January 23, 2026

January 23, 2026.

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets today in bitter cold temperatures

with wind shells of negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit or negative 32 degrees Celsius to protest

the occupation of Minneapolis and St. Paul by federal agents from immigration and customs

enforcement or ICE and Customs and Border Patrol or 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 war masks and

raided immigrant communities, he went on.

You know, there's like all this talk of revolution, where the counter revolutionaries, right?

He explained, there 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, there 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 down the first,

they've gasped 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 27th, 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 they returned 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 where the

nation's true counter-revolutionaries.

Resting his vision on the Declaration of Independence, the nation's foundational document, he defended

the principle of human equality and told Democrats, you 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 long-standing 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 desire to reduce them under absolute despotism and said 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, Ramesa Ozterk, 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 ask why he was

taking her information.

He answered, because 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 NSPM7 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 Christy Nome falsely claimed that Good tried to run over

Ross, calling it an act of domestic terrorism, and Vice President JD 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 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, a Democrat of Connecticut, warned, every American should

be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door and storm

into your home.

It is a non-lawful and 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

14th 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 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 Brieland

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 the 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.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.

It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music

composed by Michael Moss.