Live Not by Lies: ICE, Libraries, and the "Dual State"

On defending basic democratic conditions while remaining neutral on issues.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

“Facts are stubborn things.”

--U.S. President John Adams

Introduction

On December 29, 2025, approximately two dozen ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents arrested two undocumented immigrants in the Ridgedale Service Center in Hennepin County, Minnesota, a facility which houses the Ridgedale Public Library. Local eyewitnesses recorded the event. With the current “Operation Metro Surge” of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Border Patrol agents into Minnesota now occurring near and within public schools, official government buildings, and civic spaces that house public libraries, some larger questions arise about civic trust in public spaces, and even more, about the ensuing behavior of what has in recent weeks become something new in the American experience: a militarized, national police force being directed by the President.

To be clear, border control and enforcement of immigration policies are legitimate functions of any sovereign nation. And the American Library Association has advised library workers of the right of ICE agents to enter public facilities (including libraries) and of the legal scope of ICE activities with which they are required to comply. Many colleges and universities are doing the same, in order to adhere to federal and state laws, while also retaining spaces not open to this kind of law enforcement. However, the denaturing of the phrase “law enforcement” in the name of immigration control, and the mendacious official statements from the Trump administration in the wake of the very public killings of two American citizens at the hands of ICE agents, now raise fundamental questions about the civic culture and the liberal democratic order (as imperfect as they’ve been) throughout American history—questions which, we believe, should concern us as librarians.

Public libraries are both epistemic institutions and public spaces, and in fulfilling both of these functions (knowledge and civic) they have long been touted for contributing to a healthy democracy. However, we cannot be certain if even basic democratic conditions will continue to obtain because 1.) America’s epistemic divide -- exacerbated by media/information bubbles and social media designed to enrage us – risks becoming an existential threat to democracy; and 2.) the unrestrained, unaccountable actions of ICE in acting as the President’s personal branch of law enforcement threatens the integrity of (and trust in) public civic spaces, and the basic democratic conditions in which civil society functions.

In advancing the argument that present matters are of concern to librarianship, we are in no way abandoning the principle of institutional neutrality: we can (and should) as librarians be publicly neutral about immigration policy as an issue, while still being free—and indeed obligated—to raise alarm about escalating state violence in public spaces (of which libraries constitute a significant component), and to champion the First Amendment rights of Americans to protest such violence. We would argue that, as librarians, we have a professional and ethical stake in addressing two conjoined crises: an epistemic crisis, and a crisis of governance.

The Epistemic Crisis

A shared civic and epistemic reality, generally agreed on by most citizens, has collapsed in recent years. Examples of self-reinforcing and tribal media/information bubbles abound: the very different perceptions of the racial justice movement following the death of George Floyd in summer 2020; the vaccine mandates and associated vaccine policies during the COVID pandemic; and the contested outcome of the Presidential election in 2020, and the ensuing claims about a “stolen election,” to name the most obvious controversies. The fractured information system means that fractured realities result for many of us, and unconscious motivated reasoning becomes the driving force in causing different tribes to “believe their priors” and choose their preferred sources based on that motivation. Jonathan Rauch, in his 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge, wrote,

Politicians and pundits--everyone from senators and two former secretaries of state two leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement communities—[have been sounding] alarms that American civic life might be losing its grip on reality: its ability, that is, to tell truth from untruth or even believe there is a difference…In 2020, former President Barack Obama stated the matter starkly: “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis” (p. 9).

The current divide manifests itself perhaps most starkly in the reactions to the available evidence about the killings of two citizens in Minneapolis Minnesota, by ICE and Border Patrol agents. The intense polarization around the video evidence of two shootings of these agents—the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—shows just how far people living under a common constitutional order can flee from the same evidence, or spin the same facts—and argue about them. Indeed, people are seeing (or claim to see) two different realities.

For some Americans, the massive presence of ICE agents in Minneapolis represents roving paramilitary squads not before present in the American experience, assaulting citizens who, in their First Amendment rights, are entitled to observe ICE raids and record (through filming) the actions of federal agents (and in Alex Pretti’s case, exercise his Second Amendment right to carry a firearm). Others see protesters interfering with the legitimate border security functions and deportation goals of the Trump administration, core to its immigration enforcement policies, and for which President Trump received a mandate of approval when he was returned to power in the 2024 election. Many of the latter therefore find convincing the Administration’s accusations that both Good and Pretti were “domestic terrorists”, and that both shootings represented legitimate uses of force.

However, recent events in the Twin Cities of Minnesota may have the potential to call larger numbers of citizens back to a shared reality. What is obvious from the shattering events of January 2026, however, is that more citizens, in their moral intuitions, are seeing beyond the latest reporting on the violent confrontations in a major American metropolis.

