Welcome to Trump’s Remake of Argentina’s Dirty War

There’s no shortage of footage on the sights in the Twin Cities, where residents have spent these past few weeks in the streets, blocking roads, patrolling their own communities, and protesting against federal immigration agents—especially after the death of Alex Pretti last Saturday. While the Trump administration has seemingly taken a psychic hit and a brief stumble from the blowback of Pretti’s death, it’s worth remembering what it was doing as Minnesotans responded with grief and anger: It didn’t call for de-escalation but rather for Minnesota to give into its demands or face further reprisals.

Treat any talk of a “pivot” to come with grave skepticism. One year into the second Trump administration, those in power have shown they not only are comfortable with regular attacks on the public and the ensuing chaos, they are, even now, systemically enabling them. They’ve taken kids and used them as bait to draw out family members. Each new day, footage or images out of Minneapolis show protesters and legal observers brutalized, hit with pepper spray or less than lethal rounds, or tackled by groups of masked agents. And even as the administration shifts out Greg Bovino for Tom Homan in Minnesota, it is ramping up a new large-scale operation in Maine.

And none of what has happened in the last month is new or unique to Minneapolis. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and other Department of Homeland Security agents have raided communities, abducted people including American citizens, held detainees in poor conditions—and they’d already shot several people before the new year kicked off. The administration has defended these actions, smearing dissenters as dissidents and domestic terrorists and ramping up its “immigration enforcement” by surging personnel into cities to cow them.

But in the last month, the full scope and agenda has become clear. Between the assaults on constitutionally protected rights, the ambient menace projected into peaceful communities, the endless smearing and scapegoating of the victims of state violence, and the brazen way the regime figures haven’t much bothered to downplay their campaign of mayhem, the Trump administration is waging an American version of the years of mass repression and state violence the ruling junta in Argentina carried out during the “Dirty War” of the late 1970s.

The Dirty War, like the wider U.S.-backed right-wing campaign in Latin America known as Operation Condor, was an all-out assault, using direct violence, political repression and exclusion, and false narratives to snuff out the specter of leftism and democratic dissent as a whole. The United States has plenty of its own history of internal state violence that has led to what is happening in Minneapolis and elsewhere, but the tactics used today by the administration echo Argentina’s Dirty War. And that campaign offers a lens on how to understand them.

For nearly a decade, Argentina’s right-wing rulers ran a campaign of repression that looks a lot like what we’ve seen on the streets of U.S. cities. The state, through the military, police, political machines, and corporate and civilian allies, hunted down anyone seen as opposed to the regime. At least 22,000 were killed or disappeared, with the actual death toll likely much higher.

The U.S. has not yet seen—and hopefully will not see—figures like that, but it is seeing similar tactics, all the same: People are being abducted, whisked out of state or out of the country, disappeared before lawyers can fight for their release. The federal government has relied on local police to deal with protesters around the country, counting on cities and states to focus more on keeping the peace rather than stopping the feds. It’s been clear for months that “immigration enforcement” was just a pretext for terrorizing liberal cities and punishing political rivals. In Minneapolis, the administration even discarded any pretense that it was doing targeted enforcement.

After the killing of Renee Good, it was widely reported that members of the masked forces in Minneapolis treated her death—now officially ruled a homicide—as a warning to the wider populace—“Didn’t you learn your lesson?” was the refrain that many protesters heard as agents mocked Good’s murder. This defiant defaming of Good happened even as officials claimed that she had attempted to ram ICE agents, which footage showed wasn’t true. After Renee Good was killed, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told reporters that “ICE is doing what ICE is designed to do.” While he couched his comments in the context of immigration enforcement, it wasn’t hard to see the double meaning.

The killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse with the VA who had been filming the confrontation between Border Patrol agents and protesters when he stopped to help a woman in evident medical distress, saw the administration leap immediately to pushing extravagant lies. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller immediately accused Pretti of being a would-be “assassin” (in a post shared by the vice president), while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused him of being a domestic terrorist. VA Secretary Doug Collins took more than a day to comment on the death of one of his department’s employees, in a statement that discussed neither the nature of Pretti’s death nor the smears against him by Collins’s fellow Cabinet members.

These are claims to justify the violence but, given quickly and half-heartedly, instead accusing local civic resistance of being the underlying cause of these deaths. The shift is clear: The state violence is fine, and the administration is leveraging it as a tool for political power.

The Trump administration’s casualness with state violence isn’t new. During the 2024 campaign, the Trump team expressed the view—reiterated by Vance last month—that mass abduction and deportation are the path to a perverse prosperity. For example, it was the skeleton key to resolving housing supply issues, by removing people from the country so others can take over their homes. It’s now using economic violence—seen in the attempt to deny blue states federal food aid or any federal funds—to bring these states to heel. It was a claim of fraud that brought ICE swarming to Minneapolis in recent weeks: the only fraud investigation in living memory that required the pacification of an entire city by masked agents of the state and the murder of two citizens at their hands.

There is another, more searing parallel to the Dirty Wars. More than just sadistic punishment, this violent campaign is—for the Trump administration—a naked gambit for self-preservation. By using the full levers of violent power and allowing its shock troops to push the envelope by permitting them to circumvent the law, the Trump White House is trying to tamp down dissent and opposition. A big reason you see up-armored agents mobbing the streets, cameras in hand, is to create content that they believe will help intimidate the populace through constant demonstrations of their unleashed capacity for violence. As in Argentina’s darkest era, this is a holistic campaign of repression.

But it might be backfiring in ways the Argentinian junta didn’t experience in its time. The events of the last week seem to have pushed the country past some kind of inflection point. Democratic senators are now actually rallying to stop DHS funding, and may even have the votes to stop it (after seven Democrats in the House voted to help fund this even after Good’s death). But Democrats lag the citizenry: The terror and violence in the Twin Cities has clearly galvanized more people into action. Despite the enormous fear and strain that residents of the Twin Cities have been forced to endure, they are anything but cowed.

The Dirty War in Argentina didn’t end quickly. It took years of effort, a considerable amount of outside pressure, and the failure of the junta to quell dissent. Here in the United States, the administration has suffered a blow—though it can’t be counted on to back down anytime soon. Nor should we count on Trump and his fellow travelers to de-escalate the violent campaigns waged by CBP, ICE, and others. Bovino may be out, but the ramping up of similar actions in Maine and continued abductions around the country, including Los Angeles, prove they aren’t backing down. The potential for further harm is high and terrifying. But their open declaration of war seems to have finally hit a barrier they can’t simply sweep past. The only remaining question is whether and when the furious pushback against this dirty war becomes strong enough to finally break their back.