From Making Sense…
What we are seeing in Minneapolis right now is horrendous, frightening, and heartbreaking. But it is not a surprise. Over the past year, the Trump administration has deliberately escalated immigration enforcement – expanding funding and capacity for ICE, normalising violent and racist rhetoric, and expanding legal support for immigration enforcement while stripping back oversight. On the ground, federal immigration agents have grown bolder and more aggressive.
Where we are now traces directly back to the very beginning of Trump’s second term. In this post I trace out the actions since January 2025, highlighting the key events that tell the story of how we ended up here.
Below is a chart of actions over the last year – I’ve logged almost 200 and so have only been able to label the most significant on the chart below (high resolution version). The full list, along with links to relevant news stories, can be accessed here.
Christina Pagel is Professor of Operational Research in Health Care at University College London, UK.
More content from this blog
- Climate catastrophe, the ‘Zionist Entity’ and ‘The German guy’: An anatomy of the Malm–Jappe dispute, by Matthew Bolton – 29 November 2023
- East Germany – The Promised Land of the AfD, by Thomas Klikauer – 22 August 2025
- Sudan’s World War, by Joshua Craze – 17 April 2025
- Between War, the Right-Wing Opposition, and State-Centered Anti-Imperialism. Interview with Mina Khanlarzadeh – 6 August 2026
- (En)Countering epistemic imperialism: A critique of “Westsplaining” and coloniality in dominant debates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by Tereza Hendl, Olga Burlyuk, Mila O’Sullivan & Aizada Arystanbek – 4 December 2023
Except where noted otherwise, original writing and translations produced by the Left Renewal Blog Collective are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Republished and translated material remains subject to the licence and terms of its original publication.