The Intimidating State: "The Perfidious Lust for Unbridled Power" in the Streets of Minneapolis

The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

"Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice

Singing through the bloody mist

We’ll take our stand for this land

And the stranger in our midst

Here in our home they killed and roamed

In the winter of ’26

We’ll remember the names of those who died

On the streets of Minneapolis."

(Bruce Springsteen, “The Streets of Minneapolis,” 2026) 

1. Renee Good and Alex Pretti—and How the Government Talks about Their Deaths

Among the most disturbing aspects of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the streets of Minneapolis of which Bruce Springsteen now sings is that they were swiftly accompanied by hastily made and often plainly false claims from high‑ranking government officials. And as is increasingly clear, these are not isolated misstatements but part of a broader pattern of state intimidation. Talk about “insurrection” has become alarmingly common, with its accompanying threat of deploying the American military to control political opponents under the pretense of a national crisis that does not exist.

On January 7, 2026, Renee Macklin Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a surge in immigration enforcement. The location of her death was not far from where George Floyd was murdered by an officer who knelt on his neck on May 25, 2020, a moment that in so many other ways already feels like the distant past.

On January 24, Alex Pretti was shot ten times by two ICE agents during a struggle. In both cases, the Trump administration swiftly moved to justify the shootings by claiming that Good and Pretti were engaged in acts of domestic terrorism at the moments they were killed. (See here, here, or here.)

These claims were made before investigations could meaningfully proceed and in the face of conflicting video evidence and witness accounts. Almost instantly Vice President JD Vance called Good a “deranged leftist” and insisted on “absolute immunity” for the agent who shot her. The government has even sought to initiate a criminal investigation into alleged ties of Good’s widow to activists instead of following the usual process of conducting an investigation in such cases—a move that several prosecutors would later quit over.

Talk about "insurrection" has become alarmingly common, with its accompanying threat of deploying the American military to control political opponents under the pretense of a national crisis that does not exist.

Trump's deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called Pretti a "would-be assassin" in a post on X. In separate press conferences the day of the shooting, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Pretti intended to do "maximum damage" and kill law enforcement. Bovino insisted that it was not Pretti who lay dead in the snow but the Border Patrol agents who were the real victims here.  Noem referred to Pretti as "brandishing" a weapon though video evidence showed he had a handgun but never took it out of its holster.

The Good and Pretti cases attracted global attention, and rightly so. They have also drawn renewed scrutiny to a wider pattern: Trump administration officials have repeatedly made unproven or incorrect claims about immigrants targeted for deportation, American citizens arrested while protesting the immigration crackdown, and even people who merely drove through neighborhoods where immigration enforcement operations were underway. Often, criminal charges in these cases subsequently were quietly dropped or never filed.

As of the very end of January, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is investigating the killing of Alex Pretti but not that of Reene Good.

By now, there have been dozens of instances in which federal judges have chastised government officials for making false, contradictory, or unreliable statements in court. As Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College who studies political misinformation and misperceptions, put it, “There are armed masked men in the streets acting as paramilitary agents of the state being directed to grab people up on behalf of false claims, and the government is lying about what happens before, during and afterward.”

In the meantime, ICE has been seeking to expand its powers to arrest people without warrant. Recently a legal observer in Maine was called a domestic terrorist by an ICE agent—just for observing.

ICE has also been rolling out brand-new surveillance technologies to go about their business, especially in facial recognition and license-plate monitoring. ICE has in fact become a spearhead for governmental surveillance  whose use can easily expand far beyond any stated purpose, with the immediate goal of the expansion apparently being people involved in protests and thus beyond those targeted for deportation (see here, here, here, and here.)

What emerges is not simply a pattern of individual misconduct, but a recognizable mode of governance: the systematic use of intimidation, backed by force and justified through falsehoods, against those whom the state has chosen to target.

The signal to ICE agents is clear: the government will stand behind you almost no matter what you do. ICE agents will infer that they are unlikely ever to face judicial scrutiny. And ICE will attract personnel who appreciate such working conditions.

The signal to citizens and residents is equally clear: if you exercise your rights to protest against the government, it will not only use force, it will seek to vilify you afterward. Human rights standards exist precisely to push back against such governmental behavior. Unfortunately, this emergence of the Intimidating State is already part of a much broader pattern.

The goal of this commentary is to throw light on the Intimidating State by reconnecting to vocabulary I have used in previous commentaries to make sense of the situation in the U.S. (especially “vindictive tolerance” and “gaslighting”), as well as by enlisting critical parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human Rights protections in the U.S. are clearly declining enormously these days.

Before going forward in our analysis, let me quote a powerful summary by New York Times columnist M. Gessen of what happened between the killing of Renee Good and that of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis—which will make clearer how much there is at stake now:

“Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., federal officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people’s papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with no criminal record.”

