President Donald Trump with members of his Cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in 2025 (image from White House galleries)
Russian-American columnist M. Gessen wrote for The New York Times on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s ICE operations in Minneapolis have crossed into state terror—not mere repression, but deliberate, arbitrary violence designed to instill pervasive fear in which no one feels safe.
In the past month, ICE agents have shot and killed two US citizens: Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Neither had a criminal record. Another U.S. citizen was pulled from his home in his underwear by agents who later realized he wasn’t their target.
Gessen argues this is part of a Trump effort “to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.”
The randomness is the point, he continues. In Pretti’s case, agents fired 10 rounds into him at point-blank range while he was already subdued. The Department of Homeland Security labeled both Pretti and Good “domestic terrorists” before any investigation.
Gessen posted a blistering list of ICE activities designed to terrorize Americans and the federal government’s swift smearing of victims.
“Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency. But that’s not how state terror works,” Gessen wrote.
He recalled Soviet citizens targeted in the 1990s who told him they knew they’d been named by jealous neighbors or pressured colleagues. “How could they come to know so much?” Gessen asked. “They couldn’t. People crafted narratives out of suspicions, rumors, and hints to fill a desperate need for an explanation.”
It later emerged that those officers had quotas — not unlike the numbers now set by Trump’s administration.
“Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works,” Gessen wrote. “The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive.”
The same tactics are part of Trump’s toolbox, Gessen argues: quotas, a “paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality,” and “postmortem vilification of the victims.” Normal brains seek logic, but Gessen says it’s simply state terror.