What gutless corporations don’t get about ICE | Will Bunch Newsletter

Is this actually an honest-to-goodness turning point in the war for the soul of America? Monday night, the deny-everything-admit-nothing Trump regime surprised observers by revealing that violence-provoking Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino has been sent home from Minneapolis and may even be retiring. That’s a giant win for the power of everyday people resisting, but turning around the battleship of tyranny will still take much more work.

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

One of the many remarkable and lasting ideas that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. placed into the national conversation was the concept of something he called “negative peace.”

Although the phrase began appearing in the writings of the civil rights leader in the late 1950s, King made the idea famous in his 1963 Letter From Birmingham Jail, where he was locked up for fighting segregation in Alabama’s largest city. He was annoyed by a letter from eight local white clergyman, titled a “Call for Unity,” that begged King to end a civil disobedience crusade for racial integration and seek progress through negotiations and the courts.

When an aide smuggled the newspaper into King’s cell, he began furiously scribbling his response in the margins of the ad before writing more on any scrap of paper he could find. His key passage argues that the white moderate was a greater threat to Black freedom than the KKK, because he was someone “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice,” and who wants African Americans to wait for a “more convenient season.”

Flash forward 63 years, and the grand pooh-bahs of U.S. capitalism have learned nothing from this. On Sunday, 60 major corporations based in Minnesota — feeling caught in the crossfire of the federal immigration raids tearing apart greater Minneapolis and the growing resistance movement — issued a cowardly and pathetic call for a negative peace to reduce the tensions.

The open letter that was released through the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce was signed by the CEOs or equivalents of almost every major Gopher State brand that you could think of — including Target, 3M, General Mills, Hormel, UnitedHealth (yes, that UnitedHealth) and all five major sports franchises. Some of these firms are beginning to see real economic fallout from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and protest activities, which have kept some frightened Black and brown workers at home and triggered a large general strike last Friday.

The letter reads little different from the Birmingham ministers’ “Call for Unity.”

“With yesterday’s tragic news” — a vague, bloodless reference to the 10 shots fired by federal officers into a 37-year-old intensive care nurse named Alex Pretti — “we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions,” the letter states. It notes that Minnesota business leaders have been in touch with Gov. Tim Walz, the Donald Trump White House, and others in pleading for what it hopes would be a solution to the state’s crisis.

Pretti is never mentioned in the letter. Neither is Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother of three who was gunned down behind the wheel of her family SUV by an ICE agent as she attempted to drive away from a confrontation. In fact, ICE is never mentioned, nor are the federal agency’s most outrageous tactics such as the seizure of a 5-year-old boy as “bait” to detain him and his father, or dragging a barely dressed Hmong refugee who is a U.S. citizen out of his home in frigid weather.

The entire letter is remarkable not for what it says — since it says very little beyond praying this whole mess somehow goes away so they can go back to making money without thinking about such dreadful things — than for what it doesn’t say.

There is no condemnation of the murders of two U.S. citizens who did nothing beyond legally monitoring the federal officers and their activities while on public streets. There is no condemnation of the ICE tactics in seizing hard-working migrants with no criminal records who are the backbone of the Minnesota community. There is nothing about what MLK would have called “positive peace” — a desire for real justice.

That’s probably because positive peace requires bold choices and displays of real courage — qualities that modern corporate America seems to have misplaced in a giant warehouse somewhere.

Exhibit A would have to be Target, the large national retailer who — with its hundreds of stores and its name slapped on the NBA’s Timberwolves’ arena — is now to many Americans the corporate face of Minnesota. Under pressure from demonstrators including more than 100 clergy who protested outside Target’s Minneapolis headquarters on Friday, the retailer still said nothing, before the tepid group letter, about the ongoing ICE raids or why agents have been allowed to stage operations in its parking lots and even inside stores.

There’s a bleak history here. In 2020, Minnesota became the epicenter of the fight for racial justice when the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd was captured on video. That time, the state’s CEOs not only expressed moral outrage but pledged to spend heavily on diversity initiatives. Five years later, the local news site Racket reported many of these firms had backtracked and that barely a third of the pledged $550 million has been spent.

This time, the business leaders just want the “tension” to disappear. That’s not so easy. Just ask Target. Its early 2025 move to end its diversity initiatives as Trump took office sparked calls from Black leaders for a boycott that has cut into store traffic and lowered Target’s stock price. It seems that moral surrender actually does have a price.

Also on Sunday, the team chaplain for the Timberwolves — ironically, one of the teams that signed onto the corporate letter — issued a personal statement with loud echoes of the Letter from Birmingham Jail, calling out any churches that had prayed that morning for peace and unity but not for justice.

