After a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis last Wednesday, Trump administration officials were quick to come out in the agent’s defense. > Violent interactions with the public aren’t surprising, a former ICE official > said of the agency under Trump. “That’s sort of by design.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Jonathan Ross—a veteran officer with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations arm who has been identified by multiple media reports as the shooter—followed his training and the agency’s protocol. Vice President JD Vance claimed Ross had reason to fear for his life and acted in self-defense. And press secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to Good as a “deranged lunatic woman” who tried to run over the office with her vehicle as a weapon. Officials repeatedly accused Good of perpetrating “domestic terrorism.” The narrative put forward by the administration is largely disproved by available video evidence. And it has even been received with skepticism by some former ICE employees, who are condemning Ross’ use of force against the 37-year-old mother of three and warning that their one-time agency has lost its way. Former ICE chief of staff Jason Hauser recently wrote in USA Today: “When enforcement is driven by messaging instead of mission, when optics outweigh judgment and when leadership substitutes spectacle for strategy, the risk to officers, civilian and public safety increases exponentially.” The second Trump presidency has taken ICE off the leash. The agency is now the highest-funded law enforcement body in the United States, with a budget that eclipses that of some countries’ militaries. With its near-unlimited resources and aggressive directions from the White House, ICE is sending federal immigration agents not trained in community policing to make at-large arrests in cities across the country. (Days after the shooting, Noem announced DHS would deploy hundreds more agents to Minneapolis.) Two ex-ICE workers I spoke with described an agency that, in pursuit of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation mandate, is engaging in reckless and risky behavior. “They’re essentially operating now in a resource constraint-free environment and doing very dangerous things,” said Scott Shuchart, who previously worked at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS and more recently as ICE’s assistant director for regulatory affairs and policy under the Biden administration. Violent interactions with the public aren’t surprising, he added. “That’s sort of by design.” Dan Gividen, an immigration lawyer who acted as deputy chief counsel for ICE’s Dallas field office between 2016 and 2019, compared what the agency is doing as akin to running into a crowded movie theater and yelling “fire.” “You’ve got these ICE officers that are pouring out of these vehicles, pointing guns at US citizens—people who’ve done absolutely nothing wrong—and causing chaos.” ICE removal agents charged with doing administrative arrests, he said, lack the tactical training to safely do operations out in communities. “It’s not at all surprising that this is happening with these ICE ERO officers being sent out to basically treat people terribly,” he said, anticipating more escalation of violence. Another former ICE trial attorney I spoke with said that, typically, removal officers weren’t trained in high-risk operations because the daily demands of the job didn’t require it. In the past, if such an encounter took place, local law enforcement might have gotten involved to help keep the situation under control. “What has changed is there has been an encouragement from the top to be much more aggressive in enforcement and ramp things up and get the job done,” the ex-counsel for the agency told me. In Gividen’s view, the federal immigration agents didn’t have a reason to interact with Good to begin with. “He had no reason to believe she had committed any offense that he actually has the authority to investigate,” Gividen said of Ross. “They murdered her, plain and simple. That is all there is to it. The notion that they were in any way, shape, or form acting in self-defense to put three bullets in that woman is absolutely absurd.” An ICE’s use of force and firearms policy directive from 2023 states that authorized officers should only use force when “no reasonably effective, safe, and feasible alternative” is available. It also mandates that the level of force be “objectively reasonable” given the circumstances and instructs officers to “de-escalate” the situation. The guidelines further state that an agent who uses deadly force should be placed on administrative leave for three consecutive days. (ICE didn’t respond to questions from Mother Jones about its policies and whether Ross had been put on leave.) > “They murdered her, plain and simple. That is all there is to it.” “The question isn’t: Was he in any danger?” Shuchart said. “The question is: Was the use of force the only thing he could do to address the danger? And was the use of immediate deadly force the appropriate level of force?” One of the videos shows that Ross appeared to move out of the way to avoid possible contact with the car. “I don’t understand how you get from there to the idea that deadly stop and force against the driver was necessary to protect the officer from serious bodily harm,” added Shuchart, who until January 2025 was part of a team that handles ICE-wide policy and regulations. A DHS-wide 2023 policy on use of force generally prohibits deadly force “solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject” and the discharging of firearms to “disable moving vehicles.” But a recent Wall Street Journal investigation identified at least 13 instances since July where