance, that the first two black people to get PhDs from Harvard University, and those two were W.E.B Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, they both got their doctorates in history because they were trying to create a narrative that would counterbalance what was being done. When I look at the circumstances that this field came into existence under, I’m less concerned about what’s happening now. I should say that what’s happening now is bad, but I think that we have a body of scholars. Now there are people who every spring a new crop of PhDs in this field is being minted, and people are promulgating this history in all kinds of ways and so on. And so I think this is a battle that has to be contested and has to be fought and ultimately has to be won, but I don’t lament about the resources and our ability to tell these stories. You’re on faculty at Columbia University and the last couple of years it’s been center stage not only for protests- Yeah, complicated. Yeah, complicated. How do you manage that in the classroom? I have to say that as a journalism school, there’s a very easy translation because the question is always, how do we cover this? What do we need to think about? What are the questions that need to be asked at this moment? After October 7th, when the wave of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations and the kind of solemn memorials on either side, I said to my students repeatedly, if I said it once, I said it 20 times, which is that you lean on your protocols at this point. You question yourself. You question your framing. You question how you approach this story. What is the question the person who disagrees with how you feel? What is the question that person would ask? And is that a fair question? And you relentlessly interrogate. And that’s also the job of your editors to relentlessly interrogate where you’re coming from on this story. I kind of jokingly said to them, I said, “We have told you from the minute you got here to go out and find the story, and we forgot to tell you about the times that the story finds you.” Yeah. How did you feel about Columbia’s administration’s response to the Trump threats? The only thing I can say is that it was a very complicated situation. As a principal in life, I have generally been committed to not grading people harshly on tests that they never should have been required to take in the first place, if that makes sense. Yeah. There was a lot that I thought was the right thing. A lot of the decisions I thought were the right decisions to make. There were other decisions that I disagreed with, some that I disagreed with strongly. But the fundamental thing was always framed in the fact that the federal government should not be attacking a university. That was what my overarching kind of statement was. But I will say that also the journalism school has tried to navigate this while maintaining fidelity to our principles and our support of free speech and support of the free press. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of hand-wringing among journalists right now. Fact-based reporting is being drowned out by misinformation and disinformation. What do you tell your students? How do you teach them in a time when journalism itself is under such threat? Well, the thing that we teach is that this is indicative of how important journalism is. Powerful people don’t waste their time attacking things that are not important. And so we’re able to establish kind of narratives. And granted, we’ve lost a few rounds in this fight, that people not only have less trust in us, but they have more trust in people who are sometimes outright charlatans, or people who are demagogues, and that is a real kind of difficult circumstance. But I also think that it’s reminiscent of the reasons that Joseph Pulitzer founded this school in the first place. The school was established in 1912 with a bequest from Joseph Pulitzer’s estate. Pulitzer understood at the time journalism was a very disreputable undertaking, and he had this vision of it being professionalized, of journalists adhering rigorously to a standard of ethics and thereby winning the trust of the public. And that was part of the reason that people actually did win the trust of the public over the course of the 20th century. Now we’ve had technologies and cultural developments and some other changes that have sent those numbers in the opposite direction, which I also will say this is not isolated. People distrust government; they distrust corporations; they distrust the presidency; they distrust all of these institutions that used to have a much higher degree of public trust. My approach to this has been we should not ask the public to trust us. We should not anticipate ever regaining the level of trust we had once enjoyed. But I think that the alternative is that we now just show our work to the greatest extent possible. Sometimes we can’t because we have sources who can only give us information anonymously, but we should walk right up to the line of everything that we can divulge so that we say, don’t trust us. Read for yourself what we did. If you wanted to, you could follow up Freedom of Information Act and get these same documents that we are citing in this reporting. Or we should try to narrow the gap between what we’re saying and the degree to which people have to simply take us at our word. America has obviously changed over the last 10 years. How have you changed? Oh, what’s really interesting is that, and this is the kind of unintentional memoir part of it, I think that I’m probably more restrained as a writer now than I was 10 years ago. Keeping my eyebrow raised and kind of like, hmm, where’s this going? I try to be a little bit more patient, and to see that what the thing appears to be may not be the thing that it is. And at the same time, I’m probably more skeptical than I was 10 years ago. I haven’t given up on the idea of there being victory, of it being a better tomorrow, but I also think that it will exact a hell of a cost for us to get to that place.

