How the ICE shooting in Minneapolis and calls to deport Nicki Minaj are related

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I’ll be honest, it didn’t take long for the fresh, excited energy I was trying to bring into 2026 to be quashed. (But maybe that’s on me — I forgot to put “attack a foreign country and seize its leader with only the murkiest of communications about what might come next” on my “out” list this year.)

But this week, I want to talk about two other stories that, when juxtaposed, paint a striking picture of how some people are grappling with life under the second Trump administration.

First, a kind of ridiculous one: the petitions to deport Nicki Minaj.

Have you all heard about this? More than 120,000 people have signed petitions calling for the rapper cum right wing political activist to be deported to her home country of Trinidad. Minaj was brought to the U.S. by her parents as a young child, and has spoken in the past about not being a U.S. citizen. And in recent months, she’s angered large portions of her fan base by praising Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement, after being outspokenly against the first Trump administration’s family separation policies. (There’s a whole lot of other stuff people don’t like about Minaj, which you can read about here.) One of the petitions asserts that deporting her “would serve as a reminder that public figures need to be accountable for their words and the broader impact they have on diverse communities.”

I read about all that a day before an ICE officer shot and killed a woman, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis.

There are, predictably, diverging accounts of what led to the shooting. The federal government says that it was an act of self-defense against Good, who they allege was attempting to drive her car into ICE agents. State and local officials are, quite literally, calling bull****. The mayor of Minneapolis described the event as “an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.” He then, uh, politely requested that ICE “get the f*** out of Minneapolis.” There is likely to be weeks of fallout as the federal and local governments clash over the continued presence of ICE in Minnesota, and the repercussions of Wednesday’s violence.

So what do these stories have to do with each other? To me, they illustrate the contradictions that come up when people try to cherry pick applications of the law. The signers of the Nicki Minaj deportation petitions seem to be deeply offended by her embrace of the Trump administration. (“If [Minaj] believes in supporting the agenda that all illegal immigrants should be deported no matter what they bring to this beautiful country then what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Good riddance homophobic Nicki,” one petitioner commented.) But in calling for her deportation, they are tacitly accepting a key bit of MAGA logic — that a person’s political ideology can and should be grounds for their removal.

If you accept that, then you may also have to accept that deporting people is something that requires a force of agents — agents whose job is to remove people from the country. Not just people who offend their fans.

Audre Lorde famously wrote that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” It may have felt fun for some people to feel like they were giving Nicki Minaj a taste of her own MAGA-flavored medicine by calling out her immigration status. But if those people are genuinely concerned about how Trump’s policies are affecting everyday people, their rage should potentially be focused more at the underlying structures of the administration than at one of its minor mouthpieces.