From Minneapolis to Everywhere

From Minneapolis to Everywhere: Theater, Terror and ICE’s Titration Violence

On January 29th, 2026 during “Border Czar” Tom Homan’s opening press conference in Minneapolis upon replacing Greg Bovino (formerly the Department of Homeland Security’s “Commander at Large”), Homan sought to strike a more familiar, bureaucratic tone than his controversial and incendiary counterpart. Bovino had become an increasingly visible symbol of Operation Metro Surge. His inflammatory rhetoric and his long wool coat and haircut so closely mirrored that of an SS officer that German news outlet Der Spiegel, among others, reported on the resemblance. Clips of Bovino giddily yelling “gas is coming” before gassing protestors and claiming Alex Pretti, shot ten times by CBP agents, had intended to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” despite all visual evidence pointing to the opposite.

Tom Homan on the other hand, boasted a law enforcement career which spanned four decades, including roles within ICE under four consecutive US presidents beginning with George W. Bush’s founding of the agency in 2003. In 2015, Tom Homan received the Presidential Rank Award from President Barack Obama for his service. He was the kind of replacement that represented “sensible” law and order and bipartisanship. While his professional tenure, de-escalatory tone and decorum, which harkened back to the Biden or Obama years, led Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to praise his professionalism, Homan’s language and framing during his opening press conference made clear the Trump regime’s orientation to ICE’s occupation was most accurately embodied by Bovino. Their tactics were anything but the unintentional result of bad training.

Even as few, if any, media outlets picked it up, a short but monumental few sentences buried in the middle of Homan’s press conference gave away the plot. Homan noted that ICE agents “have been in theater for eight months so there’s going to be rotations of personnel, hopefully less now that we have some agreements, maybe we can make it more efficient and safe. But they’ve been in theater a long time and so there’s rotations . . . to get people out here and go home get some rest and see their families.”

Any reader will have heard the phrase “European” or “Pacific Theater” in reference to the Second World War. The word “theater,” is only ever used this way in describing geographical arenas in which combat takes place in the context of war. As Prussian Army officer and military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz, who coined the term, wrote in his 1832 treatise On War, a theater is a “portion of the space over which war prevails.”

In referring to Minneapolis as a theater, Homan reveals the administration sees this as a war against immigrants, those who can be read as such, and those protesting in their defense. In short: the American public. The White House has operated under the claim of an invasion and has sought domestic approximation of a wartime footing to address it. Beyond its official use as a military term, the term theater is dually useful here insofar as it allows us to think about violence as a performance, a mode of cultural communication.

Too often, and in America in particular, we employ the phrase “senseless violence” to describe violence which either defies rational comprehension, or which seems at odds with an assailant’s expressed material or operational aims. As such, violence is rarely discussed as a cultural category and narrative device which tells a particular story about power and the people involved in violent acts. Here in Minneapolis, during both of Trump’s terms, we have been on the forefront of conflagrations of state violence; first in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and once more under the occupation of ICE. We know firsthand that, even at its worst, violence is anything but senseless. Rather, violence is performed through a series of guiding logics which do not simply speak to the material ends which violence seeks to achieve but the worldview of its perpetrators.

The militarization of ICE is not a proportional response to an imagined population of increasingly militant immigrants (the image of the arrest of five-year old Liam Ramos in his bunny hat should be sufficient in disavowing anyone of that notion), nor is it because militarization increases the efficacy of DHS’ rates of apprehension and deportation. While Trump has had an over reliance on ICE in carrying out deportations compared to the bookending Democratic administrations, both Obama and Biden ultimately deported more people than Trump. Something Hillary Clinton recently bragged about. If the militarization does not respond to a material need or improve efficacy in achieving operational goals, what are its real functions?

One of the most famous images to come out of Operation Metro Surge shows five agents in full military kit raiding a North Minneapolis home in search of Garrison Gibson, a Liberian man who has since been released without charge. The agents are stacked in a perfect line with plate carriers, ballistic helmets, armed with M4 platforms with suppressors (particularly useful for close quarters combat within houses/enclosed spaces to protect hearing and reduce concussive shockwaves), MAWL’s (an infrared laser which can only be seen when wearing night vision) and dump pouches (for storage of spent magazines).

A separate video from inside the house shows that those who are on the other side of all this gear are unarmed and include a nine-year-old child. The story goes on to confirm Gibson was not only in regular contact with ICE regarding his immigration case with scheduled meetings but had no violent convictions on his record. His story is not unique. Less than 5% of those detained by ICE have a violent criminal conviction.

The juxtaposition between those facing the barrel of a gun and those shouldering it is not the only important one to highlight in this scenario. One must hold up the image of extensive military kit to the deeply amateur, single file formation of those wearing it. A well-placed green tip (armor piercing round) could pass through the entire line of agents in a looney toons-esque domino effect if they were actually facing a proportionate threat.

The unnecessary military kit seeks to affirm Homan’s assessment that Minneapolis is in fact a “theater.” It does not speak to operational necessity but does affirm the narrative of dangerous, violent “illegal” immigrants who have invaded the United States. It is part and parcel of the performance–the theater. The plate carriers suggest an enemy with high powered rifles, that the expected engagement is not only expected but an expected engagement between peers. The suppressors suggest impending close quarters combat. The dump pouches suggest an expectation for such a high rate of fire that full magazines will be emptied and require storing. While MAWL’s attached to the M4’s on agents at the front of the stack do often have a daytime option, they are most often used at night. ICE raids, however, do not happen at night. Why? Because the terror needs to be witnessed and felt by the public.

