After the shocking videos showing ICE "agents" in Minneapolis murdering protester Alex Pretti went viral, Trump withdrew some of his most rabid dogs from the city. But not all of them.
Security secretary Kristi Noem's official explanation of this murder was proven to be a lie. Pretti didn't approach ICE agents with a gun. They approached him, wrestled him to the ground and shot him 10 times.
Trump and Noem had labelled anti-ICE protesters "domestic terrorists", but it's obvious who the real domestic terrorists are. In fact the 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcers in Minneapolis don't even wear proper uniforms and are masked. So who are they?
The attacks by these homicidal thugs against men, women - and also children - on the pretext they are "illegal immigrants" show unhinged brutality. The large majority who've been "caught" and jailed are found to be legitimately residing in the US.
Indeed, this swamping by ICE which Trump has enforced in Los Angeles, New York, Aurora (Colorado) and Chicago, targets anyone with a darkish skin, including Native Americans. It's a terror tactic against the poorest, but also the most potentially militant, section of the working class.
There are absurd ironies in this clamp-down. As everyone knows, with the exception of the (only) true American natives, the "First People", who today make up 9.7m out of the 343m US population, a/f Americans are of immigrant extraction.
The real target is the rest of us
Going for the most vulnerable first, is just the beginning of a renewed attack on the whole working class, required by the capitalists to preserve their profitability in the face of ever-aggravating crisis.
It's the old tried and tested "divide and rule". And governments/politicians think that workers are more likely to go along with it, because it's aimed only at dark-skinned "foreign" workers - those without the right papers, the "illegals"... But the rest of us are most definitely next.
Trump has probably realised however, that when Minnesota's National Rifle Association - in this state of enthusiastic wildlife hunters - gets angry about the killing of Alex Pretti, on an after-the-fact pretext that he was carrying a gun (a legal right under the constitution!), he'd better take a step back. What's more this ICE campaign may prove unlikely to be a vote-winner, in the context of the upcoming midterm elections.
Yes, the NRA, usually on Trump's side of the political spectrum, joined the protest that took place in Minneapolis despite the freezing temperature - calling for "ICE OUT!"
And back at "home farm"...
ICE comes under the rule of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) - the US "Home Office". So we have to wonder about Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood's proposals this week for reforming the British police system, at this precise moment in time.
Mahmood has already been imitating Trump's hard line on immigration, vying for the Tories' and Reform's political territory. In November, she announced changes in the law, which make it much harder to get British citizenship; she sped up deportations and she has now sent asylum-seeking refugees to stay in former army barracks, which are reminiscent of concentration camps.
And now Mahmood wants to create a national police force and national counter-terrorism force, which just happens to look a lot like the US federal police - the FBI - and its Homeland Security force! She says that by moving "from local to national" she'll make economies of scale and this will police us all far more effectively! And give out more guns to British enforcers? Who've long since shown their form, hysterically murdering Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005, wrongly suspected of terrorism, and as early as 1993, choking to death Joy Gardner during a raid looking for "illegal immigrants".
But one of the main new ways to catch "criminals" will be through facial recognition, used extensively in the US, but not yet everywhere in Britain - although there are already cameras in London. Mahmood made no comment on the fact that these cameras cannot accurately "identify" people with darker skin tones...
All this to say that it's time for the working class truly to "come back" after its virtual no-show back in 2022/3, when there was meant to be a "wave of strikes". And this time we'll need to be political in what we strike about, because the stakes are getting higher and higher.
Yes, as the capitalist class turns nastier - and its politicians turn overtly reactionary like Trump in the US, Farage in Britain, or more subtly so, like Starmer/Mahmood, the working class also needs to get nasty. We need to sharpen our most effective weapon - the general strike. And get ready to use it.