Digital Media and the American Civil Conflict

Operation “Metro Surge” in Minneapolis-St. Paul, USA, has now attracted national and worldwide attention. Both sides in this conflict see it as a showdown. It is a showdown, and it matters who wins.  

In this blog, we try to focus on digital media; that is, on public narratives, propaganda, the polarization of political coalitions and their role in the deportation effort. Digital media are key players in the conflict. Immigration is about identity, and media representations can shape perceptions of identity. And these same media, from the forced divestiture of TikTok to FCC’s discriminatory treatment of media mergers and licensees, are at the center of numerous political and policy battles at the moment.  

The conflict needs to be placed in a broader political economy perspective, however. Immigration is a political economy issue, not just a matter of representation in the media. We were restrained and referred to American “civil conflict” and not “civil war.” While the conflict falls short of civil war, some of the key elements are there: invasions, paramilitary forces, shooting deaths, debates over the role of the military, clashes between the authority of federal and state governments. 

What is Trump trying to accomplish? 

Before it took over the Republican Party, Trump’s movement consisted of economic nationalists, cultural conservatives and a few conservative financiers. His rise to power, however, was fueled as much by reaction to the rot in the Democratic Party and the excesses of the progressive left as by its own appeal. By 2024, Americans were sick of 15 years of cultural domination by highly educated coastal elites who “moderated” social media to promote their values, told the majority they were guilty oppressors, and promoted ever-stranger concepts of gender and personal identity. But aside from the rising cost of living – inflationary pressures for which Trump was as responsible as Biden – it was the immigration issue that best encapsulated the growing cleavage between left and right in America. Whereas the left embraced ethnic and cultural diversity, the right hated it. The flood of asylum seekers seemed chaotic, racist ideas of “replacement” were circulating, and some Americans felt marginalized by a globalizing workforce and globalized markets. Prominent voices on both the right and the left, in fact, had been telling Americans for nearly a decade that they were victims of globalization and that immigration and outsourcing should be curbed.  

Prior to Trump, the more liberal elements in the Republican coalition accepted immigration as a logical extension of their support for an open market economy. Trump has rid the Republican party of its economic liberalism, leading it into a full-on embrace of protectionism and mercantilism, and a nativist opposition to immigration. His antidote to progressive identity politics is not a rejection of leftist identity politics, however, but an alternative identity politics: nationalist, nativist, religious. A multicultural society open to immigration is the opposite of that. He aims to purge America of immigrants, and the DEI ideology of the cultural left.  

To carry out this nationalist identity politics, Trump has seized unprecedented forms of Executive power. DHS, the Justice Department, and the State Department are actively focused – one might say ‘weaponized’ – on carrying out these policy goals (as well as his personal vendettas). Top of the list is ending the diversification of American identity.  When it comes to immigration, those agencies give him almost unlimited power. He can control entry and exit of citizens and non-citizens. He can expel and/or prosecute immigrants. He can single out protesting students on F1 visas. He can prosecute university administrations for allowing anti-Israel protests.  

Why immigration is Central 

We can see now why visible attacks on immigrants are so central to the MAGA vision and MAGA constituencies. It is no longer about closing the border to masses of asylum seekers – that was fixed quickly and the fix started under the Biden administration. The real goal is to advance the new MAGA identity-politick. MAGA does not conceive of America as a set of constitutional principles and liberal-democratic political ideals that can be embraced by any individual, regardless of nationality and culture. It conceives of America as a tribe of “our own kind of people,” mostly white and rural. Restricting the entry of new immigrants advances that kind of identity politics but does not go far enough to alter the character of America. There must be mass deportations as well.  

Mass deportation performs an important symbolic function. From that standpoint, Minneapolis is the perfect target. We can trace the origins of the current conflict to the riots around the George Floyd incident, which also happened in Minneapolis, and the frenzy over masks, vaccines and shutdowns in 2020. Trump wants his own, counter-woke version of the George Floyd incident to unfold on the streets of the Twin Cities. His syncretic mind sees a political trifecta in sending jackbooted, heavily armed Border Patrol agents into a city that (to his supporters) symbolizes lefty progressives, Somali welfare cheats and politicians favoring sanctuary cities.  

