A federal immigration officer drags Rummler across the pavement after shooting him in the face and blinding his left eye. Screengrab from video posted to X by OC Hawk.

“On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.”

― Gore Vidal, Julian

Every pedestrian in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Portland has come closer to being run over by a car than that ICE agent in Mpls. None of them would have been legally justified in shooting the motorist.

Even here in our small neighborhood, on the rim of a canyon, nearly once a month in the pre-dawn darkness of our morning walks, Lola and I will have a close encounter with a speeding Amazon driver, blowing through all intersections to meet their hourly quotas, with their eyes focused on their digital map not the road, trying to locate the right house amid the tangle of Doug-firs and hemlocks to deliver some must-have-now parcel of deodorant, nail clippers and light bulbs. Corporate vehicular terrorism has suddenly become a daily hazard of American life that we are told we must endure under the merciless dictates of late capitalism. No shooting back will be tolerated. And if you get run down, it’ll be your fault for inconveniencing the speedy circulation of commodities. We’re all externalities of the profit motive: pedestrians, dogs and the stressed-out drivers themselves.

Meagan Day: “If Renee Good’s car posed an actual threat to Jonathan Ross’s life, he would be dead. We know this because shooting her in the face had no effect on the immediate course of the car.”

Kristi Noem: Renee Good had been harassing ICE “all day.” (Renee Good was murdered at 9:37 AM, shortly after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.)

It’s revolting, but hardly surprising, that a woman (Kristi Noem) who thought bragging about the time she shot her puppy in the head for disobeying a command and dumped its body in a gravel quarry would advance her political career, also thinks it’s entirely justified to shoot a mother of three in the head for “disobeying” confusing commands from her ICE agents.

Jake Tapper: You said this was a federal agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying. Does your rhetoric need to change?

Jacob Frey, Mayor of Minneapolis: “I said this was a federal agent recklessly using power that ended up in somebody dying, because that was a federal agent recklessly using power that ended up in somebody dying. I mean, am I biased in this? Of course. And I’m biased because I got two eyes.”

Mike Fox: “The Minneapolis shooting shares characteristics with others the Wall Street Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire.”

Noah Levy is a Minneapolis-based drummer, plays in the Brian Setzer Orchestra and Zeppo…

How to tell if you’re living in a police state: there are currently more than TWICE as many federal agents (3000) in Minneapolis as there are city cops, county sheriff’s deputies and state police (1400).

Trump has sent 13.6% of all ICE agents to Minneapolis, a city that represents .13% of the population of the United States.

A big reason CBP issued policies instructing officers not to stand in front of vehicles is that internal reports showed that CBP officers were deliberately doing so to have an excuse to open fire.

Pablo Maniquez: “REMINDER that no ICE agent has EVER been killed in the line of duty OR been convicted of a crime for shooting someone … meaning their victimhood narrative is a hoax, as is any public accountability for agents.”

Rep. Angie Craig, on being denied entry along with Ilhan Omar, into ICE’s Minneapolis detention center: “We were told because this facility is being funded by the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ not the congressional appropriations act, that we would not be allowed to enter the facility. That’s complete nonsense … I informed them they were violating the law. They said they didn’t care.”

When an exasperated Adam Tooze said this about the Democrats, he wasn’t referring to this insipid statement from Tim Walz, but he might as well have been…

You people are a bunch of sentimental schmucks who don’t understand that you lost. If you had any self-respect, you would not be on any podium again, ever, sounding off about anything. Because, comrades, if we were in the 30s, I would have taken you out and shot you. You fail like this, you don’t get to come back and show off your wounds.

ICE agents in Minnesota have been offering protesters they’ve arrested cash in exchange for providing the names of protest organizers and undocumented people.

So the Trump/Bondi Department of Vindictive Prosecutions is going after Renee Good’s widow, a move that prompted six seasoned federal prosecutors in the office to resign in protest. What next, will Kristi “the Puppy Killer” Noem order one of her ICE agents to shoot Good’s dog?

