Federal agents wearing helmets, gas masks and camouflage fatigues took aim and prepared to open fire on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday, with one heard saying via a TV mic, “It’s like Call of Duty. So cool, huh?” The agents wrestled 37-year-old Alex Pretti to the ground and shot him dead, just over a mile from where Renee Good was fatally shot on 7 January, itself less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered by police in May 2020.
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey demanded at a press conference: “How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?” He was referring to the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown. An angry crowd gathered, swearing at federal officers and calling them “cowards”.
Donald Trump, who spoke of “American carnage” in his first inaugural address, has deployed 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection agents to Minnesota, vastly outnumbering the ten biggest local and state police agencies combined. Many operate with masks, weapons and impunity, but insufficient training in de-escalation. Local politicians have been roughed up, legal observers hauled off without charge, schoolchildren teargassed, motorists dragged from their cars, and Native Americans stopped and questioned. Simply filming agents is enough to be branded a domestic terrorist.
Trump seems to reserve a special loathing for Minnesota because he lost the presidential elections there in 2016, 2020 and 2024, despite most neighbouring states voting in his favour. He recently falsely claimed he won Minnesota all three times; no Republican has prevailed there since Richard Nixon in 1972. Minnesota is home to the biggest Somali community in the US, and Trump this week described Somalis as “low-IQ people”. The state is also home to Somali-born congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a progressive who gets under Trump’s skin, and governor Tim Walz, a trenchant critic who was Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024.
Garrett Graff, a journalist and historian, wrote on his Doomsday Scenario blog: “This is what fascism looks like – there is no bright line between democracy and autocracy, it’s a spectrum, and not all of the country will experience that switch at the same moment in the same way. But let’s be clear: there is a US city living under occupation by fascist presidential secret police right now.”
