The U.S. has a government devoid of social virtue and bent primarily on demonstrating its power over persons, says Andrew Napolitano.
ICE agents in 2023. (usicegov/Wikimedia Commons)
A half-dozen masked and unidentifiable Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents killed a 37-year-old federal employee, a nurse, on Jan. 24 by spraying pepper spray into his eyes, pushing him to the ground, stealing his lawfully owned and carried handgun, and then shooting him nine times in the back.
The thugs from ICE whom the federal government has sent to Minneapolis have produced murder and mayhem on a scale far more violent, disruptive and disturbing to human life than have the immigrants residing there without papers.
Under the U.S. Constitution, immigration — who can legally come to and remain in the United States — was left to the states to regulate; and naturalization — who can become an American citizen — was left to the feds.
Notwithstanding the plain text of the Constitution, Congress — motivated by racial animus against those who looked and sounded differently from the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elites who controlled the government — enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. When this was challenged, the Supreme Court upheld congressional authority in a truly bizarre opinion written by Justice George Sutherland, himself an immigrant.
The court held — for the first time — that Congress could exercise regulatory powers from a source other than the Constitution. It reasoned that when British troops left the colonies after their surrender in 1781, the power to regulate immigration stayed behind and metaphysically transferred itself to the new federal government here. A rationale from nowhere.
Since then, federal immigration regulations have waxed and waned, usually depending upon contemporary economic trends and prevailing racial attitudes. A century after the ruling on the Chinese Exclusion Act, at President Ronald Reagan’s prompting, Congress enacted the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which granted amnesty and permanent legal residence to all immigrants then in the U.S. The sky did not fall.
The White House has defended the ICE killings of two innocent Americans in the maelstrom of Minneapolis by using phrases like terrorist, agitator, assassin and self-defense. In the process of politically smearing two dead victims, it has tried to divert attention away from the ICE Gestapo-like tactics in the streets. And, in an act of obstructing justice, ICE has kept all the evidence of these murders from state investigators.
Are the masked men in the streets immune from prosecution for murder as the White House claims?
Federal and state laws mandate — and all police, even DHS agents, know this — that if the driver of a vehicle moving less than 5 miles per hour is trying to turn away from you, you don’t kill the driver; you let her turn or get out of the way. If somehow you feel threatened by a man on all fours on the ground whose lawfully carried handgun you have already seized, and whom you have temporarily blinded with pepper spray because he photographed you, you restrain him, you don’t shoot him in the back.
The reason police foreknowledge of right and wrong (who doesn’t know it is wrong to shoot an unarmed person in the back?) and of lawful and criminal use of force is relevant is another bizarre Supreme Court ruling which declared that prosecutions of government agents for excessive use of force will rise or fall on whether other similarly situated government defendants manifested this foreknowledge. Another legal principle from out of nowhere.
Can the state of Minnesota prosecute the ICE killers? Yes, under federal and state laws. Just ask Lon Horiuchi, the F.B.I. sharpshooter at Ruby Ridge whom the state of Idaho prosecuted for excessive force when he killed the wife of the person the feds were trying to arrest by shooting her in the back. And there is no statute of limitations for murder.
Shameless Lying
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center CECOT in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 26, 2025. (DHS/Flickr/Tia Dufour)
More dangerous than American Gestapo is American Psycho — an attitude of government devoid of moral principles. One that — as authoritarians throughout history have done — targets a helpless, hopeless, politically weak minority and justifies murdering those who protest the violence employed in the targeting.
We have a government devoid of social virtue and bent primarily on demonstrating its power over persons. It is unbridled by the good, by the natural law, by the Constitution and by common decency. It has no values. It believes life is meaningless. In its fear of ordinary folks photographing its use of force in the streets, it verbally defends killing the photographer.
This psychotic government claimed the first Minneapolis person its agents murdered was a terrorist. She wasn’t. Then it claimed her spouse was a terrorist. She wasn’t.
Then it claimed that the nurse videoing its agents was there to kill them because he lawfully carried a handgun and ammunition. He wasn’t. Then it claimed he “brandished” his gun. He never touched his gun; the ICE agents took it from him before they executed him. Now it claims this nurse it shot in the back while he was on all fours on the frozen earth and blinded by pepper spray was a threat to its agents. That’s hogwash.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told the media that her agents felt threatened and so they disarmed the nurse. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment which protects the right to keep and bear arms, is as potent as the First Amendment. There was no legal basis to spray or detain the nurse, and thus these agents could no more lawfully disarm him than they could silence his speech about them.
This shameless lying is contradicted by what we all can see.
