Minnesota resident Will Stancil is a lawyer, policy researcher, and onetime candidate for the state’s house of representatives who has long been a voluble progressive presence on X and Bluesky. Over the past week, Stancil has become a mainstay of citizen patrols, tracking ICE agents around the city in his Honda Fit and sharing his experiences with his 100,000-plus followers. On Friday, I spoke with Stancil about what he has witnessed over the past few days.
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Do the videos we’ve seen — of violent arrests, of agents deploying flash-bangs and tear gas on bystanders — capture the full extent of what’s happening?
No. In the private rapid-response channels, people will share many, many videos, and they don’t want to bring them public because they don’t want to be identified. People are worried. So there’s lots and lots more private stuff that is never circulating. The other thing is I think it’s really difficult to capture. The last few days have been calmer. But for the first week or so, it was really hard to convey the unrelenting pace of this stuff. I had a journalist come ride along — he just published an article about it. I had been talking about how crazy it was, and I could tell he was a little bit skeptical. He thought, Okay, maybe we’ll see an ICE car. In a two-hour ride, we chased four ICE convoys onto the highway, saw someone violently abducted alive in front of us, then saw a separate ICE convoy tear-gas a major commercial intersection for no reason at all. In two hours.
We have these rapid-response channels. I mean, I got to the point where — and this is very difficult to do — but I got to the point where I mute them or turn them off or leave them when I come home in the evening because getting the constant updates — as much as I want to be informed of my community, if I’m not out there and can’t do anything about it, I am a raw nerve all day and night. I come home and I just have to lie on the couch and just shut everything off and shut my brain off because you’ll go insane hearing about what all they’re doing.
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The state national guard can become federalized in a moment if Trump says so. Don’t count on them being any help unless they’re willing to disobey orders.
I’ve been advocating for months now that blue states need to get their state guard going.
It’s like the national guard, but entirely run by the state. It cannot be federalized. The downside is that they often share membership with the national guard and often get their training through the national guard and federal military branches.
You think the feds will just let states beef up state guards now? It’s too late for that. And it would take years for anything meaningful to happen.
Americans were happy to give the president all kinds of insane powers over the last 80 years, and now we’re dealing with the consequences. Some of the worst shit Trump is doing is actually legal (def not all of course), thanks to braindead chauvinistic Americans in this country, who’ve always loved empowering strongman figures and law enforcement.
9/11 exposed how ugly and hypocritical the true American “spirit” is. That’s when many of these powers were born, especially the stupid ICE and border bullshit.
What you need to do is to organize among the working class and create a militia.
You are always looking for someone to solve your problems for you. Nobody is going to solve this one except the working class.
Not realistic either. They’re already treating leftist NGOs like terrorist organizations, and private militias are technically illegal already, so any attempt to do this would have to be fully underground.
We’ve dug ourselves a real hole in the US, none of this stuff happened overnight. I don’t see a way out of this other than sustained political and civil resistance as seen in Hungary, who haven’t succeeded yet even after 20 years.
Yeah, there have been a few instances of that happening. Notably, it happened when the governor of Arkansas tried to use the national guard to bar black students from entering a (recently desegregated) white school in 1957. Eisenhower federalized the guard, and ordered them to protect the black students instead. And the governor was forced to watch as all of “his” troops (who were already on the ground and ready to work because the governor had called them in) about-faced and started following the POTUS’ orders instead of his.
Eisenhower, the last non-evil Republican president.
The US has never had a non-evil president from any party.
Eisenhower orchestrated the 1953 Iranian coup, overthrowing a democratically elected government, and installed an authoritarian, US-backed puppet. He also overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala at the behest of a banana company (United Fruit, now Chiquita).
Every new Republican advances the evil, because it’s never punished.
Every US President does shit like that. At some point you have to draw a line because it’s not helpful to just proclaim them all evil.
They are all evil.
Unhelpful. There are degrees of evil.
I just had a horrific thought that old tricky Dick Nixon may actually end up inheriting that title just because of how bad everyone after him has been. Like compared to Trump the war on Drugs ain’t fuck all, and compared to Bush jr Vietnam was practically a peace operation.