The January Crisis

Part I: Introduction — The Anatomy of an Intermestic Conflict
The events of January 2026, collectively designated by historians and security analysts as "The January Crisis," represent a paradigmatic shift in the ontology of American national security. What initially manifested as a discrete law enforcement engagement in Minneapolis—the fatal shooting of activist Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent—rapidly metastasized into a systemic crisis that laid bare the eroding boundaries between foreign policy, domestic governance, and irregular warfare. To understand the full magnitude of this crisis, one must abandon the traditional bifurcation of "foreign" and "domestic" threats. Instead, the January Crisis must be analyzed as a quintessential "intermestic" conflict, where international geopolitical maneuvers trigger domestic tectonic shifts, and internal civil unrest is operationalized as a kinetic element of global great power competition.
The crisis did not emerge in a vacuum. It was the direct, if nonlinear, downstream consequence of a radical reassertion of American hegemonic power abroad: "Operation Absolute Resolve," the unilateral military intervention in Venezuela. This operation, characterized by the Trump administration as a restoration of order and a strike against narco-terrorism, served as the geopolitical primer that radicalized the domestic environment. When federal agents subsequently deployed to the streets of Minneapolis to enforce immigration mandates, they were not merely entering a local jurisdiction; they were stepping into a pre-conditioned battlespace where they were viewed by significant segments of the population not as law enforcement officers, but as an occupying force analogous to the troops deployed in Caracas.
This report provides an exhaustive analysis of the crisis through three converging lenses. First, it offers a rigorous forensic examination of the Minneapolis incident against the backdrop of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) 2023 Policy Statement on the Use of Force. This analysis reveals a profound disconnect between the doctrinal constraints on deadly force—specifically regarding "objective reasonableness" and "imminent threat"—and the operational realities of the encounter. Second, it dissects the ensuing "weaponization of federalism," wherein state and federal authorities utilized their respective legal apparatuses to wage a proxy war for sovereignty, invoking the Supremacy Clause and the doctrine of absolute immunity as weapons of political coercion. Finally, it situates the domestic unrest within the theoretical framework of modern proxy warfare, demonstrating how civil protests have been transformed from expressions of democratic grievance into functional elements of "reflexive control" and "gray zone" warfare, exploited by foreign adversaries to paralyze U.S. strategic decision-making.
The evidence suggests that the January Crisis was not merely a series of tragic errors or political disputes, but a manifestation of a new form of "compound warfare" where the American homeland is no longer a sanctuary, but an active theater of operations. In this environment, the distinctions between a protestor, a proxy, and a combatant are deliberately blurred, and the legal frameworks designed for a stable Westphalian state struggle to contain the fluidity of hybrid threats.