In communities across the country, Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have used Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as their own personal army.

The consequences have been devastating: DHS has eroded due process, terrorized communities of immigrants and citizens, and now ICE agents are shooting and killing American citizens on our streets in broad daylight.

We demand accountability for the deaths of Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, poet, wife, and mother of three, and of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and ICU nurse, and for everyone who has been hurt or killed by DHS agents or in their custody.

And we know where to begin: Kristi Noem must be removed from her role as Secretary of Homeland Security. We simply cannot trust Noem to properly investigate these killings, which have happened under her leadership.

ICE Becomes Trump’s Personal Police Force

Trump and Noem have spent the last year testing how far they can push when it comes to using a militarized police force on the American public, sending ICE and the National Guard into cities like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and now Minneapolis.

These forces have violated our civil rights, terrorized people of color, and spread unrest in peaceful communities. The chaos that the administration holds up as justification for further federal intervention has been artificially manufactured by their own violent tactics.

What does Trump stand to gain from escalating tensions in cities across the country? He spreads racist lies and sends troops into our cities in the hopes that we will be too distracted to pay attention to the ways that his administration is failing us, and too intimidated to do anything about it.

He’s working from a familiar authoritarian playbook: use a militarized federal police force to intimidate communities, suppress dissent, and desensitize us to rule by force rather than the rule of law.

Trump and his administration benefit from agents committing highly visible atrocities, incidents that can desensitize the use of force by the federal government against its own citizens, making other authoritarian actions, such as election interference, much easier to commit.

Noem and DHS Have Purposefully Cultivated an Extremist, Under-trained ICE Force

Trump and Noem have led a push to militarize ICE, backed by a significant surge in funding. With the passage of Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” ICE has grown from a rather small agency in the Department of Homeland Security, with a typical budget of around $10 billion/year, to the highest funded U.S. law enforcement agency, with $85 billion to spend on executing Trump’s immigration crackdown and antagonizing American communities.

With these taxpayer dollars, Noem and DHS have recruited new agents, offering sign-on bonuses of up to $50k. Reports have emerged that DHS has been using aggressive, “wartime” recruitment tactics, purposefully seeking new agents who will fall into a militant, us-versus-them mentality. It has also been alleged, including by the Southern Poverty Law Center, that ICE recruitment materials have heavily utilized Neo-Nazi and other white nationalist dog whistles.

But poor training and extremist recruitment tactics aren’t the whole story. Noem’s failed leadership and rush towards coverups has sent every federal agent a chilling message: no act of violence or cruelty is too far as long as it’s done in Trump’s name.

Noem Cannot Deliver Accountability for ICE Atrocities

Under Kristi Noem, DHS officials have repeatedly rushed out public declarations that directly contradict video evidence.

During a press conference in the wake of the shooting of Alex Pretti, Noem lied, saying that Pretti was “brandishing” a gun with intent to kill law enforcement. But we all saw the videos and read the eyewitness accounts confirming that Pretti did not have his weapon in his hand. Instead, he was filming ICE activity and attempting to help a woman who had been pushed to the ground by a masked officer.

Furthermore, Pretti was killed ~ 후에 ICE agents had pinned him to the ground and taken his firearm. Noem also spread lies about Renée Nicole Good, falsely blaming her for her death at the hands of an ICE agent. Noem and her department will continue to try to make excuses for ICE’s brutality, but you cannot excuse the inexcusable.

Noem has a history of showing blatant contempt for the rule of law as DHS Secretary. Last year, she proceeded with the deportation of 100 Venezuelan men to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in direct violation of a judge’s order to keep them in U.S. custody.

Legal experts say that a video she made for TSA airport security lines, which explicitly blamed Democrats for the shutdown last October, violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits employees of the executive branch from engaging in certain partisan activities.

It is abundantly clear that we cannot trust Noem to properly investigate misconduct at DHS, especially since the facts will likely heavily point towards wrongdoing by one person in particular: herself.

Expanded ICE Funding is Coming at Your Expense

Remember Trump’s campaign promises to make life more affordable for the average American? Well, those promises went out the window the moment he took office. ICE’s recent influx of cash came as part of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” the same bill that cut many Americans’ healthcare and food assistance.

Our tax dollars are being used to wage war on our own communities when they should be going to social services, infrastructure, and solutions that actually keep us safe.

Your Community Could Be Next – Now Is the Time to Stand Up to Trump’s Authoritarian Overreach

Trump is trying to make an example out of Minnesota, home to some of the Midwest’s largest immigrant communities. He wants us to look the other way, abandon our fellow Americans, and pray we won’t be next.

But they’re not going to stop until they have total control over our lives and our freedoms. That’s why solidarity with our neighbors, both near and far, will be more important than ever.

Trump and Noem want us to buy into their xenophobic lies about immigrants and blame each other for the chaos in our streets. But thousands in Minnesota are leading by example, standing together as they take to the streets in peaceful protest against ICE’s presence in their communities and the atrocities that the agency has committed. Together, they’re calling out the real culprit of the violence we are seeing: this administration.

Trump’s authoritarian takeover is not inevitable – a narrow election win isn’t a mandate to overrun our cities and fundamentally transform our way of life. And multiple polls show that Americans across party lines agree: ICE has gone too far.

Now, many are beginning to envision what an America without ICE as we know it looks like. It’s an America from the not-too-distant past – ICE has only existed since 2003. Our communities have existed much longer. What we do in this moment, how strongly we rebuke Trump’s attack on our civil rights, will determine the future of our democracy. Now is the time to turn down the temperature and create real change, lasting change, that will build a future in which these attacks don’t happen.

And the first step is demanding accountability from Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, and anyone else in this administration that has perpetrated or stoked the flames this violence. Join us in calling for Kristi Noem to be FIRED from DHS.