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has sharply increased its spending on weapons in 2025, according to an analysis of federal government contracting data by Popular Information. Records from the Federal Procurement Data System reveal that ICE has increased spending on “small arms, ordnance, and ordnance accessories manufacturing” by more than 700 percent compared to 2024 levels. New spending in the small arms category from January 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated, through October 18, totaled $71,515,762. Most of the spending was on guns and armor, but there have also been significant purchases of chemical weapons and “guided missile warheads and explosive components.” On September 29, 2025, ICE made a $9,098,590 purchase from Geissele Automatics, which sells semi-automatic and automatic rifles. The total spending by ICE in the small arms category between January 20 and October 18 last year was $9,715,843. Spending by ICE on guns and other weapons so far this year not only dwarfs its spending during the Biden administration but also during Trump’s first term. In 2019, for example, ICE spent $5.7 million on small arms through October 18. Average ICE spending on small arms during Trump’s first four years was about $8.4 million. The data likely understates new spending on weaponry deployed in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, since many other federal agencies beyond ICE have been involved. But it provides a window into how ICE and other agencies are bringing an unprecedented number of high-powered weapons into American cities. The surge in spending on ICE weaponry has coincided with a wave of violent incidents by ICE officers. Several dangerous situations have been captured on video. Last month in Illinois, a pastor, Reverend David Black, was shot in the face with a pepper ball by an ICE officer. In another September incident, an ICE officer dropped his gun while violently making an arrest and then pointed it at bystanders. An ICE officer also allegedly shot a pepper ball at the vehicle of a CBS News Chicago reporter in September. The reporter’s window was open, allowing chemical agents “to engulf the inside of her truck,” which “caused her to vomit.” In August, US Marine Corps veteran Daryn Herzberg was hospitalized “after being tackled from behind by ICE agents while protesting outside a federal facility in Portland.” At the time he was attacked, Herzberg was criticizing ICE officers “for firing down on unarmed protesters.” A video shows “an agent grabbing Herzberg by the hair and slamming his face into the ground multiple times while saying, ‘You’re not talking shit anymore are you?’” > An unarmed veteran was attacked from behind, sustaining injuries and being > dragged into a Portland ice building. > > — Raider (@iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social) 2025-08-15T15:27:49.197Z In July, an aggressive ICE raid of a California cannabis farm left several workers injured and one dead. Jaime Alanís Garcia, who was not a target of the raid, climbed onto a greenhouse roof to escape the chaos and fell 30 feet to his death. “What we’re seeing is a general escalation of violence and the use of excessive force by ICE officers,” Ed Yohnka of ACLU Illinois told NPR. Yohnka has filed a lawsuit on behalf of protesters, including Pastor Black, arguing that ICE’s tactics violate their constitutional rights. “All over the country, federal agents have shot, gassed, and detained individuals engaged in cherished and protected activities,” the lawsuit says. It accuses ICE and other federal agencies of “the dangerous and indiscriminate use of near-lethal weapons such as tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper-balls, flash grenades, and other unwarranted and disproportionate tactics.” > ICE is stockpiling arms, including chemical weapons, guided missile warheads > and explosive components. The spending dwarfs anything we've ever seen in the > agency – a 700% increase.The President is building an army to attack his own > country. > > — Senator Chris Larson (@senchrislarson.bsky.social) 2025-10-21T14:45:57.844Z

In another dizzying plot point around President Donald Trump’s attempts to federalize the National Guard, three judges on the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision on Monday that Trump has the authority to deploy the Guard in Portland.  > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by Mother Jones (@motherjonesmag) The ruling represents another turning point in legal battles taking place across the country, from Chicago to Washington, DC, and Los Angeles—all of which have been involved in lawsuits related to Trump’s troop deployments. While Oregon leaders continue to fight the Ninth Circuit’s decision, demanding a review by the full court, protesters have consistently shown up to the ICE facility in South Portland—driving the Trump administration’s ire and claims of a war-ravaged city under antifa siege.  But here’s the kicker: The ICE facility is just one block in a 145-square-mile city. Given that—and that even there, protests have been led by an army of inflatable animals—many question the validity of deploying the National Guard. After the No Kings protest on Saturday, hundreds flocked to the facility for a nonviolent protest, but federal agents had other plans. “I’m a veteran who fought for my country,” Daryn Herzberg, 35, said. “I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic. And what I’m seeing right now is a terrorist in the White House trying to call us terrorists while we are out here trying to stop our friends and neighbors from getting kidnapped.” In an intense confrontation, agents fired tear gas, flashbang grenades, and pepper balls for over five minutes straight. For many protesters, that aggression is nothing new—just another night at the facility.