This re-emergence of a shared reality on some issues, at least, is encouraging, and resembles generally what lawyers call a “fact pattern.” But this set of facts is now enlarged beyond a particular legal case to account for all of the evidence and factual information available from videos, eyewitness accounts, and a variety of media accounts, in the large “case” involving the actions of ICE and Border Patrol agents This emerging picture of factual reality may not have solidified into certainty, but public opinion is now coalescing. The general public is now seeing more evidence that is comprehensive, congruent, coherent, and ongoing, over time, to form a picture of public brutality by an ostensible law enforcement agency with immigration deportation as its mission, that departs from the Policies Manual of Immigration and Customs Enforcement itself, and that departs from standard police procedures in other ways. Some observers believe that the rapid change of ICE into a paramilitary force enables the Trump administration to use Minneapolis-St. Paul as a testbed for dictatorship. News reports from multiple sources and from local observers—themselves demonized by federal officials—suggest the following:

• Undue violence inflicted on American citizens and immigrants such as breaking into their cars, invading their homes (a violation of the Fourth Amendment), and preventing citizens from emergency visits to hospitals;

• Violation of citizens’ First Amendment rights to protest (which includes the right to observe and record or film the actions of ICE or Border Patrol agents);

• Dehumanizing assaults upon individual dignity and beating citizens and immigrants savagely (including taking an elderly immigrant, but an American citizen, from his home into the freezing cold in his underwear);

• Use of racial profiling to make arrests, including against American citizens; and

• Many minority-owned businesses are now shuttered, and ordinary people have formed large networks of mutual support for immigrants—providing food, transportation for essential local trips—and support for each other.

This escalating, jarring pattern of many violations of civil rights laws, violent behavior, and inhumane treatment of immigrants (documented or undocumented) and American citizens alike reached an apogee on January 24, with what one writer called the “extrajudicial murder” of Alex Pretti. That he was carrying a legal weapon under Minnesota law, and engaged in protesting ICE activities and filming them—these facts aren’t in dispute except from Trump administration officials, who claim he shouldn’t have been carrying a legal weapon to a protest, a denial of Pretti’s Second Amendment rights.

In the wake of his killing, a new line was crossed into official mendacity in demeaning and defaming Pretti. This VA hospital nurse was referred to as a “domestic terrorist” by Immigration official Stephen Miller and Director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Official mendacity of this degree is a feature of authoritarian—even fascist—regimes, as political scientists, philosophers and historians have amply documented. A strong reaction from a wide swath of the public to the killing of Pretti, and the official “line” of Trump officials, blew through previous caveats and calculated excuse-making for ICE’s mission.

The clear pattern of observable authoritarian behavior by government agents became not a dry legal or even journalistic account: It became, for many, an incandescent blinking signal of threats to the most foundational principles of American life—of personal safety and freedom, the right to protest, the right to bear arms, and the opportunity to voice one’s opinions in the public square without harm or punishment. The “fact pattern” that has developed since ICE agents began their deportation raids in Minneapolis-St. Paul has crystallized in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti: the transformation of the nature of the American nation-state.

A Crisis of Governance

We are now on the cusp of coming to terms with what some experts call “democratic backsliding” and in imagining what a diminished civil society will look like. In fact, data analyst John Burn-Murdoch has developed a new scale with its own methodology for measuring “democratic backsliding,” and it points to various levels of assaults on civil liberties, sanctioning of state violence (ICE raids are an example), and checks-and-balances restraining the executive, in Trump’s second term. Burn-Murdoch identifies a downward trajectory across several criteria, but points as well to the strength of American institutions such as a free and independent press and the judicial system. Thousands of residents in a city under siege have found the strength to resist as a civic duty and in the long tradition of American civil disobedience to overweening, overcontrolling, or tyrannical state actions.

Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch (author of The Constitution of Knowledge) declared of President Trump’s actions that, “Yes, it’s Fascism”, while being careful to distinguish between the actions and characteristics of the President and those of the nation’s institutions, which (for now) remain democratic. The second account of the rise of authoritarianism complements that of Rauch. Ernest Fraenkel, in his theory of the “Dual State”, posits a “normative state” of mundane civic life, ordinary judicial proceedings, and application of civil codes, that runs in parallel with the “prerogative state” (the regime with total power, enforcing its will and demands for selective conformity, but enough to sustain a dictatorship). Most citizens experience the normative state, and learn to ignore any harms caused by the officials of the “prerogative state” if they don’t concern or affect them directly.