The 5-year-old was ordered released only on January 31. The district judge who made this ruling (Fred Biery) pointed out, obviously referring to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, that “for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”  This is a sitting federal judge's description of the agency's conduct—and it captures precisely what below we will see Ernst Fraenkel meant by the prerogative state.

2.  A Reminder: The Intimidating State, Vindictive Tolerance, and Gaslighting 

As I have argued in a commentary from August 26, 2025, under Trump, U.S. institutions are not just trying to undo progressive agendas; leadership at the highest levels is also shaping the atmosphere in ways we can describe as vindictive tolerance, a notion that builds on philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s idea of repressive tolerance.

Repressive tolerance is a form of tolerance that denies certain political positions a real chance of success in democratic politics while allowing them to persist just enough for elites to claim society is tolerant.

Vindictive tolerance is a version of repressive tolerance that tries to maintain overall appearances of a tolerant society—endorsing free speech, democracy, rule of law, and human rights—while actively maligning opposing positions as civil rights violations, bigotry, or conspiracies. Overall, society is presented as being in good health, as far as its value commitments are concerned, were it not for these allegedly ugly figures on the opposing side who viciously seek to undermine its core values—and thus must be fought vigorously.

In a climate of vindictive tolerance, opponents within the system are understood as opponents of the system. The state machinery is then deployed against them, treating them indeed as such opponents of the system. Ordinary citizens will then readily become classified as would-be domestic terrorists. And now some of them have been killed in the streets of Minneapolis.

Vindictive tolerance as a characteristic of a social or political system in turn complements another theme I have emphasized: gaslighting as a leadership style, in which opponents are accused of violating norms and values even though it is the accuser (the gaslighter) who is guilty. The prime example is Trump’s ongoing insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by a Democratic cabal, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Just this month the FBI started an investigation of election fraud in Fulton County, Georgia, claiming “probable cause.” (For theoretical elaboration, now published, of this understanding of gaslighting, see here.)

Together, vindictive tolerance and gaslighting help explain developments in the U.S. over 2025 and now into 2026, the year of its 250^th anniversary. Both are profoundly troubling, obscuring reality, elevating partisanship, and suppressing critical reflection.

And now we have the Intimidating State sending ICE agents into the streets across the country to put force behind a vision of society that has arisen from a climate characterized by vindictive tolerance and gaslighting.

Recall that all of this is happening as part of a bigger pattern: The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics got fired for presenting unwelcome numbers that allegedly were “rigged”; the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency got fired without any reason officially given but after contradicting the president’s version of what American strikes on Iran did to its nuclear program; the State Department’s human rights reports were adjusted to reflect the government’s political predilections (depicting El Salvador as a bright spot and Germany as a country in decline, and largely omitting violations of the rights of LGBTQI+ people worldwide) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the near-total destruction of his department’s human rights and global justice policy shops and programs—while a spokesperson still claimed that Rubio was “committed to human rights, every day;” and overall, this government has taken extensive measures to dismantle accountability.

3. Is the U.S. Turning into a Prerogative State?

To understand what is at stake in such developments, it is helpful to recall Ernst Fraenkel’s analysis of Nazi Germany in his classic work The Dual State—a book brought back to mind by this recent op-ed in the New York Times. As with all analogies to the Nazi period, one must proceed with caution, of course. The U.S. in 2026 and Germany in 1933 are immensely different places. Still, the events in Minnesota and beyond are indeed usefully analyzed in light of Fraenkel’s work.

Ernst Fraenkel (1898–1975) was a German lawyer and political theorist whose life and work were shaped by the collapse of Weimar democracy and the rise of Nazism. Trained as a labor and constitutional lawyer, he was associated with social democracy and defended trade unionists and political opponents of the Nazi regime in court. As a Jew and a socialist, he experienced firsthand the tightening grip of dictatorship. Forced into exile in the late 1930s, he settled in the U.S., where he wrote The Dual State (first published in English in 1941). After World War II, Fraenkel returned to West Germany and became a leading figure in rebuilding German political science, focusing on democracy, constitutionalism, and the rule of law.

In The Dual State, Fraenkel set out to explain something outsiders often misunderstood: Nazi Germany was not simply a state of chaos or total lawlessness. Rather, it combined elements of a traditional, law‑governed state with zones of essentially unrestrained, arbitrary power. This coexistence, he argued, created a “dual state,” divided into what he called the Normenstaat (normative state) and the Massnahmenstaat (prerogative state).

The normative state is the part of the legal order where general rules, statutes, and procedures still apply. In this sphere, civil courts adjudicate disputes over contracts, property, family law, and much of commercial life. Legal expectations remain relatively stable and predictable. Fraenkel emphasized that this was not simply a leftover from Weimar; it was functionally important for the Nazi regime itself.