Resistance 

Minneapolis-St. Paul was the wrong target. This city was ready to resist. Its brave people carried out a sustained campaign of notification, organized monitoring, and peaceful obstruction. (Yes, there was some obstruction but, like the civil rights movement, it was a non-violent form of protest, like a sit-in.) Like several other ICE-invaded communities, Minneapolis-St. Paul came to the defense of immigrants but also highlighted that many innocent legal residents were being rounded up in the process.  

As the crackdown proceeds, it becomes clearer and clearer that there is no economic policy goal – or benefit – from Trump’s deportation plan. It hurts the economy of all Americans. It is not just restricting undocumented workers, who despite their status fulfill a valuable production and service role and fill gaps in the supply of labor. It is restricting students from studying in American universities. It scares off tourists. It tarnishes the country’s reputation. It interfered with attempts by South Korea to build a factory employing hundreds of people in the state of Georgia. It has even threatened and intimidated recent immigrants of legal status.  

Reports from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times show that the administration made a deliberate decision to organize these armed invasions instead of seeking targeted action. Moreover, ICE entered these localities without the cooperation or approval of local authorities. The whole point was to make their presence visible and confrontational, to demonstrate that the federal government was

asserting control of the situation. The point was to subordinate and override local police and state and local governments that offered sanctuary or supported more liberal immigration policies. If they were really interested in finding and deporting known criminals who happen to be illegal immigrants, they could have targeted and arrested them. They chose not to do that. Indeed, they chose to be as provocative and militant as possible, putting Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol officer out of his jurisdiction, in charge of the Minneapolis operation. He was selected not only because he favored aggressive action, but seemingly also for symbolic purposes, as his look and behavior seem to have been modelled on Colonel Miles Quaritch, the crew-cut blond, muscular, robot-wielding militarist who invaded Pandora to destroy the Na’vi in Cameron’s Avatar movie. 

So, this was not about immigration enforcement per se. This was a display of power, an invasion meant to intimidate and subordinate cities and constituencies that were perceived as hostile to Trump. As one post on X put it,  

“If you want to deport people who are in the country illegally, you don’t pull up to random cars in parking lots and shatter their windows and drag their drivers out. You don’t trap cars in intersections and shatter their windows to force the occupants out into the street. You don’t go up to random Hispanic people at gas stations and demand their papers.” 

Minnesota’s resistance helped lift the veil from the pretense that this was about rounding up criminals. Faced with public friction and exposure, ICE agents twice lost their temper and murdered American citizens. The administration had already compromised the First Amendment, viewing unfavorable interviews and news reports as targets of litigation, and protestors as targets for police harassment; when it was discovered that one of the victims, Alex Pretti, was armed, it showed it was willing to jettison the Second Amendment, the right to carry a gun, as well.  

After three weeks of this and the second murder, the public turned against the Administration. A few Republican Senators and Representatives finally got a backbone. A Republican gubernatorial candidate withdrew from the race to protest the national government’s actions. A budget cutoff was threatened. Colonel Quaritch-Bovino was sent packing and cut off social media. Kristi Noem shut up for a while. Trump called Minnesota governor Walz.  

However, Trump did not withdraw ICE from the city. Justice Department head Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota officials saying ICE will only leave if the state turns over its voter database to Trump. A seizure of voting records from 2020 in the State of Georgia raises further alarms about an attempt to rig the next election. Trump himself compared his Operation Metro Surge to the military action against Venezuela.  

The role of digital media 

We like to complain about surveillance in digitizing society, but let’s remember the role of sous-veillance, everybody surveilling everybody, in the Minnesota conflict. The protestors’ main “weapons” were phone cameras and whistles – and to some extent, their bodies. Their pictures, shared on social media platforms and mainstream media apps, recorded a set of events from multiple perspectives and made it accessible and even viral across all digital media platforms.   

We can speak of the camera as a weapon because it carried a viable threat that any misbehavior by the troops would be exposed, and exposure would bring accountability. 