As discussed by the political scientist Azis Huq, Fraenkel drew on his experience in the Weimar Republic of Germany, and its collapse, with the rise of Hitler and Nazism, to show how aspects of that “normative state” were retained, but a “prerogative state” of arbitrary power and selective violence quickly gained control. State violence became a feature of the “prerogative state”, but it ran in parallel with the relatively calm “normative state”, and the population of Germany lived mostly within the latter even as violence, mind-numbing mendacity, and confabulations of the official ideology took over public life and drove dissent and pluralism into hiding.

Examples here for most of us are clear: we can visit our local city halls and have a document notarized; can assume local courts will resolve local disputes peacefully; can pay a traffic fine or appeal it; can attend local municipal meetings and express our views; can attend a political rally with others, and express uninhibited and raucous slogans and chants. And yes, visit our local public library. These are a mainstay of civic life in the “normative state” that Fraenkel described in a liberal democracy.

As conservative writer David French described recently, we have an emerging “prerogative state” in the actions of the Trump administration through a weaponized paramilitary force like ICE/Border Patrol, most clearly revealing itself in violations of liberal democratic norms and laws in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the citizens of which are as a result experiencing the “prerogative state.” Some Chicagoans and residents of Los Angeles, and other cities have experienced it in smaller measure. But most Americans continue living their lives in the “normative state” and aren’t personally harmed by this change in governance and so learn to accept the new reality of a “dual state.”

How does this affect libraries and librarians? What role should they play—if any—in resisting the “dual state”? Many librarians committed to institutional neutrality (as has been frequently argued on this substack) might argue that immigration enforcement (however undertaken) doesn’t concern library services directly and that, therefore, any kind of statement regarding the actions of ICE would be partisan and a breach of such commitments. However, we would counter that library neutrality has always been framed in terms of issues and creating the intellectual conditions in which library users can come to their own conclusions about those issues.

Present events do not, however, constitute an “issue.” What we see instead in the militarization of immigration control agents violating Americans’ civil rights with impunity and immunity constitutes a dramatic change to the underlying political conditions of the United States—conditions which are incompatible with the democratic polity that public libraries are intended to support and defend. While the authoritarian (and deadly) excesses of ICE may not relate directly to libraries per se, they should concern all public institutions—including libraries—for they threaten the very foundations of American democracy, including the right to due process and the freedom of assembly in public spaces—again, including libraries.

In a 2022 article, one of us (MD) argued with co-author John Wright that public libraries as institutions should be understood as “agents of the state”, and that (per Dunleavy and O’Leary [1987]) the “mode” of governance of that state (and its institutions) matters more than the form it takes. It was argued that publicly-funded libraries should adopt what Dunleavy and O’Leary referred to as the “guardian” mode, which retains

a strong sense of institutional force…to balance social forces and counter what it sees as instability or crises, but position themselves as neutral, that is, ensuring the integrity and proper functioning of the political system and its institutional mandate thereby serving the interests of the system itself. The guardian state is seen as an actor in a society of competing actors and/or structures. Effective guardian states have a strong sense of identity and see policy-making to require equally strong state capabilities to balance competing interests in society (Dudley & Wright 2022, 16, emphasis added).

What we have described above is not consistent with the “proper functioning of the political system;” as guardian institutions, publicly-funded libraries therefore have a stake (along with other public institutions) in seeking to address the epistemic and governance crises presently manifest in the conflict over ICE. At the same time, libraries and librarians can and should remain neutral as regards the debate over American immigration policy, and make available to users resources reflecting a diverse range of perspectives on that issue.

What is at stake is that lines have been crossed away from the rule of law, civic peace, and the liberal democratic order. These violations affect all of us as citizens, regardless of our political views, in the longer sweep of the nation’s history. More than the crossing of those lines, though, is the official mendacity—a feature of authoritarianism turning-to-fascism that Hannah Arendt described as the “annihilation of truth.” Arendt insisted that continuous lying by the state or by government officials disorients citizens, makes a common life impossible, and that truth itself is a “public good.”

Conclusion

We are now, in the U.S. and in other countries, caught in the long historical shadow of leaders and their moral echoes, about facts, evidence, and truth itself.

The great Russian dissident, novelist, and moral prophet Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a tract against the communist system and its official, all-encompassing, mind-warping mendacity, “Live Not By Lies”—in which he proclaimed that ordinary human beings have the moral force of their individual consciences to defy the glacis of official mendacity, and to experience inner freedom. Despite his turn to a darker authoritarian worldview later in his life, his proclamation of defiance to dictatorship and official lies lives into the present. The same call to conscience erupted from the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, whose “Power of the Powerless” speaks to the inner strength of ordinary citizens in maintaining contact with empirical reality, with facts that can be seen, heard, read, and observed, in daily life.

