Reports from observers on the ground and from news agencies have documented appalling violence committed by ICE in Minneapolis since agents arrived there in late December 2025, targeting both suspected undocumented immigrants and US citizens alike. What is going on here? I want to explore this moment through Hannah Arendt’s analysis of political violence as a tool of tyranny. In some ways, Arendt’s thinking has become commonplace. We can see signs of it in M. Gessen’s compelling case in the New York Times that ICE’s actions constitute state terrorism, and in the widespread likening of ICE to Hitler’s gestapo (from folks as wide-ranging as Minnesota governor Tim Waltz and right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan). Arendt’s contrast between violence and what she calls power, though, remains instructive, and I think it can help us understand why violence is so appealing to people like Trump and his supporters both in and outside of government, and also why it is ultimately unsustainable.
Arendt is particularly interested in the uses of violence as a tool in the political realm, so it helps to have a basic understanding of her conception of the political. For her, politics is not the same as government structures like Congress, the office of president, and the Supreme Court; hence it not about angling for what we call power (more on which below). It is, rather, the broader phenomenon that enables those specific structures to come into existence. As she puts it in The Human Condition, “the political realm rises out of acting together, the ‘sharing of words and deeds.’ Thus action not only has the most intimate relationship to the public part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it.” Politics is thus the process of co-creating our shared world. She calls this capacity to creatively act together in this way “power.” Her use of the term is at odds with our everyday understanding, so let’s explore it a bit.
“Power” for Arendt is not something that you wield over other people. It is not right to say, for instance, that the president or other elected officials have power and we don’t. Or that the rich are powerful and the rest of us aren’t. Power is not something that can be held by individuals; one cannot seize it from someone else through, say, force. Power is what we can do when we gather together to make collective decisions about the world or enact our worldview. It is a capacity that exists between and among us, unlike strength which resides in the individual. The founding of the US was powerful in this sense: a bunch of people with a common interest got together and decided what kind of institutional structures they wanted to form the basis of their government, and then they created them. That acting together is power. Power is thus a creative capacity: “Power is actualized where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”
Violence is thus opposed to power rather than a form of it; indeed, violence is the only thing that can destroy power. Those who use violence seek to isolate potential actors from each other, making the creation of relationships and worlds dangerous if not impossible. Its destructive force explains its attraction to tyrants, who seek to control and dominate others rather than share the world with them; state actors’ use of violence is clearly meant to close down opposition to the state’s policies, practices, and values. The violence we have seen in Minneapolis fits this description unfortunately well. This mistreatment of suspected undocumented immigrants is bad enough, and it should be condemned in no uncertain terms—ICE agents have been using racist tactics that target people based on skin color and whether they have an accent; and they have ignored the need for judicial warrants, lawyers, and basic due process. But they have also targeted people who are not suspected of being undocumented immigrants, focusing on protesters and observers who are trying to protect others from harm. The only reasonable assumption is that they want protests to stop; they want to break up the relations that Minnesotans are creating among themselves, the ways in which they are defining and enacting notions like neighbor, danger, and safety. While various members of the Trump administration continue to claim that ICE acts to protect citizens by rounding up dangerous immigrants, protesters and observers are positioning ICE as the real danger.
Minnesotans’ collective action challenges the administration’s account of the world both by documenting ICE agents’ behavior, and by creating an alternative to it. Rather than severing relations with immigrant community members, they are solidifying and strengthening those relations. The Other 98% reports on their Facebook page that Minneapolis is creating “an everyday, neighborhood-level infrastructure that makes state violence harder to pull off in silence,” which includes widespread participation in Signal chats that enables almost immediate response to ICE activity, from protecting neighbors from possible detainment to disrupting agents at restaurants. Networks of connection made it possible to pull off a general strike planned by unions and various community groups. These networks are creating a community based on cooperation, care and concern for others, embracing people in all their difference and diversity, and safety through connection rather than through fear.
This vision of the US being created by protesters and observers directly contrasts with the vision of the Trump administration and those who agree with them. Those folks desire a white supremacist, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, and poor-phobic (aporophobic) society, in which people see their neighbors as threats to their thriving rather than as contributing to it. The only way they can succeed in bringing this vision about is by forcing it on the rest of us through violence and intimidation. And indeed, as Arendt says, violence is the only way to stop the power of collective action. But Minneapolis isn’t having it, and ongoing community organizing and interventions into ICE’s brutality suggest that collective action can be an effective response to violence. Not only have protests erupted across the country and the world in solidarity with immigrants, protesters, and observers in Minneapolis, democrats have finally taken steps to put some limits on ICE’s mandate. (We’ll have to see if it’s too little, too late, or if they cave to the right in subsequent negotiations, but it’s a start. Perhaps.)
Action’s unpredictability means that we can’t know where things are headed—the spread of protests could lead to more extensive crackdowns by government agents, it could lead to Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and attempting to prevent midterm elections, or it could lead to something as yet unseen. The boundlessness of action means, though, that it could possibly lead to positive changes to the country’s immigration policy—as others take up anti-ICE actions and arguments, the effects are potentially far-reaching. The Civil Rights Act would not have been passed without the Civil Rights Movement; violence against women and reproductive rights (well, for a while) would not have been publicly acknowledged, workplace protections from sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination would not have been passed without the Women’s Rights Movement; the legalization of same-sex marriage would not have happened without the Stonewall uprising. None of these gains were guaranteed by the movements that led to them, but they were nascent within them. (As the current moment also makes clear, none of them are permanent, nor are any of them enough to establish full equality; the battles continue.) And so today: though we cannot know exactly where we will land, without public, collective action, brutality and terror will almost certainly remain the norm.
Arendt describes tyranny “as the always abortive attempt to substitute violence for power,” ultimately impotent and futile. Violence seems effective in the moment—killing people, dragging them out of the homes and cars seems to detain them without cause makes it seem as if the Trump administration is fulfilling its anti-immigration goals. When the power of the people refuses those goals and the means being used to achieve them, however, both become unsustainable. Time will tell what kind of world will arise from this moment; it seems likely that it will be more interesting and complicated than the one Trump and his allies seek to establish.
Sources:
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Arendt, On Violence
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-citizen-ice-removed-minnesota-home-underwear-after-129372047
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/17/us/minneapolis-family-tear-gassed-ice
For Love of the World: 