immigration agents fired at or into civilian cars, shooting eight people—including five US citizens—and leaving two dead. Instead of de-escalating, Shuchart said, Ross only “exacerbated the danger.” Shuchart pointed to a number of errors Ross made that could have been avoided, starting with his decision to step in front of the car. “This officer was not just freshly coming across the scene when a vehicle lurches at him,” he said. “[He] had already violated policy creating a danger to himself by crossing in front of the vehicle that wasn’t in park. You have to assess what was reasonable in those circumstances from the fact that he had created the potential danger to himself.” Prior to joining ERO, Ross did a stint with the Indiana National Guard in Iraq and worked as a field intelligence agent for the Border Patrol. His job as an ICE deportation officer in the Twin Cities area involved arresting “higher-value targets,” according to his own testimony from court records obtained by Wired, related to an accident last June when Ross was dragged by a car during an arrest.   “As a matter of what someone in law enforcement anywhere would be trained to do, and what someone would be trained to do under DHS policy, what he was doing was nuts,” Shuchart said of Ross’ actions last week. “He was so completely out of line with respect to what would have been safe for him and the other people on that operation. It was not at all how any kind of operation should go.” > “As a matter of what someone in law enforcement anywhere would be trained to > do, and what someone would be trained to do under DHS policy, what he was > doing was nuts.” According to Shuchart, the agents at the scene also failed to follow protocol in the aftermath of the shooting by appearing to not immediately render medical assistance or confirm that, if the target was in fact a threat, they no longer presented danger. Speaking to the New York Times, Trump appeared to try to justify Good’s killing by saying she had been “very, very disrespectful” to law enforcement. “ The fact that their feelings are hurt by US citizens disapproving of what they do loudly is completely irrelevant,” Shuchart said. “The point of the job is not to have your feelings well-cared for by the public.” Under pressure to meet the administration’s goal of 3,000 daily arrests, ICE has been on a hiring spree. The agency is offering candidates signing bonuses and plans a $100 million “wartime recruitment” effort that includes geo-targeted ads and influencers targeting gun rights supporters and UFC fights attendees to bring in as many as 10,000 new hires. Earlier this month, DHS publicized the addition of 12,000 officers and agents—from a pool of 220,000 “patriotic” applicants who responded to the government’s “Defend the Homeland” calls—more than doubling ICE’s workforce. So far, the result of that expansion drive has been less than optimal, with recruits failing fitness tests and not undergoing proper vetting. Experts have also raised concerns about the lowering of standards and reduced training times for new hires as the administration pushes to get more agents in the streets and rack up arrest numbers quickly. “I would be skeptical of anyone who would take a job with an agency that is willing to defend behavior this unprofessional,” Shuchart said. “There are thousands of law enforcement agencies in this country. If you’re a decent recruit, go work for one of the others that has more reasonable standards and expectations.”

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.

Word of the US military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro reached Mayra Sulbaran while on vacation in Canada. Sulbaran—who fled Venezuela in September 2018 and lives in Washington, DC—was in Montreal to reunite with her brother, who she had not seen in nine years. “I was hugging him when we found out,” she told me over a Zoom on Monday morning. Soon after Sulbaran heard the news, she joined other Venezuelans to celebrate what so many have prayed for and thought they might never see happen: the downfall of Maduro. > “Until there is true justice in Venezuela and the economic means to return and > rebuild the country, I don’t believe Venezuelans can go back.” Last weekend, US forces executed a months-in-the-making incursion into the presidential compound in Caracas to extract the Venezuelan strongman and his wife, Cilia Flores, who are now being held in a Brooklyn jail facing drug trafficking charges. President Donald Trump declared the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” What happens next remains unclear. At first, Trump hinted at “boots on the ground,” while Secretary of State Marco Rubio talked of “leverage” to control the country.The US president also warned Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who has been sworn in as interim leader, that she would pay a bigger “price” than the removed president “if she doesn’t do what’s right.” For so many Venezuelans like Sulbaran—a lawyer and pro-democracy activist who founded Casa DC Venezuela, a cultural center for the Venezuelan diaspora in the Washington, DC area—this fraught moment is filled with a complex mix of relief, dread, and expectation. “It’s a very contradictory situation because we understand that [President Donald Trump] has a goal and we appreciate it…,” she said, “but we’re also very afraid because we don’t know what’s coming and whether a democratic process will truly be respected.” Sulbaran is one of 8 million Venezuelans who have fled the country since 2014, part of the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history and one of the world’s worst forced displacement crises. For Venezuelans living in exile and scattered across the hemisphere and beyond, this juncture has sparked hope of one day