The Fake & Fraudulent Prophets Around the President
September 4, 2026 |
Daniel Henderson
Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on January 24. Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital. He was a U.S. citizen and a licensed concealed carry gun owner. He had never drawn his gun. He only “brandished” a phone.
Federal officials immediately, without investigation, sought to portray Pretti as a domestic terrorist, saying he had approached agents with a “semi-automatic handgun” and the intent to “massacre” them. That is a lie.
Multiple videos of the event contradict their account. They show Pretti holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, trying to help a woman that ICE agents had shoved to the ground. Then agents took him to the ground and hit him. One agent appears to remove a gun from near Pretti’s right hip. At the same time, another agent unholsters his firearm and points it at Pretti’s back. Several agents are shown to have restrained him on the pavement when one shot him, and others joined in.
This was the second unjustified use of violence and killing by ICE in Minneapolis in January. It was spectacle, brutal and cruel, just what the Trump administration wants. There were no immigrants or refugees anywhere near this scene… it wasn’t about arresting so-called “illegal” immigrants.
Here is the irony: ICE already knows how to arrest and deport violent criminals without patrolling city streets, wearing ridiculous masks, throwing flash bangs, and using pepper spray on American citizens. And certainly, ICE knows not to kill American citizens who pose no threat to them.
Let me explain what I believe to be happening.
Over the eight years of Obama’s presidency from 2009 to 2016, roughly 5.3 million deportations and returns occurred, making it one of the highest levels of deportation in recent U.S. history. Obama’s enforcement priorities focused on violent or serious criminals, and by 2016, a high percentage of these removals involved people with criminal convictions.
You probably didn’t know that this was even occurring because there were no ICE agents on the streets terrorizing Americans. ICE agents did not shoot innocent people through the window of their cars. They didn’t shoot a restrained man lying on the pavement of a street.
ICE, during the Obama years, mostly used formal removal proceedings and coordinated raids targeting people already in the criminal justice system or identified via databases. They relied heavily on border returns & expedited removal at ports of entry. These counts significantly boosted total removals. And they did it by the book.
ICE knows how to do this appropriately and constitutionally.
Most tellingly, Obama enforcement typically occurred in cooperation with state/local law enforcement. ICE made use of Secure Communities, Operation Cross Check, and other ICE-led programs to identify and remove people with criminal convictions. The policy explicitly emphasized high-priority individuals: terrorists, gang members, and serious offenders. The Obama White House prioritized enforcement against serious criminals and national security threats.
This was supported by most Americans, left and right. ICE knows how to do this the right way.
In those years, ICE tried to balance enforcement with selective prosecutorial discretion and programs like DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) to shield non-criminal immigrants.
ICE knows how to do this correctly… So why are they doing it the wrong way now?
It should be clear to anyone who is observing what ICE is doing in Minneapolis and other Democratic led cities across the nation this isn’t about arresting violent or dangerous criminals. We’ve done that before, and it didn’t involve the brutal tactics that we are witnessing today.
Trump has shifted from prioritizing criminal enforcement to a broader enforcement model, where all undocumented immigrants and refugees are viewed as deportable, not just the serious criminals. Trump’s domestic raids and at-large arrests are more common, sometimes sweeping in people without criminal convictions. Data shows that a large share of individuals arrested in 2025 had no criminal record, perhaps as high as 73%.
Tactics include workplace raids, operations in cities on the street, ramming and pulling people over in their cars, and the detention of families and children, even those with pending asylum claims. These are not law enforcement events. Something else is at play.
To understand what Trump’s goals are, it is imperative to first understand that Trump’s immigration strategy is not primarily about crime control. It is about redefining national citizenship, mobilizing a loyal base (30-35%) through permanent conflict, and weakening political opponents by weaponizing federal power against Democratic governance geographically.
If Trump really wanted to deport millions of immigrants, he would follow the Obama model. In fact, Trump’s pace of deportation will not match Obama’s record. During Trump’s first term (2017–2021), roughly 1.2 to 2.1 million removals/returns occurred, substantially lower than Obama’s totals.
The 2025 enforcement activity shows sharp rises in arrests and some increases in deportations compared to recent years, however, annualized totals still appear lower than Obama’s peaks. And as mentioned, many of those arrested and deported have no criminal record. A few have even been American citizens. Overall, Obama’s administration recorded higher total deportations across eight years than Trump’s known totals across his first term and early second term.
It isn’t about law enforcement or crime control.
First, Trump has moved from crime control to identity control.
Trump deliberately erases distinctions between violent criminals and non-violent undocumented residents. He also erased the distinction between long-term residents and recent arrivals.
Why?
Because the Obama-era selective enforcement policy implicitly legitimizes undocumented people’s presence under some conditions, such as DACA recipients. Trump’s political project requires a harder line in the sand.
For the Trump Administration, unauthorized presence in any form is a moral violation, not a regulatory one. This reframes immigration from a policy problem into an existential identity conflict: who belongs and who does not.
Second, broadened enforcement helps Trump solve an obvious political problem.
