Tens of thousands of residents of the state of Minnesota peacefully marched through the capital of Minneapolis on Friday, January 30 in sub-zero weather to protest the murder this past week of Alex Pretti, the second person killed by Immigration and Custom Service ((ICE) agents in seventeen days.
Pretti death has provoked rifts within the Republican Party and undermined support among many independent and Trump voters who have soured on the government’s heavy-handed round-ups of undocumented workers, those immigrants legally entitled to be in the country, and even U.S. citizens caught up in the dragnet.Pretti, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse who worked in the Intensive Care Unit of a Veterans administration hospital, had joined thousands of local activists in following and filming the violent and often unlawful arrests of suspected undocumented immigrants by masked, unidentified ICE agents.
Multiple video recordings document that when ICE agents forcefully shoved a woman protester into a snowbank, Pretti, who had been registering the incident on his cell phone, intervened to protect her. Agents then aimed pepper spray directly at Pretti’s face, pushed him to ground, held his arms down, and then shot him in the back ten times.
Immediately prior to the shooting, an agent removed a holstered handgun that Pretti had the legal right to carry and moved it away from the scene. With Pretti lying lifeless on the ground face down, agents dressed in combat fatigues, bullet proof vests, and heavy armament appear to have cut open his shirt to count the number of bullets that had pierced his body rather than attempt to revive him through medical assistance.
Within hours Kristi Noem, the Director of Homeland Security, announced to the press that like Renne Nicole Good, who had been killed in cold-blood on January 7, Pretti was a dangerous domestic terrorist. Although video recording circulating on the internet showed that Pretti had not pulled his gun, Noem falsely announced that he had brandished a firearm, attacked ICE agents, and threatened to carry out mass murder. Trump and members of his administration repeated these and other false accusations to discredit Pretti and others protesting ICE’s actions.
In the press conference before any investigation of Pritti’s killing had taken place, Noem also commented: “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” Several days later Trump repeated the argument, claiming that people should bring guns to protest events.
Both seem to have forgotten that fact that thousands of Trump supporters, many armed, stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to overthrow the 2002 presidential elections. Hundreds of police officers were hurt during the failed insurrection, but Trump had no problem in pardoning all of those who had been convicted of assault and illegal entry into a federal building.
Noem’s statement and the president’s remarks, however, provoked conservative gun rights activists to challenge the government’s criticisms about the right to carry a weapon in public. Dudley Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, for example sharply disagreed with Trump’s comments.
Gun Owners of America Senior Vice President Erich Pratt told CNN: “You absolutely may walk around with guns, and you absolutely may peacefully protest while armed… We have the First and Second amendments [to the U.S. Constitution] to protect the right to protest while armed — an American historical tradition that dates back to the Boston Tea Party,” when in 1773 American colonists protest a British tax on imported tea.
Asking the public to ignore their own eyes and believe the government’s narrative, the Department of Justice then announced that it would not open a civil rights investigation about Pretti’s death, an unprecedented deviation from normal procedures in such cases.
Trump’s Narrative Fuels Protests.
The Trump administration’s attempts to blame the victim, however, backfired as friends of Pretti recounted his dedication to his patients and his kind and gentle nature. Some political analysts believe that his death may mark a watershed moment in the opposition to the Trump presidency.
Gregory Bovino, a senior U.S. Border Patrol official overseeing the Minnesota actions, claimed that ICE was carrying out targeted arrests of criminals, gang members, and others accused of violent crimes. In fact, for the last several months, masked agents have been sweeping through Minneapolis neighborhoods arbitrarily arresting non-whites whom they suspected might be undocumented. This illegal procedure is known as racial profiling. Required to fulfill daily arrest quotas throughout the country, ICE agents have picked up anyone that they can plausibly claim may not have the legal right to be in the United States.
The Trump administration’s lies have been so blatant and the images that the community networks of “Ice followers” have documented so disturbing that even some Republicans have begun to denounce the assault on the city. Cuban-American Republican Congresswoman Maria Salazar from Florida commented last week on the mass deportations: “One thing is the gardeners, another thing is the gangsters. One thing is the cooks, the other thing is the coyotes,” referring to human smugglers working along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Opinion polls back her up. The recent Times/Siena University poll, conducted after Good’s death but before that of Pretti, found that while 36 percent of voters approve the way that ICE was handling its job, 63% disapproved, with 70% of those polled who consider themselves to be independent also opposed to government actions. Moreover 61% consider that ICE has “gone too far” in their tactics. Asked how President Trump was handling immigration, 40% of those polled approved, while 58% were critical.
