Trump promised the ‘largest deportation operation.’ He brought chaos to American streets
The president’s campaign to arrest and deport thousands of immigrants has turned cities run by his political enemies into conflict zones, Alex Woodward reports
Sunday 18 January 2026 08:06 EST
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Nearly one year after returning to the White House with a promise to carry out the “largest deportation operation” in American history, masked immigration officers ripped a woman from her car as she tried to get to a doctor’s appointment in Minneapolis. On the other side of the country, a 21-year-old protester in Santa Ana, California, was recovering from eye surgery after an officer fired a riot-control weapon inches from his face.
They both came just days after an officer fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Good.
The Trump administration’s promise to go after the “worst of the worst” in his nationwide campaign to rapidly deport tens of thousands of people has turned American cities into conflict zones patrolled by hundreds of masked and heavily armed officers.
Democratic officials warned for months that a surge of militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection officers would only stir up more unrest. They warned that the scenes of mass protests were by design, giving the president an opening to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy active-duty troops on Americans in cities run by his political enemies.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has reshaped the government to pursue an anti-immigration agenda across nearly every federal agency, with a mission to find, arrest and deport thousands of people, deter new arrivals and impose new restrictions on legal immigration that have repulsed humanitarian aid groups and civil rights advocates.
Thousands of people, most of whom have never been convicted of a crime, are now locked up in immigration detention centers, entering a byzantine legal process that the administration has pushed to make it virtually impossible to escape.
Federal officers, whose identities are largely kept secret and whose faces are hidden by COVID-era masks, are routinely seen jumping out of cars and vans to round up immigrants and citizens alike, sometimes leaving their cars stranded in roadways or rolling down streets. They leave behind neighborhoods in shock and families in crisis, scrambling where to find members who often end up jailed hundreds of miles from home.
From Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, to Chicago, New York City, New Orleans and Charlotte, North Carolina, footage and stories of violent arrests and volatile protests have emerged at a dizzying pace.
In Washington, D.C., last summer, Trump invoked a never-before-used authority to seize control of the city’s police department as deployed the National Guard and surged federal officers into the streets, claiming the city was overrun with “bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.” Officials there accused the administration of a waging a politically motivated “hostile takeover.”
And in Minnesota, where thousands of federal officers descended in recent weeks, “news reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities,” according to Governor Tim Walz.
“This long ago stopped being a campaign of organized immigration enforcement,” he said January 13. “Instead, it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”
“People are being racially profiled, harassed, terrorized, and assaulted,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement announcing a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of “spreading terror” in the state. “Schools have gone into lockdown. Businesses have been forced to close.”
See Also: About the publication, The Independent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Independent
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Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump promised the ‘largest deportation operation.’ He brought chaos to American streets | The Independent
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