Breaking News from Pod Save America - NEW Viral Video of ICE Has People OUTRAGED

Episode Date: January 17, 2026

Videos of ICE agents in Minneapolis are going VIRAL, sparking protests after the fatal shooting of Renee Good. Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer break down what’s happening now. Go to https://www.cookunity.com/CROOKED for 50% off your first order. Thanks to CookUnity for supporting the show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everybody. I'm here with Dan. Love it. How are you? Living the dream. Obviously, chaos continues to unfold in Minneapolis and in Minnesota. The administration continues to threaten escalation. Trump is now threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act. Meanwhile, we want to keep you updated on just what it feels like to be on the ground. So let's go to this first clip that captures a moment in which somebody was grabbed by ice off the street. Yes, you are required to. Where is safe? Look, sir, are you going to do this the easy way or are we going to take you in?

You cannot take me. Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Do you have documentation? I do have documentation. And you present it to me, please. Why are you asking me for my paperwork? Because of your accent.

I still, you have an accent to. Where were you born, sir? Where were you born at? Put your hands down your back. So, Dan, we have somebody basically being grabbed off the street and the officer explicitly saying, I'm asking for your papers because you have an accent. Yeah. It is. It embodies everything that's happening here. It's just a bunch of guys on a power trip without any concern for due process or, you know, any of our other constitutional rights

just insisting someone, do someone. If they don't do it, they arrest them. You know, we're here in Los Angeles. And obviously, Trump had deployed the military here. There have been been periods in which ICE was doing a big crackdown, a big showy crackdown here. And Trump would describe Los Angeles as a hellhole and a war zone, but it didn't feel that way on the ground. You hear reports about ICE being at a Home Depot. You hear reports about ice coalescing around other parts of the city. You felt the presence.

You knew it was going on. But it didn't feel like it was happening everywhere because Los Angeles as a city is a big place. And ICE didn't have the scale, didn't feel like it was bringing the scale. didn't feel like it was bringing the scale to match the size of Los Angeles. It is just not that way in Minneapolis. And what is clear when you talk to friends and family in Minneapolis, when you hear reports from Minneapolis, is what we are seeing is what it feels like. They really are everywhere. They really are having a big impact on what it feels like to live and work and go to school in Minneapolis

because everywhere you go, there is a possibility that a group of guys are going to jump. about of an unmarked car wearing masks to interrogate you or to go after the people following them or to get rough with protesters, throw people into holding cells because they're annoying them, I guess. And you see that whoever this officer is, who's obviously wearing a mask is saying, I'm stopping you because of your accent, which just reveals, A, what their goal is. And B, that they're just poorly trained. Like, they're not equipped to explain. what they're doing in a way that isn't unconstitutional. All right, let's go, let's go to the next clip.

Eklund followed out onto the streets of Woodbury, as ICE agents led him to his own somewhat private neighborhood and passed his own home. Must have run my plate because they drove into my neighborhood and into my cul-de-sac where I live. There's no circumstance where they would have rolled through there without knowing that. He stayed behind them until they stopped him.

What can I do for you? One warning for what? You will not be following us anymore or you will be arrested. I can follow you wherever I want. You will be arrested. A little while later, they follow through on that threat. You've been warned that you continue to follow us and you're breaking a lot of, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Hell no.

Nope. We warned you, sir. Nope. One of those ICE agents went into the back seat, gave me a chokehold around the driver's headrest, unbuckled my seatbelt from behind me in my car. And those five agents pulled me to the street, put me in cuffs. and put me in an unmarked van. Ice agents technically never arrested Eklund.

They did cause several injuries, including a black eye and other marks on his face. And they held him at a detention facility for more than nine hours. Nine hours. Nine hours. Never technically arrested. And looked up his plates or did something to bring him. That is the craziest part of this.

It's so fucked up. They brought him to his own house. To what? Send a message that they had looked him up to, to intimidate him? To send a message that they can get him wherever he is, right? So he's following them. They look in the river mirror.

They, he's following them as he is allowed to do legally. It's something to stop him from doing it. They look up his plates. They run his plates. Then they lead him to his own home to send the message. Then they arrest him anyway, or detain him, I guess, because he's never actually arrested, which is this giant loophole. They keep running through.

And look at the bruises on his face. Like, how does that happen? There's no charges, right? They never seem to have been able to claim he broke any law. By the way, it's a small moment, but when the officer pulls at his door, he says something like, you break it a lot of laws. Doesn't say what, you know, doesn't accuse him of anything specific, but just sort of like, you're breaking laws. I'm going to, I'm going to grab you because you're breaking laws. This is a, my understanding is like a somewhat prominent person in the area that people know and are seeing that like, look what is happening.