Immigrants—documented and undocumented—commit less violent crime than native-born citizens; therefore, crime-focused enforcement does not generate enough visible “threat” to sustain mass mobilization.
In other words, there aren’t enough “criminal immigrants” to justify the billions of dollars allocated for this purpose.
According to the Cato Institute, only about 5% of those arrested by ICE have any serious criminal record. That isn’t near enough to meet the quota goals that detention center contracts have demanded. There isn’t enough profit margin.
Trump’s political solution is to broaden the target so that enforcement is constant, fear is ambient, and the enemy is always present. And, they have a better chance of seeing a profit.
This allows Trump a permanent spectacle of action that includes raids, detentions, buses and planes full of immigrants, court fights, and media confrontation. The spectacle is more the point than any enforcement goal.
Trump’s movement thrives not on outcomes (his base doesn’t care about outcomes) but on the visibility of conflict. It is the chaos and brutality that Trump wants to see, which leads to the next reason.
Third, the broadened enforcement mechanism allows Trump to target Democratic-led cities and states.
The goal here is to punish these geographic regions for not supporting him in past elections and defying his policies through litigation. And he wants to punish them with spectacle, brutality, and cruelty.
Trump is using immigration as a pretext to inflict pain on Democratic controlled areas. Undocumented immigrants disproportionately live in large metropolitan areas that are economically dynamic regions. These are overwhelmingly Democratic-governed.
However, in terms of sheer population numbers, immigrants tend to live in red states such as Texas and Florida. For instance, according to Pew Research, there are 130,000 people without legal immigration status living in Minnesota, as opposed to 2.1 million in Texas and 1.6 million in Florida. Why are ICE agents storming Minnesota and not Texas or Florida?
It is all about punishment, not enforcement.
Fourth, federalism is a challenge to authoritarian rule. Trump believes he must break down the guardrail of federalism to reach his authoritarian goals.
For Trump, federalism is a battlefield because Democratic cities often limit cooperation with ICE and assert local autonomy. Additionally, these cities and states emphasize civil liberties and due process, which serve as roadblocks to Trump’s autocratic ambitions.
From Trump’s perspective, these cities are not merely non-compliant; they are ideological adversaries. So-called immigration “enforcement” becomes a way to punish ideological non-alignment, reassert federal dominance, and undermine local democratic legitimacy.
This mirrors an authoritarian playbook: increase central power and decrease pluralist local governance. Every authoritarian tries to do this. Federalism, a key pillar of the Constitution becomes a casualty of increased Presidential power.
Next, Democratic cities and states also challenge Trump’s MAGA vision of an ethno-state under one “true” religion. These cities are multiracial, secular, immigrant-friendly, and progressive. By targeting these cities, Trump is not just enforcing the law; he is attacking a rival vision of America. That is reason number five.
Fifth, Trump’s objective is a two-tiered citizenship state. In other words, “real Americans” and “non-Americans.”
This is really the brainchild of Trump’s Deputy Secretary, Stephen Miller. We need to take a slight detour to understand this idea.
In 2019, during Trump’s first term, the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed leaked emails in which Miller encouraged the far-right website Breitbart to promote white supremacist ideas. In one message, Miller references a book of fiction: “Someone should point out the parallels to Camp of the Saints.” It is a novel Miller has extolled since his youth.
The Camp of the Saints is a 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail that has become a key inspiration within white nationalist circles. It portrays a dystopia, or perhaps an apocalypse: a flotilla of South Asian people who invade France and effectively overthrow Western society.
The key themes are white supremacy and the end of white civilization as the West knows it, highlighting the horrors of infestation, invasion, hordes of nameless, faceless migrants who come to invade the West and bring about its end.
Historian Kathleen Belew from the University of Chicago commented on Miller’s fetish for The Camp of the Saints.
“This is an organized ideology. It has a coherent worldview that is not only deeply racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant, but also, at times, un-American and dedicated towards war on the state….. This is about deliberate construction of a white nationalist public policy coming from the halls of power into our laws and into our nation.”
Miller is thought to be the primary architect of Trump’s ICE enforcement policy. For Miller, legal status is not important; cultural belonging is. It allows for leniency toward ideologically aligned immigrants such as white-skinned South “Afrikaners” but hostility toward others regardless of their status or conduct, and especially their skin-color.
Miller’s architecture also prepares the ground for attacks on birthright citizenship, expanded executive discretion over status, and loyalty-based definitions of belonging.
In the Miller framework, cities that protect immigrants are protecting the “wrong” Americans.
Trump’s ICE actions in Minnesota make no sense unless it is framed in this logic. Trump broadened immigration targeting and focused on Democratic-led cities because Obama’s narrow enforcement model undermines the MAGA movement’s identity logic. Democratic cities represent both demographic and ideological opposition to Trump’s vision of America, and conflict itself sustains the loyalty of his political base.
Immigration is a uniquely powerful lever for redefining citizenship, federalism, and executive power. It is part of Trump’s authoritarian aspiration. All roads in Trump world lead to the same place… authoritarian government.