returning to a Venezuela freed from Maduro’s oppressive grip. But it has also instilled anxiety among the thousands of Venezuelans—even those cheering the US operation—facing deportation to a nation now influx where their safety is all but guaranteed. “Until there is true justice in Venezuela and the economic means to return and rebuild the country, I don’t believe Venezuelans can go back,” said Sulbaran, now a US permanent resident. “It’s not just about changing a government, it’s about addressing an economic, social, and moral structure.” With the Maduro regime’s chain of command still ruling the country, she said the United States should offer protection to Venezuelans. Since retaking office, Trump has done the opposite. He has vilified and singled out Venezuelan migrants as a threat, accusing them of being gang members and taking over American cities. Last year, his administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a discretionary reprieve from deportation for immigrants from countries stricken by natural disasters, wars, and other circumstances—for Venezuela, claiming conditions in the country had improved and allowed for people’s safe return. As I wrote then, that move impacted more than 600,000 Venezuelans and represented the largest de-legalization campaign in modern US history. It threw thousands of people into a legal limbo, with many losing legal status and the ability to work. Now, amidst the ousting of Venezuela’s sitting president and a nationwide crackdown by the regime, there appears to be no plan to halt the deportation of Venezuelans. In an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was asked if the administration would continue to send Venezuelans back to the country. “Venezuela today is more free than it was yesterday,” Noem said, adding that the Venezuelans who were stripped of TPS have “the opportunity to apply for refugee status.”  But the refugee program, which the Trump administration has gutted, is intended for people who apply for protection from outside of the United States, not those present in the country already, like one-time Venezuelan TPS holders. In response to questions from Mother Jones, a DHS spokesperson conceded that “applicants are only eligible for refugee status prior to entering the country,” which excludes the people Noem said could qualify. “Secretary Noem ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 500,000 Venezuelans and now they can go home to a country that they love,” the spokesperson said. “[Deportation] Flights are not paused.” (In 2025, the US government deported 14,310 Venezuelans back to their home country, according to a flight tracker initiative kept by Human Rights First.) Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, called on the Trump administration to restore TPS for Venezuelans. “This is not the right time to keep deporting law-abiding Venezuelan immigrants,” she said. “All of these vulnerable people that have already been hunted, discriminated against, and victims of all of these xenophobic and racist immigration decisions are in more danger than ever before.” Ferro pointed to a decree by the Venezuelan regime ordering the police to identify and arrest “everyone involved in the promotion or support for the armed attack by the United States.” There are reports of armed gangs patrolling streets and setting up checkpoints to question residents and look through their phones. On Monday, fourteen journalists were detained, according to the National Press Workers Union. If Venezuela descends into further instability, it could also push more people to leave the country. In that climate, Ferro expressed concern about what might happen to Venezuelans who celebrated the operation on the streets of the United States if they were deported back. “People are more terrified than before,” she said. “The ultimate hope is that there is a real goal of bringing back democracy for Venezuela and, as a consequence, the Venezuelans that are willing to go back can do it in a safe manner. But that’s not the case right now.” At first, Ferro said she felt relief, joy, and a “sense of justice” to see Maduro removed from power. But following President Trump’s initial press conference, and Rodríguez ascent, that was overtaken by “disbelief, shock, frustration, devastation.” She took issue with the US government’s sidelining of opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and backing of Rodríguez. (Machado, who the Venezuelan regime barred from running in the 2024 presidential elections when Maduro declared victory despite evidence that the opposition candidate Edmundo González was the legitimate winner, has said she plans to return to Venezuela “as soon as possible.”) “At the end of the day, we’re not free,” Ferro added. “The opposition leadership was asking for the construction of a transition to democracy, not a long-term negotiation with a dictatorship.” Ferro said she had questions about what it means for the United States to “run” Venezuela, too—even if temporarily, as Trump promised. “What I know for sure is that the people of every country have the right to decide their own future,” she said. “Venezuelans have been waiting for more than a decade—if you talk about Chavismo, 27 years—and fighting to decide our own future. We have voted. We have protested. We have been killed. We have been persecuted. We have been imprisoned. We have been tortured. We have done everything in our power to have a path to democracy, and we deserve that opportunity.” Nathaly Maestre, who lives in Maryland with her partner and six-month-old baby, said there’s “a lot of tension and fear” in Venezuela right now. Her mother avoids leaving the house in an area where the pro-government armed civilian groups known as colectivos are active. They worry about