Look at what they're doing here. Look at how they're harassing people. This is just old school thuggish, like right-wing militia behavior. It's a paramilitary group that is running rampant. And this idea where they are just detaining people instead of arresting them is a, like I said, it's a loophole that goes through where they don't actually have any probable cause. They don't have to justify why they did it. They bring it. They cuff them up.

They rough them up. They take them to a detention center. They leave them there for a long time. and they let him go. And that's it. They never have to explain why they did it, why they let them go, why they picked them up, why they let them go? Because they had, these people are breaking no laws. They're committing no crimes. And there's no evidence to suggest either one of those things. So they're just trying to intimidate them one by one. And this is partly why among many good reasons a free society doesn't have agents of the state wearing masks. Because when you are,

because they are not acting as individuals. They are acting on behalf of the government. And so if they are acting on behalf of the government and they do not follow the law, they do not follow procedure, they stop being agents of the state and they start being people that you can investigate, that you can question, that you can sue because you're supposed to be able to say, that's the guy. That's the guy that grabbed me. That's the guy that bruised my face or cut my seatbelt or put me in a chokehold. That's the one. And either the government stands behind what that person did or they don't. but when you were, but they are not as individuals given whatever, they're now saying this phrase absolute immunity, which no human being on earth has ever had. And, uh, uh, uh, the masks are part of it. And so we have, they're grabbing people. There, there, there was that the kid in front of the in front of the target or the Walmart who was grabbed, uh, basically beaten up thrown into a car. And they dropped him off at a different parking lot. He had to kind of find his way back. That's, that is what authoritarian government.

That's what dictators do. They grab you, they scare you, they dump you out of the side of a car. That is not something that is supposed to happen in the United States of America. And I do think, I don't know, Dan, like there was a, you know, the, I'm always wary of polling that says what Donald Trump is doing on illegal immigration is unpopular. Not that I think it is popular, but I do think that the Trump theory is that people don't like it, but they, but they, they still come away seeing him as someone who's willing to do the hard, strong thing. And like it gives him some sort of like credibility in a deeper, harder to measure way. Like I think they have a more sophisticated understanding how people answer questions sometimes

than Democrats do. That said, I think this shit is alienating to just about everybody. And so John, I talked with this a little bit on Friday's pod. But in the CNN poll, they ask people, does the deployment of ICE agents make cities more safe or less safe, and a majority said less safe. And I think that's an absolutely essential finding because if people come to the conclusion, as they are watching these videos, that this level of chaos, this level of thuggery, this level of conflict is making us less safe, not more safe, the entire political narrative around immigration for Trump collapses.

I think that's really important. Because as we think about how to talk about this, how to react to it, is, yes, you have these things that show that, that immigration is, that things Trump is doing is unpopular and usually get to that, those majority numbers with 85, 99% of Democrats, two thirds of Republicans and 10% of Republicans. Sorry, two thirds of independents, 10% of Republicans. And when you look at this, there is now 15 to 20% of not just Republicans, but Trump 2024 voters who do not like what's happening, who think the shooting was not justified, who think Renee Good was not a domestic terrorist, who think the officer should be charged

with crimes who think ISIS is going too far. And that is, that's the, that's the collapse of the coalition. And you also see this numbers very strongly with Latinos, right, who are, who was a group who sort of counterintuitively for a lot of liberals who sometimes approach immigration in a simple-minded way, assume that Latinos are, would be against Trump's immigration policies on, you know, on merit. But in that election, a lot of them went, you know, they, they didn't like what was happening at the border. They didn't like the chaos. And now you're seeing a worse situation. And so, like, like, yes, we should try to think strategically about how this all plays itself out. But there's just no question in my mind that this is very, very bad politically for Trump.

And there's a report in Axios today that believes they now think that. They just did a meeting of the White House day where they reviewed all Trump's immigration numbers and they're in the toilet. And they're trying to think about whether they have to recalibrate. It doesn't mean they're going to start being better. But at least, but they are getting the message. They're starting to worry that this is hurting them politically. I also think it's worth saying, like, why is this happening? Why, why is this starting to hurt them politically? It is because people are standing up to them and the people are filming, people are talking about their own experiences and you're seeing more and more interviews and people on the street who maybe haven't been part of protest before. Maybe I've never been felt this way about the government before. Never felt scared of the government before. Never felt like this was going to actually happen to them or to people that they knew. And I do think that matters.