Economic life could not run on terror alone. Businesses need enforceable contracts, markets need rules, and ordinary people require some assurance that not every aspect of daily life will be decided by ideological whim. The normative state provides this minimal rule‑bound framework.

By contrast, the prerogative state is the sphere in which the political leadership acts by discretionary “measures” (Massnahmen) rather than by binding general norms. Here, the leadership—through the party, the Gestapo, the SS, and other security organs—can arrest, detain, expropriate, and even kill without meaningful legal constraint. Courts are bypassed or subordinated, and individual rights offer no real protection. Decisions are made on the basis of ideology, racial policy, “state security,” or the Führer’s will, rather than on the basis of established law. This is the realm in which political opponents, Jews, and other targeted groups were persecuted.

Crucially, Fraenkel argued that these two spheres do not exist side by side as equal halves. The normative state operates only so long as it does not conflict with the political aims of the regime. When a conflict arises—when following the law would obstruct the regime’s interests—the prerogative state prevails. In this sense, the prerogative state has primacy: the dictatorship preserves law where it is useful but reserves the right to set law aside whenever power demands it.

Fraenkel’s analysis shows that modern authoritarianism often depends not on abolishing law, but on hollowing it out: keeping legal forms and institutions intact in many areas while building parallel mechanisms that can intimidate, control, and destroy. 

Fraenkel’s analysis shows that modern authoritarianism often depends not on abolishing law, but on hollowing it out: keeping legal forms and institutions intact in many areas while building parallel mechanisms that can intimidate, control, and destroy. Citizens may conduct their everyday affairs under the normative state, yet live under the constant shadow of the prerogative state, which can at any moment reach into their lives.

What I call the “Intimidating State” is a state with a nascent duality, that is, with a nascent prerogative state whose contours are yet to be determined.

Here is how New York Times columnist David French applies Fraenkel’s analysis to Renee Good’s death in Minneapolis. It makes for a chilling read:

“[I]f you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ICE agent’s video of the fatal encounter between Renee Good and ICE is that it’s plain that Good thinks she’s still in the normative state. She has no idea of the peril she’s in.

She seems relaxed. She even seems to have told the agent that she’s not mad at him. In the normative state, your life almost never depends on immediate and unconditional compliance with police commands.

But she wasn’t in the normative state. She had crossed over the border to the prerogative state, and in that state you can be shot dead recklessly, irresponsibly and perhaps even illegally, and no one will pay the price.”

4. A Human Rights Perspective

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948 in the aftermath of Nazism and World War II, can be read as a systematic attempt to block the prerogative state and its methods. Articles 6–12, in particular, offer a blueprint for preventing governments from exercising the kind of arbitrary, intimidating power that Fraenkel described.

The UDHR is a long, clumsy document, the kind of document only a committee would write. Unlike, say, the Ten Commandments, it does not lend itself to being learned by heart. First-time readers of the UDHR often lose interest once they come to these specific articles because there is a lot of seemingly tedious material on judicial procedure and related topics.

But it is specifically these articles that talk about how the state ought to exercise its formidable powers that can readily crush any individual citizen. It is these articles that are central to making sure the normative state does not coexist with a prerogative state.

Article 6 states that “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” This strikes at a central technique of the prerogative state: the ability to treat certain categories of people—sometimes Jews, then also political enemies, “undesirables”—as outside the legal community. By insisting on universal legal personhood, the UDHR rejects the idea that the state can push anyone into a legal void where no rights apply. Article 6 therefore is also a reminder that, in all their interactions with ICE and other agencies, Americans never cease to be persons before the law.

Article 7, which guarantees equality before the law and equal protection against discrimination, further tightens the constraints. The prerogative state thrives on differential treatment: one standard for loyalists, another for opponents, say. By demanding equal protection against both discrimination and incitement to discrimination, Article 7 seeks to close off the legal foundations of such dualism.

Article 8 asserts the right to an effective remedy before competent national tribunals for violations of fundamental rights. Fraenkel showed that in Nazi Germany, victims of political persecution had essentially no recourse against measures taken in the name of state security or ideology. Article 8 counters this by insisting that rights must be enforceable and that courts must have real authority to review and correct abuses—even, and especially, when the state itself is the violator. As far as Minneapolis is concerned, there should be thorough investigations into the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Article 9 prohibits “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.” In the prerogative state, preventive detention, concentration camps, and forced displacement were central tools. And their point was not simply to punish, but to intimidate—to instill fear that one could be taken away without warning or reason. Article 9 transforms this core instrument of intimidation into a clear violation of human rights.

