The Dictatorship
Cell phone videos are protecting Americans — and eroding our privacy
ByI dig Shroff
A critical but little-discussed evolution is occurring amid our national debate over immigration enforcement and ICE tactics. As Americans rely on video to document abuses and atrocities, they should not lose sight of the fact that communities are being pushed to adopt tools and habits of surveillance to defend themselves against a government that has already embraced them.
In the short term, cameras are protecting people. But over the long run, the Trump administration is forcing us to build a cage of our own making.
Over the long run, the Trump administration is forcing us to build a cage of our own making.
Over the past yearImmigration and Customs Enforcement has expanded far beyond traditional enforcement methods. The agency, which received a $75 billion funding boost with the Big Beautiful Bill Act alone, has expanded its reliance on real-time biometric identification and mass data access. Agents deploy facial-recognition tools, mobile biometric verification apps and license plate reader systems. In addition to monitoring social media, officers have access to platforms that link state and federal databases. Identification that once required time, paperwork or judicial approval occurs in seconds. Technological capacities for targeting individuals — whether in street encounters, courthouse arrests or elsewhere — have massively advanced even as the legal framework around immigration enforcement has barely changed.
Moreover, the detention of U.S. citizens and other aggressive actions suggest authorities are willing to abuse power to suppress Americans’ fundamental rights, regardless of an individual’s immigration status. Trump border czar Tom Homan bragged recently that the administration would “create a database” to target ICE protesters — going well beyond the purview of immigration enforcement to monitor American citizens who dare dissent.
Meanwhile, in reaction to instances of state violence from the killing of George Floyd to the fatal shooting of Renee GoodAmericans now default to documenting law enforcement actions. When a self-employed software engineer recently posted a call for dashcams to support ICE monitoring efforts, some 500 showed up on his suburban Minneapolis porch. Minnesotans’ rapid-response networks have not only recorded ICE operations, livestreaming arrests and tracking agents’ locations, but also exposed agents’ brutality to the rest of the nation.
Even when constant documentation is justified, the transformation of recording into a survival strategy reshapes how society understands public life.
To many, these counter-surveillance efforts feel essential to protect public safety and fundamental rights, especially when federal officials promote narratives at odds with proliferating cellphone videos. They’re also encouraged by some local and state authorities, such as when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz instructed constituents“If you see ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record. Help us create a database of the atrocities … to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
But even when constant documentation is justified, the transformation of recording into a survival strategy reshapes how society understands public life. Every viral video, livestreamed arrest or crowdsourced map expands the mass-surveillance landscape in the United States. Our phones become both a shield and a monitor. Protection merges with data production, and resistance begins to resemble a corollary tech-driven surveillance infrastructure: crafted by humans, often with good intentions, but also accessible to courts, law enforcement and the Big Tech oligarchy to boot.
This is not an argument that people should stop recording ICE activity. But anyone primed to point their cellphone camera should be mindful of how often what begins out of temporary necessity becomes permanent. Documentation deters abuse and creates evidence when institutions fail. It has saved real people from disappearing into a system that often operates without meaningful transparency, whether wrongly detained citizens or erroneously deported immigrants.
Still, we should be clear-eyed about the position society is being forced into. A democracy depends not only on formal rights but also on practical limits. The growing, and mutual, hyper-surveillance carried out by the state and the public is eroding the last dregs of Americans’ privacy.
To be clear, responsibility for this spiral does not lie with neighbors holding phones outside courthouses or whistle-blowing volunteers warning of nearby agents. It lies with an enforcement regime that has made surveillance the price of safety — not from some undocumented boogeyman but from the state’s increasing authoritarian violence.
The likely progression of such entrenched surveillance poses a clear threat to fundamental American values.
The likely progression of such entrenched surveillance poses a clear threat to fundamental American values. It becomes ever easier to see how formal rights guaranteed by our legal systems and institutions will be realized only if and when they can be proven on video or with some sort of data. Justice then becomes conditional on bandwidth, battery life and the willingness of strangers to jump into monitoring mode.
A surveillance state does not usually announce itself with sweeping laws or dramatic speeches. More often, it grows through narrow justifications, technical upgrades and the gradual normalization of nonstop monitoring. And that is what is happening both because of and in response to the large-scale ICE abuses taking place across the country.