And so when you see Trump threatened to evoke the insurrection act or you see Trump post that like great people of Minnesota, your retribution is coming. I think that's a we should be worried about that. We should take that threat really, really seriously. But we should also know that that is bluster. And behind it, they are like, they are not immune to political pressure. They are not immune to bad images. And one of Trump's tricks is pretending otherwise.

But it matters that people are standing up to him. Okay, let's, on that note, go to one last clip. Well, this is ridiculous. It's a waste of money, a waste of time. All these men out here for what? What inspired you to come out here? Well, I just couldn't sit home. I've been in marches and stuff, and I had to do something.

It's so, you know, what can you do other than wait until we vote again? But this is just crazy. I don't believe. They have all these men, for what? A few people that are. against people doing wrong things, that's all. No, this is too bad. This is shameful.

I live in Minneapolis. I'm from living in Minnesota most of my life, and I took a half day off of work just so I could be down here. The president has said it's basically threatening to use the Insurrection Act. What does it like to have that threatened by the president of the United States against a state, an American state? Yeah. It's intense. All of us have other things to be doing. You know, and what's going to happen is that Minneapolis is still going to take care of each other.

I love hearing that first woman do basically hear her talking about this in that great, like, Minnesota, Scandinavian accent being like, yeah, of course I'm going to come out here and take on the fascist, but said in the sweetest way by like, I believe she's like maybe hit by tear. She was like wiping her face because she's out there. And there's, I was talking about this last night at Love It or Leave It. And, you know, as this is all unfolding, all the, the social media managers at all the different government agencies of the Trump administration are feeling they're feeling their their loins. And they're like posting all this like Groyper adjut prop like, you know, remember yourselves, America, you know, one of ours, one of yours, one of yours, all. that stuff. And one of the ones they always post is like, America is for Americans. And that's something Stephen Miller has said. And we know what they mean when they say it. But I do think, like, it is reassuring, right, that like America is still also filled with Americans.

And they're not interested in living in a police state. Not even, and even plenty of Republicans are able to see through the Trump line on this because they have that libertarian rebellious streak in them that makes them really discomfort, really uncomfortable with state power. Part of the reason the Second Amendment has such purchase is because they are afraid of state power and don't want a state monopoly on violence. And I do think that is a check. It still is a check that people just don't want to live in a country that feels like this. It is sort of in the long history of this country, the battle to defend.

find what being an American is. And in the Trump telling of it, it's obviously anyone who is white, anyone who's been here a long time. And in their view, the people who are peacefully standing in the street doing civil disobedience to protect their rights, protect the freedoms of others and the rights of others, they are the enemy, right? Well, there's the alternative version of the story, the one that our old boss who's talked about all the time, the one that goes through suffrage, civil rights, stonewall, everything that's ever happened is that they're the most patriotic embodiment of the ideal of American values is protest to try to make this a better country. To people who have, the guy who's taking a half day off work, that woman who's standing out there,

the people who are sharing these videos on social media, which is a very, very powerful thing that's helping shift the politics here. That is the most American thing. Like, that is the proof, like that what Trump is arguing for is wrong, is what people are doing. And it's very, very, very powerful. very, very, very powerful. Yeah. Shout to everybody in Minneapolis and Minnesota, who are trying their best to protect people and stand up for their communities and making sure the word gets out. My fiance is from Minnesota. I love Minneapolis. And I do think Trump missed with the wrong group of people because there's a kind of quiet pride

to that place that I think you're seeing. And I think it is beautiful. And on that, I also think it's great when people subscribe to this channel. It's a very, very classic. Great transition. We are trying to get the word out. We are trying to do our best to help people understand what's happening in this moment. There's a ton of right-wing news out there. There's a ton of people trying to discredit these protests,

trying to blame Renee Good for her own death, trying to defend what is indefensible. And the more people that can get behind what we're doing, doing here just by clicking subscribe or sharing this video or commenting on this video, it really does help us build a bigger pro-democracy media. And that's what we need. We need pro-democracy media to support people standing up for democracy on the ground. So thank you.

Dan, good to see ya. And we'll keep coming back to you as we learn more in the days ahead. Bye, everyone. HODSA of America is brought to you by Cook Unity. I've been using Cook Unity forever for years, long before they ever sponsor this podcast. It is fantastic. Most of my meals are from Cook Unity. They deliver chef-designed meals that balance real flavor, nutrition, and convenience with no cooking or planning required. They also let you choose what works for you with collections like

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