In our earlier national history, American President John Adams demonstrated his own conscience, pre-American Revolution, in defending a group of British soldiers in the infamous Boston Massacre against the clamor of his compatriots demanding mob justice against them. His prickly conscience, stubbornness, and devotion to his own principles won respect in the long term from fellow citizens. His most succinct aphorism comes from the record of that trial, along with a clear statement of the clarity for a society that lives within the bounds of the law and a shared reality:

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

We will have to come to terms with the official mendacity foisted upon us, that corrodes the very foundations of our constitutional system and rule of law, and how alternative voices in the noisy media landscape can be heard—and how ordinary citizens can record what they see, and what they come to know, from direct observation. Facts known (and documented) by citizens matter.

We believe that, while public libraries could continue as parts of the “normative state”, as described in Fraenkel’s theory, they will not be able to maintain an officially neutral stance regarding the “prerogative state” and its violation of the liberal democratic order itself as the result of authoritarian actions. Rauch’s amply-documented account of the emerging fascism personified by President Trump, alongside Fraenkel’s “dual state” theory, call for a more serious discussion of an emerging authoritarian order and how it affects all civic institutions, including libraries and cultural institutions, where civil peace, vibrant debate, and epistemic pluralism undergird liberal democracy.

Upholding the liberal democratic order is a foundation-stone for libraries, and for all citizens, in order to create pathways for regaining a shared reality. And when necessary, expressing that human need through what Gal Beckerman, in a commentary on actions of Minneapolis citizens, calls dissidence:

“The American dissidence, should it continue and grow, will need to look different from the resistance of months and years past. It will need to focus on what is common to all of us, what Havel called “the aims of life.” We share many more of these aims than we sometimes realize. We may disagree about tax rates and foreign policy, gun rights and rent freezes, but “normal” is a universal concept in America when it comes to what we expect for our children, our communities, and our sense of security and well-being. To be a dissident in this moment means moving beyond scoring points and underscoring differences, and on to recognizing what we are all losing—and blowing a whistle in order to prevent that loss.”

Appendix

Events are changing rapidly in the ICE/CBP immigration enforcement raids in Minneapolis/St. Paul and in other cities. Updates from the events described in this article include:

• The dismissal of Border Patrol “commander at large” Greg Bovino followed the shooting death of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis/St. Paul raids and then the appointment of Department of Homeland Security official Tom Homan to lead ICE/CBP operations there.

• A federal judge in Minnesota, Patrick Schiltz, has stated the ICE has violated over 100 court rulings during January 2026 alone

• ICE agents are now empowered to enter homes of suspected undocumented immigrants without judicial warrants

• The Department of Justice, facing fierce criticism, has opened a civil rights investigation into the shooting death of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents. As of this writing, no such investigation has been opened into the death of Renee Good.

• A federal judge has ruled against state and local officials in Minnesota in their bid to end Operation Metro Surge outright.

• Large-scale surveillance activities by ICE of both undocumented immigrants and protestors is drawing the attention of civil liberties groups, while protestors and observers of ICE raids have themselves deployed electronic tools to track location of ICE agents.

• Immigration expert Austin Kocher (faculty member at Syracuse University) has produced data showing that 92 percent of ICE detention growth is of immigrants without criminal records

• Large protests and rallies have occurred in Minneapolis/St. Paul and in many other cities, in addition to some shutdowns and strikes.

• The U.S. House Oversight Committee held a Congressional Forum (with members of the Senate) on ICE/Border Patrol actions involving violence against citizens and immigrants in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Testifying were two brothers of Renee Good, and three other citizens who experienced violence and infringements on their rights, at the hands of ICE or Border Patrol agents. This Forum was held on February 3, 2026.

• Tom Homan, the newly assigned official in charge of ICE/Border Patrol operations in Minneapolis/St. Paul, announced a draw-down of 700 field agents on Wednesday, February 4, 2026.

A timeline of events for Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis/St. Paul, December 2025/January 2026, is available here.

References

Dudley, M. Q., & Wright, J. (2022). The Role of Multidimensional Library Neutrality in Advancing Social Justice: Adapting Theoretical Foundations from Political Science and Urban Planning. Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy, 7(3), 13-24.

Dunleavy, P., & O'leary, B. (1987). Theories of the state: The politics of liberal democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Fraenkel, E., & Meierhenrich, J. (2017). The dual state : a contribution to the theory of dictatorship (First edition). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716204.001.0001

Rauch, J. (2021). The constitution of knowledge : a defense of truth. Brookings Institution Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6260616