having their conversations monitored and have stopped exchanging messages over WhatsApp, using phone calls instead. “The situation is worrisome because they’re intimidating people,” she said. After fleeing Venezuela, Maestre sought asylum in the United States and later applied for TPS as another layer of protection. Since the Trump administration ended the program, she’s now reliant on her pending asylum case. Some of her relatives lost their full-time jobs as a result of not having legal status. But despite their vulnerable position, she said they have no plans to leave because Venezuela isn’t safe, perhaps even less so now. “I think we’ve awakened a monster that will now turn against civil society and against anyone who expresses an opinion,” Maestre said. She thinks, at best, it’ll take time for the country to really change. During our call, Sulbaran also rejected a simplistic narrative that paints the reactions of Venezuelans to Maduro’s capture in broad strokes. She described Chavismo—the political movement of socialist leader Hugo Chávez—and the authoritarian government of his successor as a “farce.” Maduro, she said, is a “dictator” who oversaw a money-laundering “narco-state” as the Venezuelan people fell into extreme poverty and faced political oppression and violence. “We experienced firsthand, as a couple and as a family, what it meant to leave Venezuela to preserve our lives and the lives of our children,” she said. But Sulbaran also tries to remain clear-eyed about the risks that may lie ahead. She worries that the result of the United States’ intervention in Venezuela and ousting of Maduro could just be the exchange of one “executioner” for another. Her hope is that Rodríguez will engage in a peaceful transition period before handing the reigns of the country to the duly elected González. “Yes, we’re nervous,” she said. “But we’ve come from the worst, from rock bottom.”

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar said Sunday that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled over her son this weekend and asked him to prove his citizenship.  In an interview with WCCO, a CBS affiliate based in Minneapolis, the Somali-born congresswoman said she’s feared for her 20-year-old son since President Donald Trump and ICE began targeting Somali immigrants in the Twin Cities area earlier this month.  “Yesterday, after he made a stop at Target, he did get pulled over by ICE agents, and once he was able to produce his passport ID, they did let him go,” Omar, a refugee from Somalia, told WCCO’s Esme Murphy.  Since descending on Minnesota, home of the largest Somali community in the US, ICE agents have detained several US citizens, according to local officials and video evidence. The operation, “Metro Surge,” has prompted area residents to begin carrying around their passports and even avoid going outside, according to The New York Times. This includes Omar’s son, who “always carries” his passport with him, the four-term congresswoman told Murphy.  The incident described by Omar occurred one day after she announced that she was launching two formal inquiries into the Trump administration’s “escalating attacks on Somali communities in Minnesota and across the country,” her website reads. In a December 12 letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE acting director Todd Lyons, Omar wrote that “constituents, advocates, and local officials have documented blatant racial profiling, an egregious level of unnecessary force, and activity that appears designed for social media rather than befitting a law enforcement agency.” > “I kept calling to see if he was okay, if he had any run-ins, and he wasn’t > answering,” Omar told WCCO. Among other questions, Omar wants Noem and Lyons to answer: “How many arrests were the result of judicial warrants?” “How can the public report potential violations of constitutional rights, and how will those be investigated?” and “How is ICE ensuring due process protections while a large volume of new officers are on the ground?” Amid a barrage of xenophobic remarks about Somali people in recent weeks, President Trump has repeatedly targeted Omar, who arrived in the US as a refugee in the 1990s and became a citizen in 2000. These attacks go back to Trump’s first term, when Omar was first elected to Congress. “She’s garbage,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting December 2. “Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.” In that meeting, the president also said that Somalia “stinks” and that immigrants from the country “come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch.” “We don’t want them in our country,” he said multiple times. At a Pennsylvania rally this past Tuesday night, Trump called Somalia “about the worst country in the world” and mocked Omar. “I love this Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is, with the little turban. I love her, she comes in, does nothing but bitch,” he said. “She should get the hell out, throw her the hell out,” Trump continued as his supporters chanted “GET HER OUT!”  In her interview on Sunday, Omar said ICE had previously entered a local mosque where her son prays, before leaving without making any arrests last Friday. Omar said that throughout that day she was watching videos of ICE stops in the same neighborhood as the mosque. “I kept calling to see if he was okay, if he had any run-ins, and he wasn’t answering,” Omar told WCCO. “Eventually, that night I did get a chance to talk to him and I had to remind him just how worried I am.” 

Nelle ultime elezioni americane, Donald Trump ha ottenuto un massiccio consenso tra gli uomini, confermando un fenomeno già osservato negli ultimi decenni: il… L'articolo I maschi in una crisi politica sembra essere il primo su L'INDISCRETO.