The same psychotic mentality that argued last year it can execute people on the high seas without trial has brought that might-makes-right nihilism into our streets. If Congress doesn’t stop this sickness in the executive branch by defunding it before it is too late, the voters will deem Congress complicit.
Of course, the psychopaths have the upper hand. Watch out, people of Iran. When the psychopaths are failing at home, they will bring us to war abroad.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, was the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel and hosts the podcast Judging Freedom. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
Published by permission of the author.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
If, you listen, you will hear, President BHObama, the NPP winner, winner chicken dinner: “I’m really good at killing people. *“President Barack Obama told his aides that he’s “really good at killing people” while discussing drone strikes.“
….* “Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield,” that global operations under Obama became “harder, faster, quicker — with the full support of the White House.” Jeremy Scahill, who also made a “Dirty Wars” documentary, told NBC News that Obama will “go down in history as the president who legitimized and systematized a process by which the United States asserts the right to conduct assassination operations around the world.” Jeremy Scahill @ *Business Insider, November, 2013. * hxxps://www.businessinsider.com/obama-said-hes-really-good-at-killing-people-2013-11?op=1
The “double tap” — “bombing the same place in quick succession and often hitting first responders — has become common practice under Obama’s eye.” Thirteen (13) years later, under the ICEY Kingdom’s Trump-Vance-Noem, Inc., the “double tap” lives large! “Whatever it takes” the American/Israeli Ninjas aka “American Gestapo/American Psycho” (TY, Judge Napolitano) w/“bombs”, bullets, pepper spray, force, is common practice. Trump’s motto, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” i.e., the “double tap” murder of Renee Good & Alex Pretti.
Consequently, two (2) more join the thousands, deliberately, killed by a “sitting” US President & his Board of Executioners. POTUS’ best practice is manipulating the facts, to cover-up a murder(s). And, of all the killings, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, deaths per the Corona Virus (COVID-19), War in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Ukraine, Vietnam, Venezuela, Minnesota, death per natural disasters and/or death per genocide (starvation, dehydration, disease) or an overdose, which is the “Murder Most Foul?”
“Of course, the psychopaths have the upper hand.” Judge Napolitano. And, once, again, the US Congress is M.I.A.
The owl asks, “WHO, besides Israel, needs the US Congress?” The bird tweets, “imo, POTUS, SCOTUS & the US Congress oughta be exiled to Israel.” Which. Of course, would take an act of Congress. It’ll never, f/ever happen!” It’s Big “D” Democracy i.e., Deception, Destruction, Death, lives large, in The Divided $tates of Corporate America.
There are many parallels between these events in our country and what transpired historically in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930’s. What needs to be understood is that, in those historical examples — and in the United States today — it is the economic decline of capitalism that creates the conditions for fascist ideology to take hold.
In the case of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s, Jews and other minorities were blamed and targeted by the Nazis for the economic problems in that country. In effect, these groups became the scapegoats for the hardships brought on by the Great Depression. And this narrative became central to Nazi propaganda — with the aim of directing the anger of German workers towards these minority groups instead of at the failings of the capitalist system itself.
At present in the U.S., we are witnessing a similar phenomenon, where the working class base of the MAGA movement is being propagandized to blame immigrants and other minorities for the hardships they are experiencing due to the decline of capitalism in the U.S. As real wages fall, and real inflation eats away at the standard of living of the American worker, and housing becomes unaffordable, and good-paying jobs become rarer and rarer, the aim of the ‘Trumpian’ propaganda apparatus is to steer people’s anger towards the most vulnerable — and away from the elitist structural edifice of the American capitalist system.
Excelente analysis, both historical and current, from a jurist I have grown to admire. Because Facebook does not permit the sharing of articles from Consortium News, I have copied it and reformatted it for use there.
They may be aspiring to be Gestapo, but I’d say — at present — they’re more like Hitler’s brownshirts, the Sturmabteilung.
Napolitano’s claims that ICE and the current Trump Administration is motivated by “psychoses” and “lack of morals” obscures the significant import of immigration enforcement actions to the wealthy and political classes. His focus also diverts attention from the long history of U.S.A’s repressive and oppressive (but profitable!) U.S. immigration enforcement policies and practices. DHS (directs both ICE + CBP) carries out pacifying public policy objectives that reward powerful players. Under Trump, DHS has done so with greater reach, brutality, public spectacle, and legal and judicial disregard.
