REGIME CHANGE IN THE U.S.A.

 

Across the United States, a wave of resistance continues to grow against ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). It's not a coincidence that a panicked ICE has met that resistance with a level of violence that led to the murder of Renee Nicole Reed by an ICE agent. Now protesters are calling for 'regime change'.

THE KILLING of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis and the shooting of two people in Portland are not isolated tragedies. They sit inside a much larger political storm—one that the Trump administration is struggling, and increasingly failing, to contain. These incidents unfolded against a backdrop of rising community resistance to ICE, working class resistance that has grown from scattered outrage into a sustained, organised challenge to the administration’s immigration regime. What’s striking is not just the scale of the protests, but the way ordinary people—neighbours, students, workers—have begun treating ICE not as an untouchable federal agency but as a political actor that can be confronted, disrupted, and delegitimised. This, in short, is class war.

That shift terrifies the Trump administration. You can see the panic in the way officials have scrambled to frame this grassroots mobilisation as the work of a 'radical left-wing conspiracy.' It’s a familiar script: when people resist, accuse them of being puppets. When communities organise, insist they’re being manipulated. When the state loses control of the narrative, claim shadowy forces are pulling the strings. Yet for all the bluster, the administration has provided no evidence—none—that the protests are anything other than what they appear to be: a spontaneous, decentralised uprising against an agency whose actions have crossed a moral line for millions of Americans.

The killing of Good, captured on video, has only intensified that anger. The attempt by the Trump administration to portray the killing as an act of 'self-defence' has only served to pour further gasoline on the fire. In Portland, where two people were shot during protests, the same dynamic has played out: a community already on edge, already distrustful, already aware that the Trump administration's first instinct is to protect itself rather than the public.

What ties these events together is not just violence, but the political context in which that violence occurs. ICE has become a symbol of something far larger than immigration enforcement. It represents a worldview in which the state’s power to detain, deport, and discipline is treated as unquestionable. It represents a government that sees dissent as a threat rather than a democratic right. And it represents an administration that has repeatedly used fear—of migrants, of crime, of 'outsiders'—as a tool to consolidate power.

But fear cuts both ways. The administration’s insistence that the resistance is a coordinated left-wing plot reveals its own anxiety. If the protests were truly fringe, truly marginal, truly the work of a few radicals, there would be no need for such frantic messaging. The panic comes from the recognition that the resistance is broad-based, decentralised, and politically diverse. It includes people who have never attended a protest in their lives. It includes families who have seen neighbours taken away. It includes communities who have watched ICE expand its reach into schools, hospitals, and workplaces. It includes people who simply refuse to accept that cruelty is an acceptable instrument of policy.

And now, in a twist that exposes the administration’s own contradictions, some protesters have begun calling for 'regime change.' It’s meant to highlight the hypocrisy of a government that claims to champion democracy abroad while dismissing democratic dissent at home. It’s impossible to ignore the irony: the same administration that insists it wants to bring 'democracy' to countries like Venezuela is now facing domestic protesters who argue that the United States itself has drifted away from democratic norms and toward the creation of a police state.

Of course, the calls for regime change are, for the moment anyway, symbolic, not literal. They reflect frustration, not a blueprint for insurrection. But symbolism matters. It forces a confrontation with the uncomfortable truth that many Americans no longer trust their government to act in good faith. They see an administration that deploys federal agents into cities without local consent, that uses militarised force against protesters, that treats dissent as sedition. They see a political leadership that demands loyalty rather than accountability. And they see a system that seems increasingly willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of 'security.' There is no reason to think that the protests could not continue to expand to the point that the very political legitimacy of the Trump administration is threatened.

The administration’s response has been to double down: more rhetoric about law and order,' more attempts to delegitimise protesters, more claims of conspiracies lurking behind every act of resistance. But repression is not a strategy; it’s a symptom. It signals that the government has lost the ability to persuade and must instead rely on force and fear.

As congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has observed: 'I understand that Vice President Vance believes shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in. I do not. That is a fundamental difference between VP Vance and me. I do not believe that American people should be assassinated on the street.'

The resistance to ICE is not a conspiracy. It is a reckoning. And the louder the administration insists otherwise, the clearer it becomes that the real crisis is not in the streets—it’s within the walls of the White House.