What happened in Minneapolis, a few blocks from the point where five years ago the African-American citizen George Floyd was suffocated under the knee of a brutal policeman, is not a fatality. It’s a signal. It is the photograph of an America that has stopped questioning itself and has started protesting its anger or shooting again. This time the one who dies is a thirty-seven year old white woman, Renee Nicole Good, shot at point blank range during an operation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal immigration police deployed to hunt for immigrants at the behest of Donald Trump as if it were an occupation militia.
The images circulating on social media are brutal in their simplicity: a stationary SUV, officers ordering people to get out, a door being grabbed, a car reversing, then moving forward. In front of the hood an armed man who does not retreat, does not reflect, does not evaluate. Shoot. Two shots, maybe more. The woman, mother of three children, died shortly after in hospital, struck in the head. This is how the new American order works. Welcome to the stars and stripes Far West, Maga version.
The episode is part of the climate of three-day demonstrations against Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant policy, which the White House wants to repress with an iron fist. So much so that the fanatical Minister of Internal Security Kristi Noem (the one who shot her dog and who was portrayed with a grim face, witch hat and curls in El Salvador prison in front of a cage full of Venezuelan immigrants deported from the United States) paints the mother of three as a terrorist and Trump as a “social agitator”. The president then accused the “radical left” of threatening and targeting that militia on a daily basis, which for him is only trying to do its job: make America safe. It’s the same old old story of authoritarian power: internal or external security is invoked to justify repressive actions and mass deportation campaigns against immigrants guilty of immigrating and to fetch a dictator in the name of the fight against drug trafficking (but the real reason is oil), when the fight against drug trafficking should be done with the cooperation of the police forces and not by kidnapping dictators.
Now, however, we can see some barriers to Trump’s foreign policy, such as Macron’s accusations of “colonial aggression”. So far, only the French president has reminded us that the message must not be passed that when a state has an interest in expanding onto the territory of another state it can do so (otherwise we will throw away everything we have built since the Second World War). From the European Union there are some cries, from Italy, as usual, we are struggling.
On the domestic front, Minneapolis is one of Trump’s battlegrounds because its mayor, Democrat Jacob Frey, is his bitter enemy, as is governor Tim Walz, former vice presidential candidate with Kamala Harris. But for Trump, political adversaries are fought by all means, even by sending police militias. When a gunman killed a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband last year, he didn’t call Walz, who he described as “out of his mind.” Walz, for his part, criticized immigration agents last year as “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.”
The wave of anger among the Democrats who govern Minnesota is destined to grow further. A fuse also outside this state: the Democratic congressman from Illinois Robin Kelly has announced his intention to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem following the shooting. It is certainly not the turning point for opponents of Trump’s brutal policies and abuse of power, but we can perhaps consider it a beginning. Thousands of people poured into the streets of Chicago, New York, Detroit, San Francisco and other cities across the country. It is not the turning point, it is not the fall of the Maga regime. But it’s a crack. The America that protests in the name of democracy, the real one, still exists. But he has to hurry. Because on the other side they don’t wait any longer. They shoot.
