Michigan’s attorney general is posing as an anti-Trump champion. So why is she helping Trump’s FBI to target protesters?
By Lewis Raven Wallace, Truthout
Democratic anti-Trump warriors are popular with the party base — and they know it. On Wednesday, May 7, Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel put out a strongly worded press release decrying the latest “appalling Supreme Court decision” in favor of President Donald Trump’s ban on trans people in the military. The previous day, Nessel’s office had announced it would join another in a string of lawsuits against the Republican administration over its abuse of presidential powers to override states and dismantle federal regulations.
This continues a steady drumbeat of opposition to Trump and the Republican administration that Nessel and other Democrats have been promoting — except when it comes to Palestine.
On Palestine, the Michigan attorney general has sung quite a different tune. Since 2024, Nessel’s office has been involved in deploying increasingly repressive tactics against pro-Palestine activists in Michigan, most recently supporting and collaborating with Trump’s FBI to raid several homes of pro-Palestinian protestors in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Canton on April 23. Nessel joins Democrats across the country like New York City Mayor Eric Adams and former President Joe Biden in staking out a position on this form of dissent that is dangerously similar to Trump’s.
The self-professed resistance to Trump from Democrats is meaningless when they’re capitulating on Palestine and collaborating with police and federal law enforcement to shut down protests and frighten dissenters. This behavior, which predated the Trump administration, now places them squarely in Trump’s corner, makes them active collaborators in rising authoritarianism, and undermines trust with core constituencies who are the most likely to be criminalized and targeted by Trump: immigrants, Arab Americans, Muslims, Black people, and queer and trans people.
While Nessel’s office claimed the April raids involving multiple law enforcement agencies were unrelated to previous anti-genocide protests on the University of Michigan campus, the stated reason for the raids did not add up, either. The Attorney General’s Office said it was investigating acts of vandalism, but then confiscated electronics, interrogated activists and arrested no one. Nessel estimated $100,000 in damage from this supposed vandalism at unnamed locations — implying that her office has tallied the cost of all the pro-Palestine spray paint spread across Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and metro Detroit over the last year, and is using this tally to make a case for invading the homes of several grassroots anti-genocide activists. Tracking down taggers appears to be more of a pretense than an actual practice.
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