On the morning of January 23, a second-grader walked into his Minneapolis elementary school and told his teacher that federal agents had taken his father. The seven-year-old was terrified. His teacher later recounted to The Guardian what he said next: “Trump has guns. They can kill him.”
The next morning, outside Glam Doll Donuts at 26th and Nicollet, federal agents shot a man named Alex Pretti. He was 37, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA, and was in the Whittier neighborhood to observe and film what federal agents were doing. Like other observers, Pretti had a phone and was filming. He also had a permit to carry a pistol, which requires firearms training, and was legally carrying a handgun which he never touched during his assault, according to multiple videos and analyses of the incident.
An aghast pediatrician in nearby apartment watched it happen. Pretti crouched to help a woman an agent had knocked to the ground. Agents pepper-sprayed him. He put his hands above his head. They sprayed him again, then four or five of them took him down and opened fire while he lay beneath them on the icy ground.
The gunshots drove the doctor, who has chosen to remain anonymous, to action and they ran downstairs. Federal agents initially blocked the way, but when they finally stepped aside, the physician found Pretti lying on his side in the snow with agents standing in a half circle around him. Nobody was performing CPR or checking for a pulse. In a sworn declaration filed in federal court, the pediatrician described what the agents were doing instead: “The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents appeared to be counting his bullet wounds.”
That evening, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Pretti was a domestic terrorist who had arrived “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who ran the Minneapolis operation until he was reassigned effective January 27, 2026, told reporters Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement.”
A children’s entertainer in a bright pink coat was standing five feet away and gave a different account: “The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up.” Pretti was the second American killed by federal immigration agents in just 17 days.
Predating the widely publicized shootings in Minneapolis, a detained immigrant was also killed as a consequence of mass deportation policies, the first of three casualties in less than a month. On January 3, guards allegedly choked Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban man, to death at an El Paso detention facility. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Four days later, agents shot Renée Good through the window of her car in Minneapolis. She was 37, a mother of three. The government has blocked outside investigations into all three killings. Two witnesses to the Lunas Campos death faced deportation after talking to the Washington Post. DHS still hasn’t backed up its claims about Pretti or Good, though both narratives circulated widely before video evidence emerged to contradict them.
What is happening in Minneapolis traces back to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, an authoritarian playbook that called for the largest expansion of immigration enforcement in American history. Project 2025 proposed eliminating protections that kept agents away from schools, hospitals, and churches, arguing that ICE should instead “rely on the good judgment of officers in the field.” It called for 100,000 detention beds and “soft-sided facilities” — tent camps — to hold people awaiting deportation, and an end to political asylum. The consequences of these policies are now playing out in Minneapolis neighborhoods and across America.
“The Largest Immigration Enforcement Operation in American History”
The Minneapolis Police Department has roughly 600 officers. In January, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent five times that number to the Twin Cities, 3,000 federal agents for an operation officials called Metro Surge. Within a week, agents had detained at least nine children. The youngest was two.
A school superintendent told reporters that agents had instructed a five-year-old to knock on his own front door to see if anyone else was inside. “Essentially using a five-year-old as bait,” was how he put it. Agents circled school playgrounds in Columbia Heights. Half of St. Paul’s Spanish-speaking students stopped showing up for class.
On January 23, the temperature dropped to 29 below zero. Roughly 50,000 people marched through downtown anyway. Hundreds of businesses closed in a general strike. That same morning, in an elementary school classroom, the seven-year-old was telling his teacher about his father. The next morning, Pretti was dead.
“This Is Why We Killed That Lesbian Bitch.”
Renée Good was a poet and a mother to three children. On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot her three times in the face, chest, and arm, killing her.
The Trump administration claimed Good had tried to run Ross over and that he was recovering in the hospital. Neither claim has been substantiated. Video reviewed by multiple news organizations shows her car passing Ross, not striking him. On the audio, immediately after the shots, Ross walks away and is heard dismissing Good as a “Fucking bitch.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized control of the investigation, blocking Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from accessing evidence, testimony, or the vehicle in which Good died. Then, according to MS Now, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into Good herself — after she was already dead. A Justice Department attorney wrote that “a deceased individual may still be charged with a crime” and that the department was “exploring whether to charge” Good with “attempted murder of a federal law enforcement officer.” Attorneys for Good’s family called the probe “an obvious attempt to smear a murder victim.”
Good was married to a woman, a fact that agents invoked when threatening people attempting to monitor their actions. A legal observer detained on January 11 reported that an agent told her, “You guys need to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” Another detained woman said agents pressed her face into the ground while telling her, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued to end the operation, naming Bovino as a defendant. The state’s two U.S. senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, demanded ICE leave Minnesota. In Washington, 140 House Democrats sponsored a bill to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Noem. DHS did not respond.