While the experience of police officers in America differs based on race, class and gender, the meta-narrative upon which the institution of policing is founded and relies upon is that of safety and assistance. The soldier however, and the presence of such, suggests an enemy is present. Where enemies do not exist, the soldier’s presence implies their existence. An implication within a narrative creates presence where there is none. If only 5% of those detained by ICE have any real documentable potential for interpersonal violence, the violence that ICE exerts on the public must produce a narrative which suggests that 5% is in fact 100%. For this goal, the lack of training is more useful than not. It too is a performance, perhaps not one individual agents perform willingly (one cannot act beyond one’s training), but one which is planned, nonetheless.

The lack of training is certainly a natural symptom of ICE’s rapid expansion due to its operational “needs” but given the chaos and terror which stem from it it is also a pre-emptive narrative tool. Even as ICE lost public opinion, the administration did not lose public discourse predicting calls for additional training by Democratic leaders including Tim Walz, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. In this way, DHS could have their cake and eat it too. The militarized amateurs with carte blanche access to force would create absolute chaos around the city through a balance of intention, lack of training and military costume. The injection of untrained chaos could both create a scene which would give the sense of the threat of violence where there was none while simultaneously restricting the dialogue to that of training and not tactics. The plot was quickly lost that Jonathan Ross, the officer who had killed Renee Good, was an 11-year veteran ICE agent who had begun serving under the Obama administration.

The Democratic establishment took for granted that the lack of training could be purposefully weaponized rather than being an unintentional oversight or series of institutionalized errors. Making good-faith assumptions of bad-faith actors prevented any substantive mainstream conversation about the role of terror and spectacle from taking place. Feeding the reformist tendencies of the Democratic establishment would make Tom Homan’s “draw down” feel like a victory rather than a ploy.

At the height of Operation Metro Surge there were nearly 4,000 ICE and CBP officers in the state with the Army’s 11th Airborne Division on standby for potential deployment. The latter, a constant weight of potential violence hung over the city. The surge had resulted in more than 60 arrests per day during the height of the surge and the horrific public execution of Alex Pretti the day after the largest general strike in more than a century. On February 4th, within a week of Homan’s arrival he announced a 700 agent draw down in the state and the national eye began to blink. By February 12th, Homan announced an end to Operation Metro Surge and the national eye turned away.

It was an error for anyone on the ground or on the outside looking in to believe the removal of Gregory Bovino was a victory. While the public response, the dedication of organizers and activists, did make his continued presence too costly for the administration, his removal was perhaps more useful long term than his presence. Said differently, the juxtaposition between Bovino’s cartoonishly evil persona and Homan’s more metered authority has proven to serve the interests of long-term occupation.

ICE cannot keep up the kind of tactics or presence which produced Alex Pretti’s killing and an average 60 arrests per day at the height of the surge. It is simply too expensive. Agents burn out and quit. They cannot be housed and fed en masse indefinitely, and less lethal munitions and crowd control agents are not unlimited. While the most respected historians of authoritarianism agree Trump is an autocrat, he has not yet sufficiently captured the state enough so as to render public opinion useless. Moreover, those tactics and ubiquitous presence will always result in resistance. Life under such a gratuitous boot is untenable and it is impossible to look away from; even those least affected start to resist.

However, after such an escalation, a draw down to a still-unprecedented level feels suddenly more tenable. A recent court filing shows that as of late March, 500 ICE agents remain in Minneapolis, well over the promised 140 the draw down was supposed to reach. Surveillance, harassment, arrests and deportations continue. The militarized presence has largely changed its face and undercover arrests—more effective and less spectacular—have begun to be favored. Together, this makes it possible to look away, it makes it possible to let out a little breath, it makes it possible for many—but surely not all—to return to some semblance of “normal” life if even that life is just a simulacrum of the past.

Perhaps more pernicious than the idiom “senseless violence” is this overwhelming desire for things to return to normal. The problem is that “normal” is a bar that can be infinitely moved. This is called a titration violence. The administration is adjusting the levels of violence—as a doctor adjusts a new medication—to measure what is the maximum amount the public body will “tolerate” with minimal/manageable rejection. Whether it was in the plan from the outset or it was discovered in the process, Minneapolis as a blueprint points to the administration engineering long term consent for occupation by constantly adjusting its levels as it increases its capacity to maintain a greater and greater presence in addition to where that presence can be (such as airports or other transit points).

The administration must balance the exhaustion of the public and its own forces. Whether they choose the moment to turn down the volume or it is chosen for them through local resistance and ICE’s own gratuity isn’t predictable. What is predictable, however is the function of this dial and that it will be ICE’s modus operandi in each new “theater.” And as a theater what is predictable is that the curtains will close when the performance is over and the audience closest to the doors begin to file out. But the apparatus is intact, the audience is changed, and the machine continues to roll, increasing in pace and intensity as it slowly assimilates the American public into its slow escalation masked by its kinetic flashes of masked police cosplaying as soldiers. That is, until they are no longer cosplaying.

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