The federal agent who executed Alex Pretti was employed by CBP (under DHS), not ICE (also under DHS). And the ICE agent who killed Good was previously employed by CPB and, before that, by the U.S. military. Some resources regarding the federal killers…
1. propublica.org/article/alex-pretti-shooting-cbp-agents-identified-jesus-ochoa-raymundo-gutierrez
2. wbur.org/news/2026/01/09/johnathan-ross-ice-killing-renee-good-minneapolis-background
For a solid historical and material context, I highly recommend an excellent posting by Zayneb Day at Bullhorn Bulletin on Substack (free). I like her subtitle – “The for-profit immigration system under DHS isn’t broken, it’s built this way.” She writes:
“Both [Minneapolis] killings occurred under Operation Metro Surge, a large-scale DHS operation that resulted in thousands of arrests in the Twin Cities region, including U.S. citizens and documented migrants. Two killings. Two DHS agencies. One operation. Trump’s policies ARE an escalation. Whitewashing the history of abusive immigration practices doesn’t weaken Trumpism. It strengthens it.”
ICE is of course the Deep State.
The Deep State is un-elected bureaucrats who take power for themselves instead of letting the citizens decide the course of their nation themselves in a democracy. ICE = Deep State.
The “protesters” are the thugs when they obstruct law enforcement and attack law enforcement …. exactly what this guy had been doing on several occasions. If he would have followed law enforcement orders, he would have been alive today!!!!!!
So law enforcement is always good and right, and whatever they do is always good and right?
Oh, and who are the thugs? ICE, that’s who. Those whom you wrongly call “law enforcement”. I thought that should be obvious.
Are you really serious about what you are saying???
We are at this cusp: whether violence and threat of violence makes right (often mischaracterized as ‘might makes right’) or community solidarity and values shared across our various human differences makes right. The psychopaths and situational sociopaths in this administration have clearly made their choice (in many thousands of acts of violence from assault to murder to blackmail and bribery) and once that choice is in operation, must and will be played out until forced to stop by…by what? By so demoralizing and destroying the society that some fascist equilibrium is sustained… by being challenged so widely and relentlessly, just below the level that could justify military action against the people, that the psychopaths are incapsulated like a pustule and expelled, and society is faced with great uncertainty as it reorganizes…. by the resignation of the people to the violence and destruction of lawful norms such that the people accept the narrative that nothing has changed and ‘going along to get along’ has always been the way. What isn’t either likely or even possible is a return to what used to be.
How is accountability possible when all our institutions are captured by a mentally deranged ruling oligarchy? It’s looking more and more like a prolonged national strike is our only option. That will take planning and coordination offline and away from all technology including phones. Much more challenging, but necessary.
I’m glad we are finally talking about and referring these people as the psychopaths they are, and we should continue to do so. The point has to be emphasized at every opportunity; we are not dealing with average thinking, feeling humans here. Humans, yes, but some of the worst kinds. And there is no reaching or compromising with psychopaths.
In the United States we are losing the rule of law. Where are those in the legal profession? Why aren’t they pushing back against this?
The US Constitution is now nothing but a snow job; the Zionist Israeli regime footprints in it; the ‘white sheets’ sitting on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, clad in black funeral garb, now clearly apparent.
As the final arbiters of the law, the Justices are presumed to serve unbiasedly, as guardians and interpreters of the Constitution, but in fact they now serve as the foxes guarding the henhouse.
Judicial review, purportedly determining the constitutionality of laws, and executive acts to ensure they do not violate actual fundamental human rights that exceed ‘government’ authority, is but only one of its major roles in the now maliciously poison polluted, downstream rapid flow of the con artist ‘Extraordinaire’s’ “pull the wool over” the public’s eyes major tactics for fulfilling his delusions of grandeur extreme narcissist ‘ghouls’; to the calamitous detriment of all of humanity!
Thank you Judge for a clear and potent analysis. The ICE agents that have committed murder must be held to account. The fact that they are currently free after committing murder which was recorded from multiple angles is telling of our justice system’s dual nature, where how guilty you are depends on who you are. Justice is not blind, it is selective.
“American Gestapo/American Psycho /American IDF ?”
Parallels between the tactics used by law enforcement during immigration crackdowns in Minnesota and those employed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the occupied territories. This comparison generally centers on the use of heavy-handed, militarized tactics against civilian populations.
Allegations of Foreign Training or Influence:
Online discourse and social media groups speculate that the “brutal tactics” used by ICE in Minnesota resemble those seen in Gaza, with some even questioning if there is direct Israeli participation, influence or training involved in these domestic operations the fact that they are masked
Tactical Parallels:
Observers cite “military-style home invasions,” intimidation tactics, and the specific “stance” of agents as resembling IDF operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
Our chumminess with unregistered foreign entity is it really American…NO!
American military and police forces have long since paid American tax-payer money to Israeli firms and mercenaries for “Training.” This has been going on for a long time, and its quite possible that you can find that your city and state (including of course many Democrat politicians) have given your tax money to Israel for this training in Israeli methods.