For the first time, a poll (The Economist) shows a plurality of Americans support abolishing ICE…

46% support abolishing ICE
43% oppose abolishing ICE

The same poll shows that 60% of Americans support “criminally prosecuting any ICE agent who kills someone.”

ICE went into a Target, where they snatched a 17-year-old worker from his job, threw him to the ground outside the entry and cuffed him, as he kept telling them he was a US citizen. Twenty minutes later or so, after confirming that the teenager was in fact a US citizen, they dumped him in the parking lot of a Walmart a mile away, where people found him bleeding and crying: “They slammed me on the ground.”

An ICE agent dragging the seriously wounded Kaden Rummler by the hood across the pavement. Screengrab from a video posted to X by OC Hawk.

During a protest in Santa Ana, California, last week, Kaden Rummler was shot in the face at close range by an ICE agent with a “non-lethal” round that left the 21-year-old blind and with a fractured skull and a piece of metal lodged in his throat, only seven millimeters from his carotid artery.

Videos of the shooting show the ICE agent firing his weapon into a crowd of people at a few feet away, who were protesting the shooting of Renee Good outside of the Santa Ana Federal Building. Bullets hit a woman in the leg and Rummler in the face. The agent appeared to aim at Rummler’s head.

After being shot, Rummler collapses to the pavement, hands to his face. The ICE man who shot him grabs the hood of Rummler’s jacket and drags him across the ground. As the hood tightens around his throat, Rummler heaves for breath. It looks like he’s being strangled. Blood seeps from his left eye, which has been permanently damaged by shards of plastic, metal and glass. Other ICE officers start firing pepper balls at a man’s throat and head as he tries to film the encounter with his cell phone.

Inside the building, the ICE shooter leaves Rummler on the ground, still bleeding. Two agents press his face down into the pool of blood. One agent hisses: “You’re going to lose your eye.” They wait several minutes before calling paramedics.

What set the ICE officers off on this rampage? Someone tossed an orange traffic cone in their direction.

Meanwhile, Rummler is lucky to be alive. After six hours in surgery, doctors saved his eye, but it will be permanently blind. The surgeons didn’t remove the shard of metal from his neck, fearing it might sever his carotid artery and cause him to bleed to death.

“That could have cost him his life,” his aunt Jeri Rees told the Los Angeles Times. “But now, for the next six weeks, he can’t sneeze or cough because it could do a lot of damage.”

After being released from the hospital, Rummler told a local TV station, “I will be blind for life. I have fractures in my skull that they can’t fix. They pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel out of my eye. I had shards of metal, glass, and plastic behind my eye and in my skull. They said it was a miracle I survived.”

It was only a day after an ICE officer murdered Renee Good, when six Border Patrol officers patrolling east Portland in four separate vehicles for some as yet unexplained reason began tailing a red Toyota Tacoma pickup truck, eventually pulling it over into the parking lot of a medical center.

There’s no indication that the driver of the truck had committed any moving violations and Border Patrol doesn’t enforce Oregon traffic laws in any event. The Tacoma hadn’t been reported stolen. Neither of the occupants of the truck was the registered owner, so there’s no way Border Patrol could know for sure who they were stopping. They were simply two Hispanic-looking people, a man and a woman, in a Toyota truck. The agents didn’t have a warrant and had no probable cause for the stop. It was another case of racial profiling, a so-called Kavanaugh stop, after the Supreme Court justice who said such incidents amount to only a minor inconvenience. In this instance, it led to a married couple being shot.

The Border Patrol agents parked their unmarked vehicles around the Tacoma, attempting to box in the truck, a common tactic that has given immigration agents an excuse to escalate if a confrontation ensues.

The six agents got out of their vehicles and approached the truck with their guns drawn, pointing to the ground, according to an FBI document. One of the Border Patrol officers later said the driver of the truck, later identified as Luis Nino-Moncada, looked “anxious and [was] visibly moving around in the driver’s seat.” And who wouldn’t be “anxious,” a mere day after Renee Good was shot in the face by an ICE officer in similar circumstances. And it turned out that Nino-Moncada had good reason to be fearful.

According to depositions from........

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