On January 9, two days after ICE officer Jonathan E. Ross shot poet Renee Nicole Good to death in Minneapolis, comedian John Mulaney announced that he was postponing his shows in the city scheduled for January 9-11 because of safety concerns. Indeed, the situation became so dire in Minnesota that in-person school was cancelled for several days. In response to anti-ICE protests, President Trump has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Mulaney is not the first artist to avoid a locale because of ICE’s potentially violent presence there. Various cities cancelled Latino-related cultural events throughout 2025. In September, musician Bad Bunny revealed that he chose to skip the United States during his 2025-26 world tour because he worried that ICE would attempt to arrest concertgoers. (Since then, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said ICE would be “all over” the Super Bowl, where Bad Bunny is headlining the halftime show.)
This shrinking of the public square may not be what the Trump administration says they are doing by increasing ICE deployment, but nevertheless, free expression, open exchange, and the cultural and arts sector are clear casualties of this crackdown. In other words, the fear, chaos, and violence that ICE is perpetrating doesn’t only have a local impact through arrests, deportations, and disruptions to community life (for instance, ICE’s presence is negatively affecting Twin Cities bookstores); the deployment of this paramilitary force must be understood as part of the broader attack on free expression and dissent, and is having an impact on the American artistic and cultural landscape.
The tactics of intimidation of immigrant communities in Minneapolis are also tactics of silencing. And they are of a piece with the administration’s broader attacks on education, on knowledge, on history, on language and identities, as the administration aims to subdue and repress freedom of expression. We see this in the purging of “improper ideology” through executive orders such as Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History or the ideological takeover of the Kennedy Center. We see it in the government’s deportation of journalist Mario Guevara, its targeting of non-citizen pro-Palestinian student activists like Mahmoud Khalil, its stripping of international students’ visas, and its revocation of temporary legal status for more than 1.5 million immigrants.
“The Trump Administration’s racial profiling and brutal targeting of immigrants is by far the most pervasive and repressive attempt in recent memory by our government to silence us,” said Dinaw Mengestu, PEN America president. “The fundamental principles of free speech should be guaranteed to all, not predicated on citizenship status or subject to the whims of the federal government. And underneath it all, the attack on immigrants in Minnesota is a veneer for an even more insidious project, to create an authoritarian regime that acts with utter impunity.”
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls for “the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” But under the conditions now being imposed by the Trump administration, who can exercise these fundamental human rights is narrowing, becoming fundamentally unequal. This chilling inequality is especially being weaponized against Latino communities, Somali communities, and other immigrant groups that ICE is targeting.
But we all must remember: the government could target someone else tomorrow.
Mulaney’s and others’ impulse to keep their audiences safe from all of the violence is understandable. But it should not go unnoticed that what is happening in Minneapolis has a much wider impact, chilling the space for dissent, artistic expression, and cultural engagement. To limit U.S. residents’ experience of the fullness of the world’s cultures is to cause people to live in a circumscribed artistic landscape. Separate from the clashes unfolding on the ground, this is a broader form of censorship and repression worsening simultaneously.
We will all be worse for it if we do not uphold a democracy in which freedom of expression for all can flourish.