Facing mounting opposition to the government’s actions, Republicans at first deflected their responsibility and blamed Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fray and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate in the 2024 presidential elections. Ardent Trump defender and White House spokeswomen Karoline Leavitt claimed that the two Democratic politicians had “shamefully blocked local and state police from cooperating with ICE, actively inhibiting efforts to arrest violent criminals.”
However, the Trump administrations real intentions were revealed in a letter sent by Pam Bondi, the head of Department of Justice, only hours after Pretti had been killed. The Attorney General demanded that the federal government have access to voter rolls “to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law… Fulfilling this common sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law.”
Bondi indicated that the federal government would wind down the ICE actions, if the state complied with the Department of Justice’s request.
Although elections are run and controlled by the governments of the fifty different U.S. states, it seems that Trump hopes to access voter records throughout the country to claim fraud and argue that the federal government “needs” to intervene to ensure “honest elections.” If a governor were to refuse, the Attorney General could theoretically intervene, seize ballot boxes, and throw out election results unfavorable to the Republicans.
But by the end of the week, public opinion nationwide had turned against Trump’s policies. Sensing this wave of opposition to his immigration policies, Trump convened a special two-hour White House meeting to attempt to turn things around. He removed Bovino, who had overseen the Minnesota operation, signaled that there would be a investigation into Pretti’s death, and sent Tom Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar” to the state to change unfavorable images of ICE operations.
Although Homan met with the governor and the mayor of Minneapolis and promised a more reasonable deportation effort, he had been responsible for the Child Separation policy during the first Trump administration. That attempt to separate children from their immigrant parents that had crossed the border illegally or had entered the country legally requesting political asylum also met with significant opposition, and Trump was forced to abandon the policy.
The crisis in Minnesota comes precisely at a time when Congress is attempting to approve six different budget appropriation allocations to fund on-going government operations and avoid a government shutdown. Democrats have vowed to block any funds for ICE unless the government places severe restrictions on ICE operations.
In October 2025, Trump refused to concede to Democratic demands to extend government health care subsidies for many Americans, causing the government to cease operations for forty-five days. Congress finally approved a spending bill to fund the government until the end of January 2026.
This time the president was eager for a deal. He reached out to Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, who announced that if Congress agreed to sever five other spending bills from the one allocating money for ICE, Democrats would vote to appropriate those funds. Democrats have asked for a two-week period to negotiate new provisions in the bill authorizing ICE funding.
To get support for the spending bill, Democrats have demanded three major changes in ICE operations. The first would eliminate roving patrols randomly seeking undocumented workers rather that targeting those who have been convicted a violent crime. Second, Democrats insist on having clear code of conduct and accountability for the ICE agents’ actions. Finally, Schumer stated: “Masks off. Body cameras on. Proper identification. That’s not about politics; it’s about basic transparency.”
Time will tell if the Democrats are successful in these negotiations, but the sustained mobilizations in Minnesota and around the country against ICE have given moderate Democrats the impetus to push back against Trump’s policies. For his part, Trump seems to understand that his current immigration policies may hurt him in the 2026 Congressional elections.
Nonetheless, Trump can’t help himself. At the same moment that he seemed to be retreating, the president waged another retaliation campaign against a person on his enemy’s list.
Trump Targets Freedom of the Press
On January 30, the Department of Justice announced that it was charging the former CNN anchor Don Lemon with participating in a conspiracy to deny religious freedom to Minneapolis church goers. Lemon was covering an action by activists who entered a church to criticize a pastor who allegedly worked for ICE.
Living streaming his reporting, Lemon made a point of stating that he was not a part of the protests. Moreover, following journalistic standards he reported on both sides of the confrontation by interviewing church members and protesters. After two judges refused to accept the case, the Department of Justice obtained a grand jury indictment. Lemon now faces felony charges and up to one year in prison.
Lemon argues that he was exercising his rights under the first amendment to the U.S. constitution that guarantees freedom of the press. Were he to be convicted, it would mean any journalist covering a violent protest, riot, rebellion, or any alleged criminal activities could be similarly charged. But Trump’s insistence on prosecuting Lemon, who had been a long-time critic of the president, is merely a part of a larger plan to use the Department of Justice to silence his opponents.
There is no indication that the White House intends to abandon its goal of trying to deport a million undocumented immigrants a year. However, if ICE agents continue to use current methods while entering communities to arrest anyone that they suspect is not legally entitled to be in the country, they will likely receive significant pushback from local governments and outraged citizens.
Minneapolis’s resistance evokes other moments in U.S. history, when ordinary people spoke out against egregious abuses. The repudiation of the brutal mistreatment of Black civil rights activists in the 1960s by Southern racists strengthened the movement to eliminate racial segregation in the United States. The country may now be living through a similar turning point.
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