“Medical Distress”
On January 3, guards at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in El Paso, where there are no witnesses with cell phone cameras, allegedly killed a 55-year-old Cuban man named Geraldo Lunas Campos. The initial government statement said that Lunas Campos had experienced “medical distress.”
A witness told The Associated Press that Lunas Campos was handcuffed while at least five guards pinned him down and squeezed his neck until he was unconscious. The autopsy found injuries on his chest and knees, and hemorrhages in his eyelids and neck. His death was ruled a homicide: asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.
The government’s story shifted. ICE’s initial statement said only that Lunas Campos had become “disruptive” and was moved to segregation — with no mention of any altercation with guards. After the family was informed his death would likely be ruled a homicide, the agency changed its account, claiming he had attempted suicide and “violently resisted the security staff.”
Two detainees who witnessed the events — Santos Jesus Flores and Antonio Ascon Frometa — received deportation notices days after speaking to the Washington Post. Flores told the newspaper he heard Lunas Campos saying “I can’t breathe” as guards held him down. A federal judge temporarily blocked their removal, ruling their testimony was critical to the family’s planned wrongful death lawsuit.
“No Factual or Legal Support”
The administration’s conduct has met resistance in federal court. In November 2025, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis issued a 233-page ruling detailing how Bovino and his agents had repeatedly lied about their actions during immigration raids in Chicago. Ellis found Bovino was “evasive” during three days of sworn testimony, “either providing ‘cute’ responses or outright lying.”
When shown footage of himself tackling a man to the ground outside an ICE facility, Bovino denied using force. He testified that people wearing maroon hoodies were Latin Kings gang members preparing to attack — but maroon is not a Latin Kings color, and one of the people in maroon was a Chicago alderman.
“I find the government’s evidence to be simply not credible,” Ellis said. “The government would have people believe that the Chicagoland area is in a vise hold of violence, ransacked by rioters and attacked by agitators. That simply isn’t true.”
In Minneapolis, according to MS Now, magistrate judges have repeatedly rejected arrest warrants for protesters, finding agents haven’t provided sufficient evidence. One judge rejected a warrant for a protester accused of throwing a single egg at a law enforcement vehicle. Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko blocked charges the Justice Department tried to bring against journalist Don Lemon for covering a protest at a St. Paul church. District Judge Laura Provinzino denied the administration’s motion to detain two arrested protesters, finding Justice had offered “no factual or legal support” for its claim they had committed “a crime of violence.”
“Eager to Escalate”
On Sunday, January 25, two former presidents spoke. Barack and Michelle Obama issued a statement calling Pretti’s death “a heartbreaking tragedy” and “a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.” They described “the spectacle of masked ICE recruits and other federal agents acting with impunity and engaging in tactics that seem designed to intimidate, harass, provoke and endanger the residents of a major American city,” tactics, they noted, that “even the former top lawyer of the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration has characterized as embarrassing, lawless and cruel.” The administration’s response to the shootings, the Obamas wrote, showed officials “eager to escalate the situation, while offering public explanations for the shootings of Mr. Pretti and Renée Good that aren’t informed by any serious investigation — and that appear to be directly contradicted by video evidence. This has to stop.”
Bill Clinton released his own statement: “In recent weeks, we’ve watched horrible scenes play out in Minneapolis and other communities that I never thought would take place in America. People, including children, have been seized from their homes, workplaces, and the street by masked federal agents. Peaceful protesters and citizens exercising their constitutional right to observe and document law enforcement have been arrested, beaten, teargassed, and most searingly, in the cases of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, shot and killed,” the former president wrote. “At every turn, the people in charge have lied to us, told us not to believe what we’ve seen with our own eyes, and pushed increasingly aggressive and antagonistic tactics.”
“This Has to Stop”
Democratic members of Congress have counted 53 deaths in ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody since Noem took charge of Homeland Security. The United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights has called on the United States to bring its enforcement into compliance with international law.
Governor Tim Walz, at a press conference the day after Pretti’s death, asked the public: “Which side do you want to be on? The side of an all-powerful federal government that could kill, injure, menace, and kidnap its citizens off the streets, or on the side of a nurse at the VA hospital who died bearing witness to such government?”
The pediatrician who watched Alex Pretti die ended the sworn declaration this way: “I do not feel safe in my city. In less than one month, ICE agents have shot and killed two people for protesting and observing their actions. I worry that I or someone I love will be shot and killed for voicing their displeasure and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