If surveillance becomes the default language between the state and the public, then the argument will eventually be over who watches more carefully, not whether anyone should be watched at all. And a country where safety and freedom are offered only to those with proof is no democracy at all.
I dig Shroff
Kaivan Shroff is a senior advisor to the Institute for Education and a political commentator. He previously served on the advisory board for Dream for America, a progressive Gen Z-led non-profit. He is an alumnus of the Hillary for America digital team, holds a joint degree from Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a BA in Political Science from Brown University.
Amanda Gorman shared a powerful poem on Instagram that she wrote in honor of Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen killed by a federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Saturday.
The poem, “For Alex Jeffrey Pretti,” characterizes Pretti’s killing as a “betrayal” and an “execution.”
Gorman, earlier this month, also paid tribute to Renee Nicole Good, another U.S. citizen killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. In a caption accompanying another poem shared on Instagram, Gorman said she was “horrified by the ongoing violence that ICE wages upon our community. Across our country, we are witnessing discrimination and brutality on an unconscionable scale.”
Her poem says, in part: “You could believe departed to be the dawn/ When the blank night has so long stood./ But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone,/ When they forever are so fiercely Good.”
The 27-year-old writer and activist famously recited her poem, “Blue Light News We Climb,” at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in 2021. Gorman has also written poems in the wake of other tragedies in the country, including “Hymn for the Hurting,” about the Robb Elementary mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas in 2022. She also performed a poem she wrote about reproductive rights and the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court case in a NowThis video in 2019.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in recordings obtained by Axiosseems to have a bone to pick with Vice President JD Vance and sometimes, President Donald Trump.
In his remarks, which lasted about 10 minutes and were reportedly made in a private meeting with donors sometime last year, Cruz portrays himself as an economically-minded, pro-interventionist who has the president’s ear.
The Texas senator is also heard criticizing former Fox News personality, Tucker Carlson, and his relationship with the vice president. “Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same,” Cruz told donors.
Cruz, who has clashed with Carlson in the past over foreign intervention policies, bashed the administration’s appointment of Israel critic Daniel Davis to a top national intelligence position. A vocal supporter of Israel himself, Cruz called Davis “a guy who viciously hates Israel,” and credited himself with removing Davis from the job.
The Republican senator also blamed Vance and Carlson for ousting former national security adviser Mike Waltz over similar anti-interventionist sentiments related to Iran.
“[Waltz] supported being vigorous against Iran and bombing Iran — and Tucker and JD took Mike out,” Cruz said.
Cruz also said he has been trying to get the White House to accept a trade agreement with India, but claimed White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, Vance and “sometimes” Trump, are resistant.
Domestically, Cruz cautioned donors about Trump’s tariffs, which he said could result in severe economic and political consequences. Cruz is reportedly heard telling donors that he told the president “if we get to November of [2026] and people’s 401(k)s are down 30% and prices are up 10–20% at the supermarket, we’re going to go into Election Day, face a bloodbath.”
Cruz said a conversation he had with Trump about tariffs “did not go well,” and that Trump was “yelling” and “cursing.” Cruz said Trump told him: “F*** you, Ted.”
“Trump was in a bad mood,” Cruz said. “I’ve been in conversations where he was very happy. This was not one of them.”
In a statement about the recordings, a spokesperson for Cruz said he is “the president’s greatest ally in the Senate and battles every day in the trenches to advance his agenda. Those battles include fights over staffers who try to enter the administration despite disagreeing with the president and seeking to undermine his foreign policy” and that “these attempts at sowing division are pathetic and getting boring.”
In an email responding to MS NOW’s request for comment on Cruz’s reported statements, the White House did not address Cruz’s statements.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Alex Pretti was shot to death on the sidewalk of a street in Minneapolis after he didn’t leave when federal agents demanded he leave. Renee Good was shot to death in her car on a street in Minneapolis because she tried to leave when federal agents demanded she not.
Advocates of President Donald Trump’s administration will cite this disobedience as a central factor in Pretti and Good’s deaths. Each has been assigned a contrived danger, as well, to reinforce the urgent need for their killings: Pretti had a gun (that he doesn’t appear to have drawn) and Good had her car (that she doesn’t appear to have used as a weapon).
But their central offense, among those eager to champion Trump’s politics and policies, was their failure to be pliant. They were at odds with the state and, well, sometimes that’s punishable by death.