But how strong was this weapon? Misbehavior – terrible, fatal misbehavior – was in fact exposed. Everyone saw the videos. They left little room for debate about what had happened. Yet for nearly a week, it was frighteningly unclear whether this would even make a difference. The Trump administration tried to impose a false interpretation. It characterized the victims as “terrorists” and claimed they were aggressively threatening ICE agents. They instantly granted the killers immunity from state or local prosecution. They excluded domestic police from investigating the crime. Their capture of the federal-level executive branch agencies and of both Houses of Congress seemed to shut off most avenues for recourse.  

Ultimately, smartphone documentations of two deaths, disseminated across digital media, made the government’s approach untenable. There were too many witnesses, and the evidence was too clear. The entire country could witness not only the shooting, but hear the outraged dissent of Minneapolis’s Mayor, the shock of its police chief, the first-hand accounts of bystanders. The government was lying and everyone knew it. There was a flood of videos of other abuses by undisciplined ICE agents in less fatal situations. Trump was losing millions of people who voted for him in 2024 and alienating a vast set of middle-ground voters who might consider voting for Republicans in the midterms.  

Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis asked poignantly, “what if we did not have these videos?” Social media networking and digital devices were crucial.  But it was not simply the information, the publicity, but the willingness of responsible and authoritative political actors to become vocal and act on that information, that made a difference. 

Polarization 

Social media are often accused of polarizing the polity. Mostly this accusation is about a polarized U.S.A., but sometimes the argument is extended to other democracies like Brazil, India or even Europe. The now-cliched argument is that divisive and angry messages are more likely to keep users engaged, so algorithmically controlled media amplify them to sell ads, and a passive public falls in line. 

Generally, it is a mistake to blame digital media for divergent reactions to hot button issues. There are strong substantive differences in the population; the media reflects, it does not create, these divisions, though it may accelerate them under certain circumstances. The significance of immigration and identity politics in the current conflict was explained above. To think that these divisions would not exist if social media were banned or heavily moderated to allow only anodyne cat videos shows a lack of understanding of collective action in a complex, liberal-democratic society. 

A heated discourse about Minnesota was certainly evident on social media. The two sides shouted at, caricatured, goaded and trolled each other on X, with owner Elon Musk obviously – but a bit half-heartedly – tipping the scales toward a pro-ICE stance. Yet even on X, the discourse became increasingly balanced, as apologists for ICE became outweighed by critics, and evidence of abuse piled up.  

Polarization was evident in the way defenders of ICE tried to represent protestors and their supporters. ICE operations reinforced liberals’ and leftists’ view of the Trump administration as “fascist,” “authoritarian,” or racist. MAGA nationalists, for their part, saw the hard-line actions as highly satisfying. After the killings, however, the “poles” shifted.

MAGA supporters tried very hard to keep them aligned. When it was no longer possible for Trump supporters to argue that the killings were justified, it became about the victims’ identity, and specifically their status as agents of the opposition political movement. Michael Shellenberger, a professional Trump apologist, tweeted that “the Left is getting people killed” by “encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations.” While disavowing the shooting, Shellenberger’s approach places the blame for the killings on “progressive nonprofits, Democrats, and liberal influencers” – an attempt to reinforce the political divisions that led to the conflict.  

One could therefore superficially conclude that people reacting to the representations of the conflicts on social media reinforced polarization. Except it didn’t. Ultimately, media interactions broke through the standard forms of division. The Trump administration alienated a significant segment of its current and potential supporters, and they began to post. Conservative judges, independent Republicans, libertarians, and even a response from cautious CEOs, who remained silent as long as possible due to their attempt to avoid recriminations from Trump, began to react to the situation. 

A January 25 letter signed by 60 leaders of Minnesota companies, including Target, 3M and General Mills, published the day after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, called for “an immediate de-escalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions.” The polarization existed before the incident, but it put the advocates of mass deportation on the defensive. The exchange of real-time opinion, rage and evidence altered the political environment.  

Unfortunately, the issue has not been resolved. Trump’s political base is deeply invested in both the symbolism and the reality of mass deportation. Its goal is to erase the message of hope inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. Minnesotans cannot back down either, because to do so would be to surrender basic American rights and liberties, and dangerously curb the local and state powers granted to them under a federalist constitution.