Sunday’s edition of MS NOW’s The Weekend stoked paranoid fears of “black and brown” people being targeted by ICE, and the Trump administration at large.
Co-host Eugene Daniels primed the persecution complex, teeing up The Atlantic author Adam Serwer:
“Trump and co. get to decide who gets the benefit the entire Constitution and who gets to say that they are an American living in this country. And often the people left out of that are black and brown people.”
Serwer was only too happy to ratchet up the paranoia:
“This entire immigration operation has been an excuse to violate the 14th Amendment rights of equal protection under the law of people who are not white . . . If there’s a possibility that ICE will perceive you as, quote, not as American as a white person, you know, you’re at risk of some kind of racial profiling, or worse . . . They want a country where being white means that you’re more American than everybody else.”
So, non-whites were in danger of ICE profiling, “or worse?” Sounds mighty ominous. Federal agents have fatally shot two people in the Twin Cities: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. But rather than being “black or brown,” both were manifestly people of pallor.
And the two federal agents identified in the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis were Jesus Ochoa, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, and Raymundo Gutierrez, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer.
Were they the sort of white supremacists Daniels and Serwer had in mind?
As for ICE focusing on “black and brown people,” the leftist Economic Policy Institute reports that at least 93 percent of illegal immigrants in the US were non-white, and overwhelmingly Hispanic. So whom should ICE be focusing on: those hordes of Norwegian illegals roaming the Gopher State?
The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:
MS NOW’s The Weekend
2/1/26
7:09 am ETEUGENE DANIELS: Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic. Adam, I want to start with you. Thank you all for being here, first of all. But Adam, I want to start with you because the through line in a lot of the things I just read are Trump and co. deciding and thinking they get to decide who gets the benefit the entire Constitution and who gets to say that they are an American living in this country. And often the people left out of that are black and brown people.
ADAM SERWER: Yeah, I mean, this entire immigration operation has been an excuse to violate the 14th Amendment rights of equal protection under the law of people who are not white.
And when you talk to folks in Minnesota, there are a lot of folks who have legal status of some kind who are staying home, who are staying out of sight because they’re afraid of being profiled by ICE and detained, set somewhere before, you know, because ICE frequently will, according to reports, ignore people who actually show proof of citizenship in favor of whatever their apps say on their facial recognition apps say on their phone.
So if you do not, if there’s a possibility that ICE will perceive you as, quote, not as American as a white person, you know, you’re at risk of some kind of racial profiling, or worse.
And I think this is fundamentally, you know, an expression of the kind of governance that the Trump administration wants to see and that the ideologues surrounding the president want to see.
They want a country where being white means that you’re more American than everybody else. And they are implementing that ideology into law as we speak.