Article 10 requires a “fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal” for the determination of rights and obligations, including criminal charges. This is the opposite of the prerogative state’s typical practices: closed proceedings, special courts, political judges, or the total absence of judicial process. Independence and impartiality are precisely what the prerogative state seeks to neutralize. Again, as far as Minneapolis is concerned, any activities by ICE or any other governmental agency must be subject to the rule of law, and any potential abuses must be investigated.

Article 11 deepens these protections. It lays down the presumption of innocence and the right to a public trial with all necessary guarantees for defense, which targets show trials and confessions extracted under pressure. It also forbids retroactive criminal laws and heavier penalties imposed after the fact. These principles are designed to prevent the state from reinterpreting previously harmless conduct as criminal in order to target individuals or groups. Again, this undercuts a classic prerogative technique: using the flexibility of “political criminal law” to criminalize people rather than acts.

Article 12 protects against arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, and correspondence, and against attacks on honor and reputation. Surveillance, house searches, harassment of families, and public defamation were all instruments through which the Nazi state—which, again, was Fraenkel’s context—intimidated people into conformity or silence. By requiring that any interference be non‑arbitrary and offering legal protection against such intrusions, Article 12 aims to shield individuals from the all-pervasive gaze and pressure of an intimidating state.

As I mentioned above, we have already learned that the current ICE operations are a laboratory for governmental surveillance.

Other articles of the UDHR also work against the prerogative state. Article 3’s guarantee of “life, liberty and security of person” establishes a baseline that indiscriminate violence and terror cannot cross. Article 5’s prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment speaks directly to the brutality of police and security services. Article 20 on freedom of assembly and Article 21 on participation in government challenge the monopoly of power that prerogative structures seek to maintain.

Taken together, these provisions can be read as the international community’s answer to the world Fraenkel analyzed: a world in which the state could switch at will between the reassuring mask of legality and the terrifying face of unchecked power. The UDHR’s insistence on legal personhood, equality before the law, fair procedures, independent tribunals, protection against arbitrary arrest, and respect for privacy are all attempts to make that switch impossible—to bind the state to norms so firmly that there is no separate prerogative sphere beyond law.

In this sense, the UDHR does not merely list abstract ideals. It encodes, in legal language, the lessons drawn from a concrete historical experience of the dual state. By turning the abuses of the prerogative state into explicit prohibitions and by institutionalizing the guarantees of the normative state as universal rights, the Declaration aims to protect human beings against state intimidation and to make the rule of law more than a fragile façade—whether in mid‑twentieth‑century Europe or in twenty‑first‑century Minneapolis.

The United States of America in 2026 is in important ways dramatically different from Nazi Germany in 1933. But now is the time to bring Fraenkel’s distinction between the normative and the prerogative state on our radar to make sure it is these differences that remain strong, rather than giving way to more similarities.

And that distinction then also leads us directly to the UDHR, and especially its Articles 6-12—which were written in response to Nazism but capture timeless principles for the legitimate use of state power.

5. Where All This Leaves Us

Immigration enforcement is law enforcement, one might object: the state has legitimate authority to detain and deport. But here the concern is not with law enforcement per se. It is with a pattern of false claims, surveillance expansion, and intimidation that goes beyond legitimate enforcement. Moreover, the Intimidating State also fits with the unfolding of vindictive tolerance and the ongoing practice of gaslighting as a leadership style.

The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, the pattern of false government claims, and the expansion of unaccountable surveillance are not isolated failures; they are symptoms of a state that is learning to operate beyond the reach of law.

In light of Fraenkel’s analysis, the recent pattern of immigration enforcement and official rhetoric in Minneapolis and beyond should not be dismissed as unfortunate excesses. It reveals how, even within a formally constitutional order, pockets of prerogative power can emerge—zones in which certain people are treated as though they stand outside the protection of general norms.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—a document that proclaimed all persons are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. It is also a midterm election year—an election that can bring change, but whose integrity we must all stand up for.

The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, the pattern of false government claims, and the expansion of unaccountable surveillance are not isolated failures; they are symptoms of a state that is learning to operate beyond the reach of law.

The UDHR was written to prevent exactly this. Whether its guarantees hold in practice depends not on hope but on action: protests, litigation, legislative oversight, judicial independence, the refusal to accept official falsehoods as normal—and the maintenance of the integrity of the midterm elections.

To be clear: governments legitimately enforce immigration law and pursue genuine security threats. What the UDHR rules out—and what we must resist—is the expansion of arbitrary, unaccountable power justified by false claims and deployed to intimidate political opposition.

And again to be clear: The United States of America in the year of the 250^th anniversary of its founding is not Weimar Germany. But it will remain different only if we insist, through democratic means and at every level, that the rule of law is not negotiable and that no one—citizen, immigrant, protester, or passerby—can be pushed outside its protection.