Former President Barack Obama is sending a warning to all Americans amid the Trump administration’s ICE operations in Minnesota, cautioning that it will have broader implications on “basic freedoms.”
“More and more Americans are voicing their outrage at the tactics being deployed by federal agents in Minnesota. But it’s important to understand the broader implications of what this administration is doing, and the threat it poses to the basic freedoms of every American,” wrote Obama in a post on X.
America’s first Black president shared a recent episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the New York Times podcast, featuring immigration reporter Caitlin Dickerson, who lays out what she sees as the dangerous impacts of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies.
Obama said the podcast does a “good job of laying out what’s at stake, and why all of us need to get off the sidelines to demand change.”
Dickerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Atlantic, emphasizes that, at its core, the Trump administration’s immigration tactics undermine the perception that the U.S. is a nation that honors the rule of law.
“When you turn on the news and you look at what’s happening in the United States right now, it doesn’t look like a place where the rule of law is still in effect or where the country is necessarily free to participate in basic democratic freedoms, like voting and protesting. There’s a lot of violence in the streets right now,” said Dickerson. “We see them taking into custody American citizens. We see them taking into custody people who have legal status, stopping people and openly acknowledging that they’re stopping people because of their physical appearance, their race, or their accent.”
The experienced journalist noted that ICE officials, supported by Border Patrol agents in American city streets, have bypassed the enforcement procedures of years past in an effort to scale the amount of arrests but also “foster fear and division.”
Dickerson also touches on the ways in which ICE and Homeland Security officials have embraced white nationalist “dog whistles” at a time when Black Americans are being swept up in the Trump’s administration’s immigration raids, from a 6-month-old nearly losing their life after being tear gassed, to Black Chicago residents, who are U.S. citizens, being zip-tied and dragged out of their homes and taken into custody.
“They’ve used images that speak to Manifest Destiny and this idea that the United States was the land intended for white people,” shared Dickerson. “But the fact is that if you’re a member of the Proud Boys or you’re a follower of QAnon, you recognize these exact phrases that are being used as a kind of call to action to apply for a job as an ICE agent.”
Aside from the stated goal of removing undocumented immigrants from the U.S., the award-winning journalist notes that members of the Trump administration, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, “want a return to not just a majority-white country…but also one where white American culture is dominant.”
She continued, “That we’re not so much viewed as a diverse nation of immigrants, where different languages and different foods are celebrated, but one that is more purely a white-supremacist country.”
More alarmingly, Dickerson notes the ICE use of newly funded facial recognition technology has the potential to cause harm to all Americans, regardless of their immigration status. The technology enables the government to create “dossiers” on U.S. residents, including education and financial records, social media accounts, utility records, and even license plate information.
“There are lots of concerns about what happens with all that data and who is being swept into these collection efforts. I think it’s pretty impossible to keep American citizens out when you’re collecting video for the purposes of facial recognition, whether it’s at the border when people are coming home from their vacation or in the interior of the country,” said Dickerson.
In a memo issued by Trump in September 2025, the president identified domestic terrorists as those who espouse views that are deemed anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, views opposing the “traditional American family.” Dickerson notes, “[This] is how this administration would describe anybody who is out in the streets protesting or trying to protect immigrants without legal status in their communities.”
She adds, “You can’t imagine language that’s more broad.”