It is stunning, though not surprising, to see the president of the United States and sworn federal officials impugn dead citizens so callously.
It has been posited that the eagerness with which Trump and his allies have defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against charges of excessive force, and the alacrity with which they assign blame to the victims of those shootings, demonstrates hypocrisy, given their collective willingness to absolve — to beatify! — the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They, too, defied state authority and, in many cases, far more aggressively. But they are hailed as heroes by the current administration.
But this isn’t hypocrisy at all. It’s consistent. If you object to or impede their politics, they will hurt you. That is the consistency and it is why off-duty police were in the mob on Jan. 6 and why Trump supporters defend ICE today. It’s not the badge that matters. It’s the red cap.
The most jarring element of the response to Pretti’s death and to Good’s death is the speed with which the administration has disparaged the victims rather than the perpetrators. Each of them was also immediately asserted to have been a premeditated, violent actor. A terrorist. When each, instead, was at the scene of their unwitting deaths because they were part of and supportive of their community.
It is stunning, though not surprising, to see the president of the United States and sworn federal officials impugn dead citizens so callously. It’s utterly immoral, if not deranged. What flows through their veins is partisanship, and what dominates their thoughts is knocking their opponents and critics back on their heels. Perhaps there are flutters of recognition that this is not how human beings behave, much less political leaders in a democracy. But if those flames flicker into existence, they are quickly snuffed.
And for what! This is the question that continues to baffle me more than any other. Why has the Department of Homeland Security dispatched vans and SUVs filled with masked men to Minneapolis? Most immediately, it seems, it’s because a bad-faith “investigation” from a right-wing media personality made Minnesota a focus of the right’s collective anger. So the president pointed at Minnesota and his shock troops marched.
Their mission has been described in a number of ways, which means that (as with so much else in Trump’s world) the effect was decided before the cause. Maybe it’s about combatting the fraud alleged by the media personality, even though prosecutors had been investigating and securing convictions for social services fraud in Minnesota for years. Or maybe it’s just about uprooting immigrants.
This is the government’s most common explanation. Trump and his aides have repeatedly insisted that the expansive, guerrilla-style raids being conducted by federal agents in Minnesota have been effective at removing the “worst of the worst” criminal immigrants from the area, something it insists that the state’s Democratic leaders had refused to do. (The state disagrees.)
What’s the right ratio here, Mr. President? How many citizens being shot to death is worth this campaign of fear and its sporadic deportations?
At a White House press conference on Jan. 20, Trump held up images of 40 individuals who he claimed had been detained by federal agents in Minnesota. A DHS website titled, “ARRESTED: WORST OF THE WORST,” — identifies just under 500 such people in the state. Some of them (as was the case with Trump’s visual aids) seem less like “the worst of the worst” than like “people with any criminal record at all.” Does having a DUI make you one of the nation’s worst criminals? If you weren’t born here, I guess so.
Even by DHS’ count, though, the government isn’t only targeting “the worst of the worst.” On Jan. 14, the agency put out a press release claiming that they’d arrested 2,500 of the “worst of the worst,” meaning that the website, even with the drunk drivers, is a couple thousand short in its tally. Nationally, of course, ICE has accelerated its detention of people with no criminal records at all. One analysis estimates that 92 out of every 100 people added to ICE detention last year faced no criminal charges and had no past convictions. Besides, violent crime in Minnesota was already on the decline before DHS and ICE showed up (also mirroring national trends).
So the feds rolled up some people with criminal records or maybe pending charges. In doing so, they spread chaos and confusion around the city, shipped a kindergartener off to Texas and sent a baby to the hospital.
In doing so, they killed two residents of Minneapolis, their dying bodies laying at the side of the road.
What’s the right ratio here, Mr. President? How many citizens being shot to death is worth this campaign of fear and its sporadic deportations?
It seems as though the answer is clear by now: As many as can be killed with his base still believing that they were violent opponents of the president’s politics. As long as that belief is sustained, the killings can continue because it means that his supporters’ confidence and trust in him is sustained, too. And that, more even than purifying the populaceis what matters to Trump.
The White House and DHS frequently validate their work by pointing to the killers they’re taking out of the country, outsiders who’d killed Americans. It would be a more effective argument if they weren’t defending the outsiders they brought into Minneapolis who did the same thing.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor.
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