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Tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets today in bitter cold temperatures with wind chills of -20°F (–28°C) to protest the occupation of Minneapolis and St. Paul by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Status Coup News interviewed a protester walking down the street holding a sign that said: “CLASSIC NAZI BLUNDER: INVADING IN WINTER.” The protester compared ICE agents to the Ku Klux Klan, noting that both wore masks and raided immigrant communities. He went on: “You know, there’s like all this talk of revolution. We’re the counterrevolutionaries, right?” He explained: “[T]here is a minority who is trying to create a post-law, orderless, lawless society, where their might makes right. And because, you know, they have guns and are willing to use them, they think they can suspend the Constitution, suspend habeas corpus…, suspend civil liberties, generally speaking.” He continued: “[T]here was a memo that came out that said that they think they can break into people’s houses without warrants, you know, basically just like, trust us, which is, you know, fundamentally against the Fourth Amendment. And so if you look at the amendments, I mean, they’re trying to tear it down the First, they’ve gassed people, they’ve shot people, you know, hit people with beanbag guns and batons for exercising their First Amendment rights, they don’t want people to, you know, exercise their Second Amendment rights, and certainly their Fourth, but also the Fourteenth, you know, basically, they’re attacking the whole Constitution.” In his assertion that the Trump administration is engaged in a radical attempt to remake the American government while those trying to stop them are protecting our traditional government, the Minnesota protester was echoing another midwesterner from our history who also had to contend with a minority that had seized control of the federal government and was trying to rewrite the history of the United States of America to justify using the government to enrich themselves. On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois spoke at New York City’s Cooper Union. Five years before, in his controversial annual message of December 1855, Democratic president Franklin Pierce had ignored the Declaration of Independence and, in service to the elite southern enslavers who ran the Democratic party, retold the founding of the United States as a republic of “free white men.” The rights and privileges of belonging to that republic did not include “the subject races” of Indigenous or Black Americans, the president said. He called out as fanatics and partisans those northerners, living in free states, who obeyed state free laws and protected enslaved Americans who had escaped from the South. They were radicals who rejected the federal law demanding their return to their enslavers. Even worse, they opposed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that overturned the 1820 Missouri Compromise prohibiting the spread of human enslavement to the American West. At Cooper Union, Lincoln rejected Pierce’s rewriting of American history. He also retold the history of America. In his version, though, that history was one in which the Founders opposed enslavement and those who stood against those trying to create a white man’s republic were the nation’s true counterrevolutionaries. Resting his vision on the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s foundational document, he defended the principle of human equality and told Democrats: “[Y]ou say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;’ while you with one accord…spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new…. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated.” Lincoln was on solid historical ground when he reminded Americans of his era that those trying to impose a new system of white nationalist oligarchy on the nation were the true radicals, while those defending equality were conservatives. The colonists who threw off the rule of King George III also stood firmly on the idea that they were protecting longstanding principles of self-government that British officials were trying to replace with tyranny. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders called out “a long train of abuses and usurpations [that] evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” After enumerating the many ways in which the king had usurped the powers of Englishmen that had been established over centuries, beginning with the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta, the Founders launched a new nation. And then, when the Framers wrote a constitution for that new nation, they were careful to place within it a bill of rights to protect Americans from the rise of another tyrant. Now the Trump administration is made up of radicals who are ignoring that Constitution and that Bill of Rights in their open attempt to create a white nationalist nation. The man on the streets of Minneapolis today was right to call out the administration’s assault on the First Amendment that protects freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right of people peaceably to assemble. Thanks to an unsealed State Department memo, we learned today that the administration revoked the visa of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk and detained her for six weeks solely because she co-authored an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The administration concluded that her op-ed “may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization.” ICE agents arrived in Maine this week, and one took pictures of a legal observer’s car, prompting her to remind him that it is legal to record their actions and to ask why he was taking her information. He answered: “‘Cause we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” He appeared to be referring to Trump’s September 25, 2025, memo NSPM-7 that describes opposition to the administration’s policies—opposition protected by the First Amendment—as “domestic terrorism.” Rachel Levinson-Waldman of the Brennan Center noted that this dramatic expansion of the legal framework for domestic terrorism appears to be the administration’s argument for suggesting Renee Good was a domestic terrorist after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed her. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem falsely claimed that Good tried to run over Ross, calling it “an act of domestic terrorism,” and Vice President J.D. Vance suggested that protesters are engaging in “domestic terror techniques.” But, as Levinson-Waldman explains, domestic terrorism has a specific definition in the law: actions that are dangerous to human life, violate criminal law, appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or to influence the government by intimidation or coercion, and occur primarily in the U.S. “To actually be called a ‘domestic terrorist,’” she writes, “an individual must commit one or more of 51 underlying ‘federal crimes of terrorism,’” which involve nuclear or chemical weapons, plastic explosives, air piracy, and so on. The Minneapolis protester was right about the administration’s assault on the Fourth Amendment as well. On Wednesday, Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press reported that ICE has been breaking into homes under the authority provided by a secret memo of May 12, 2025, signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, saying that federal agents do not need a judge’s warrant to force their way into people’s homes. This is a direct assault on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which says the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” and establishes that the government can violate those rights only after a judge agrees there is probable cause of a crime and signs a warrant. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) warned: “Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door & storm into your home. It is an unlawful & morally repugnant policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time. In our democracy, with vanishingly rare exceptions, the government is barred from breaking into your home without approval from a real judge. Government agents have no right to ransack your bedroom or terrorize your kids on a whim or personal desire.” The Minnesota protester was also right to call out the administration’s assault on the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees that no state shall “deprive any person”—not citizen, but person—“of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It is this principle that is at the heart of the challenges to the administration’s rendering of immigrants to foreign countries without due process. Instead of rooting itself in the real history of the United States of America, Ali Breland of The Atlantic noted on Wednesday, the Trump administration is embracing Nazi propaganda, trying to convince Americans that the nation’s roots are not in human equality but in the hierarchical system of European fascism. Rejecting the idea of liberty and equality proposed in the Declaration of Independence and defended by people like Abraham Lincoln as the nation’s foundational principle, they are trying to define the United States of America in an entirely new way: one made up of white Protestants who, in their minds, “belong” to the land here. Rather than a nation based in ideals, they want a nation based in “blood and soil.” In the 1770s, and again in the 1850s, everyday Americans recognized the radicalism of those extremists who were trying to erase the nation’s principles and the rule of law, ignoring the longstanding rights of the people to liberty and equality and instead trying to impose a despotism. Today a protester in Minneapolis, one of those tens of thousands who filled the streets in below-zero weather to demand that ICE end its violent occupation of their city and its abuse of immigrants and people of color, made it clear that Americans in 2026 still believe in the nation’s founding principles of equality and the rule of law, and they utterly reject the right wing’s blood-and-soil radicalism. — Notes: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/third-annual-message-8 Abraham Lincoln, Address at Cooper Institute, New York City, February 27, 1860, in Basler, Collected Works, 3:522–550. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.282460/gov.uscourts.mad.282460.315.18.pdf https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/us/tufts-rumeysa-ozturk-release.html https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/social-media-trump-administration-dhs/685659 https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-trump-00d0ab0338e82341fd91b160758aeb2d Bluesky: statuscoupnews.bsky.social/post/3md4nyppqds2y bringmethenews.bsky.social/post/3md4nkz3dxd26 jbendery.bsky.social/post/3md4pj3qdak2x adamsteinbaugh.bsky.social/post/3md3w225fgs2j whstancil.bsky.social/post/3md4xzifz6c26 You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. 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