Blood and Power
A protester wearing a gas mask gestures, during clashes between federal agents and community members, on Jan. 24, 2026. Tim Evans—Reuters
IT’S TIME TO STOP PRETENDING!
The Trump Administration is terrorizing Black and Brown immigrants.
Not immigrants broadly. Not "undocumented people" in the abstract. Black and Brown immigrants.
They are targeting Black people. They are targeting Brown people. They are targeting Latinos. They are targeting Somalis. They are targeting Haitians.
The administration is hunting them, detaining them, and killing them because of who they are.
President Trump sent ICE into Minneapolis to terrorize communities of color. That is the point. The administration concentrates raids, stops, detentions, and armed confrontations where Black and Brown people live. Fear is not an unintended consequence. Fear is the goal.
Even Minneapolis' own police leadership has said it plainly: federal agents have stopped, questioned, and racially profiled officers of color. When the federal government treats skin as probable cause, even on someone wearing a badge, the message is clear.
This is not about immigration. This is about race and power.
This is not new.
This is the same governing logic that shaped slavery. The same logic that enforced Jim Crow. The same logic that allowed lynching to function as public policy.
Control Black bodies. Intimidate them. Make their presence conditional.
Some people reach for comparisons to Nazi Germany. That impulse misses the point.
We don't need Germany to explain this. We don't need the Gestapo to understand it.
America has its own history of fascism and racial violence.
Langston Hughes wrote in 1936:
"We are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism… We Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action."
He wasn't talking about Europe. He was talking about the United States.
James Baldwin warned us:
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
This is the truth we keep refusing to face.
There can be no revolution — no transformation, no healing — without naming the sickness. The sickness is racial hierarchy enforced by state power.
Minneapolis understands that. The city is acting
Demonstrators take part in a anti-ICE protest, after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good on January 7 during an immigration raid, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S., January 20, 2026. REUTERS/Seth Herald/File Photo
They are organizing. They are communicating. They are standing together.
Mutual aid is moving. Information is flowing. People are protecting one another because they know exactly who is under attack and why.
Lancaster — and communities like it — must do the same. The barrier isn't resources. The barrier is honesty.
Because if you won't name who the state is terrorizing, you won't know who you're protecting, and you won't know why this fight matters.
That confusion is dangerous — especially for the people already in the crosshairs.
What comes next will not be decided by tone or intentions. It will be decided by who names the truth — and who refuses to.
