United States of America

[EuropeanMind]

Ich habe zu der Sachlage auch einen relativ langen aber sehr aufschlussreichen Artikel im Atlantic gefunden:

Welcome to the American Winter

In the frozen streets of Minneapolis, something profound is happening.

The six-car ICE convoy came to a stop and instantly dozens of people swarmed it, cellphones in hand, while others ran out of nearby houses—I saw a woman in gym shorts in the 20-degree weather—and began surrounding the masked and heavily armed agents who had spilled out of their black SUVs. The fury in the crowd felt almost like a physical force, as real as the cacophony of whistles and honking cars and angry chants: “ICE out! Fuck you! Go home!”

The officers threw a protester to the slushy asphalt and piled on top of him, then cuffed him and dragged him away. The screaming only got louder. With their escape route blocked by protesters and their cars, the agents tossed out tear-gas canisters, the white clouds billowing up into the winter air. An injured man stumbled past me and vomited repeatedly into the snow.

From where I stood, a few yards back from the scrum last Wednesday afternoon, it looked, at best, to be a savage caricature of our national divide: on one side, militarized men demanded respect at the butt of a gun; on the other, angry protesters screamed for justice.

But behind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.

Ganzen Artikel (ohne Paywall) gibts hier: https://archive.is/U9zi6

Am Ende des Tages ist jenseits aller Moral einfach festzustellen, dass ICE den Rückhalt der lokalen Bevölkerung verprellt hat. Der Gedanke, dass da der Bürgermeister seine Leute "aufstachelt" ist halt falsch rum gedacht. Der Bürgermeister wird schlicht abgewählt, wenn er nichts zu ICE sagt, weil seine Wähler verlangen, dass er sie schützt.

Wenn die Leute mehr Sympathie für die gesuchten Leute haben als für die Polizei (oder Bundesbehörde), die sie sucht und den Autoritäten im Wesentlichen mit Angst und Ablehnung begegnen, dann hast du als Behörde halt versagt, egal ob das nun politisch opportun ist oder nicht.