“Peace is what the powerful ask for when they don’t want to be interrupted,” Matt Moberg wrote in a short piece that went viral on social media, adding: “Unity that refuses to name violence is just loyalty to the ones holding the weapons.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that corporate America misread the room. Sunday’s statement suggested a continued deer-in-the-headlights reaction from the shock of Trump’s return to office — even as the CEOs ignore not just the power of the Target boycotts but the recent success of economic justice campaigns against firms from Disney to Avelo Airlines, not to mention the solidarity that drove the Minneapolis general strike.

Already, there is growing talk of a national general strike or expanded boycotts by millions of citizens who are also consumers and who are both furious over the Good and Pretti murders and now flabbergasted by the corporate cone of silence. America’s business leaders don’t understand that cowardice has a steep cost attached.

Question: Why do Dem Leaders want to save ICE, when nobody really else does? What’s the motivation? — @keynesaddiction.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: I wonder this too. Both ICE and the current crew at Customs and Border Protection have been simmering for far too long in a toxic, unredeemable culture that cannot be reformed. What’s more, the shocking abuses on display in Minnesota and two killings have now convinced a plurality of U.S. voters that ICE should be abolished. Still, I can understand the Democrats’ bind, since at the moment the party has no other political leverage beyond the ability to block most Senate legislation with the filibuster. It might be best to push hard for as much as can be done in 2026, while running in the midterms on a platform of abolishing ICE when they gain power on Capitol Hill.

LOL — remember that whole Greenland thing? It feels like that was five years ago, but some of you had some good responses on dealing with Donald Trump’s bluster about an American takeover, even if things have temporarily cooled down. Tom Desmond said the Europeans “need to quit pretending that they can ‘manage’ him through flattery and soft words. Instead, they need to apply threats — i.e., whatever tariffs he imposes on Europe over Greenland they will return against the U.S. three-fold.” Jo Parker said Congress needs to reassert its powers over tariffs and declaring war, but, “With the spineless [Dave] McCormick and [John] Fetterman representing us, I’m not sanguine that such actions will take place, however.”

📮 This week’s question: Things are coming to a head in Congress over funding for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Should Democrats make a deal for ICE reforms such as unmasking and requiring arrest warrants, or must they push for bigger concessions, or even abolishing ICE? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “ICE funding” in the subject line.

I must confess that keeping up with the downward spiral of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Sen. John Fetterman since he took office in 2023 can get tiresome. At first, Fetterman’s rightward tack seemed largely a function of his zealous support for Israel, which caused him to wave off allegations of war crimes by Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government. Soon others pointed to his health woes — hospitalizations for a stroke and depression, among other things — as he endorsed more and more Trump-flavored ideas.

Amid mounting outrage over Trump’s aggressive immigration raids, Fetterman made some comments that had his growing legion of critics wonder if the senator’s real heart issue was whether he had one. “ICE performs an important job for our country,” the Democrat posted on X last July, adding that any calls to abolish the agency were “inappropriate and outrageous.” Even after the Jan. 7 ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Fetterman’s middle-of-the-road stance was this: “Secure the border. Deport all the criminals. Stop targeting the hardworking migrants in our nation.” In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents, even Pennsylvania’s GOP Sen. Dave McCormick had called for a congressional investigation before Fetterman said anything.

On Sunday night, though, Fetterman issued a heartfelt and moving statement. Well, a Fetterman did.

“For more than a decade, I lived undocumented in the US,” the senator’s wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, a native of Brazil, posted on X. “Every day carried the same uncertainty and fear lived in my body — a tight chest, shallow breaths, racing heart. What I thought was my private, chronic dread has now become a shared national wound. This now-daily violence is not ‘law and order.’ It is terror inflicted on people who contribute, love, and build their lives here. It’s devastatingly cruel and unAmerican.” Her post ended with an emoji of a broken heart.

Sen. Fetterman finally issued a statement nearly a day later. He called for “an immediate end” to the ICE operations in Minnesota, adding: “It has become an ungovernable and dangerous urban theatre for civilians and law enforcement that is incompatible with the American spirit.” But Fetterman still disappointed critics of Trump immigration policy, insisting that while he wants ICE reforms he still supports the embattled agency, and won’t join other Democrats in shutting down the federal government if those reforms aren’t happening.

Pennsylvanians thought they were getting a progressive voice and a moral leader when they elected Fetterman in 2022. It feels now like we elected the wrong Fetterman.

It was only 16 years ago, but at the dawn of the 2010s there was still a robust conversation about how to save the traditional journalism outlets — especially newspapers — that had flourished in the 20th century. On Jan. 27, 2010, I criticized an idea coming from Apple that a new kind of $1,000 iPad it nicknamed “the Jesus tablet” would fix everything. I wrote: “To survive, we need to change our whole worldview — finding ways to encourage more dialogue with readers and more community involvement so that local readers feel they have a stake in this thing. And we also need to do a better job at the thing we claim to be already good at — real journalism that makes a difference." Read the rest: “Apple’s iPad will NOT save journalism.”

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.