For days after the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents, I didn’t plan to write about it. Most of us saw what happened in south Minneapolis. Reporters and pundits have said plenty of smart things about this egregious killing and what to make of it. What more needed to be said?

But, well, I do have a take. It’s crucial that we grasp the state we’re in as clearly as possible, and I think parts of the picture are not getting the emphasis they deserve.

To start, here’s the hard reality: The more you zoom in, the closer you look at those Customs and Border Protection officers and what they did at 26th and Nicollet that day, the worse it gets. And the more you zoom out, the more you consider the federal presence in Minnesota and what it portends — likewise, the worse it gets.

The people of Minneapolis, in their response to this violent federal invasion, have demonstrated that the Trump-Miller regime chose the wrong city to pick on. They’re setting a truly inspiring example for the rest of us. But if we’re exhaling and thinking, Hurray for Minnesota, Trump is in full retreat!, we’re making a mistake.

Zooming in

From the early hours after the shooting, with the first video angles made public, it was clear that Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old Veterans Administration nurse, did not have to die. He posed no threat to the masked agents who shot him ten times as he lay prone on the street. But there was still room, based on those first distant, partially obscured images, to extend the masked agents some benefit of the doubt — at least it seemed so to me — given that Pretti was carrying a gun. Not because it’s wrong or incriminating to bring a (legally owned and licensed) gun to a protest, as some formerly pro-2nd-Amendment Trump administration officials cynically asserted afterwards. But because, just maybe, the agents had lost their cool in the moment. One yelled “gun,” and perhaps the others had panicked, momentarily fearing for their lives, and started shooting.

But with more angles and more detailed visual analyses, any support for that benefit of the doubt evaporated. The agent who first opened fire into Pretti’s back was standing right next to the guy who disarmed Pretti, apparently in a clear position to see that happen — before he started firing. Then there’s the second agent, the one who’d pepper sprayed Pretti and beat him in the head with a canister while he was down — and now pulled out his weapon and pumped more bullets into the completely subdued, already shot Pretti. It’s horrifying. The summary execution of a peaceful protester.

How many abuses of the country’s policing power must a president carry out before we acknowledge that we live in a police state?

We’ve come to expect bald-faced lies from this administration. But we can’t stop pointing out how aberrant its incessant gaslighting is — except among totalitarian regimes. As with the ICE killing of Renee Good, the administration blamed and slandered the victim. Kristi Noem dubbed Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” Stephen Miller called him an “assassin” — a lie reposted by JD Vance. Gregory Bovino, the flamboyantly fascistic Border Patrol commander, stood at a podium and claimed that Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement.” He even stooped to declare that the ICE agents who killed Alex Pretti were the victims.

Within a few days most Americans had seen the videos and the administration was backing off its most egregious lies — without retracting or apologizing for them. It’s a genuine win that, thanks to the cell phone videos taken by Minneapolitans, the Trump regime failed in its attempt to paint Alex Pretti — and Renee Good — as terrorists deserving of death. But justice for Good and Pretti, at least in the near term, may be too much to hope for, especially since the feds have done all they can to handicap local investigations.

Zooming out

Those who still insist on defending these killings (see, for example, the sneering Megyn Kelly) paint a picture of radicalized protesters illegally obstructing our fine public servants, those kitted out agents in balaclavas, as they go about their legitimate law enforcement work. Aside from the inconvenient details of the shootings themselves, there’s a reason this narrative isn’t holding up: Most people can see that Operation Metro Surge isn’t about legitimate immigration enforcement. Nor is it about rooting out Somali-American fraudsters, as the administration weakly claimed. To fight fraud you’d send in forensic accountants, not swarms of masked paramilitary dudes to terrorize Black and Brown people at schools, workplaces, and hospitals.

The federal show of force in the Twin Cities, like the previous incursions into Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities, is about other things. It represents the biggest deployment, so far, of the Trump-Miller paramilitary force — a force the administration is rapidly expanding, yes, to seize and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees, but also to menace non-White people and intimidate the president’s political opponents. Minnesota ranks low in its concentration of undocumented immigrants. For those asking why this ICE and CBP surge targeted the Land of 10,000 Lakes, the answer certainly has more to do with Trump’s loathing of Democrats including Governor Tim Walz and Somali-American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar — whom Trump has called “garbage” — than any real immigration concerns.

Trump apparently finds it hard to accept, perhaps because of Minnesota’s predominantly White population, that the state keeps turning up its nose at him. He recently claimed that he “won” the state “all three times.” (Minnesota last went for a Republican presidential candidate in 1972.) Trump’s people seem bent on fixing whatever’s wrong with the North Star State.

Their intimidation campaign, in turn, is only part of a multi-pronged drive for boundless power by a lawless, authoritarian regime. Other facets include its attacks on universities, the legal profession, media companies and journalists — and on the country’s elections. In a chilling twist, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz after Pretti’s killing in which she demanded, among other things, Justice Department access to Minnesota’s confidential voter rolls — as if that has anything to do with a dispute over immigration enforcement. States run elections in this country; the federal government does not. But under Trump, the DOJ and Homeland Security are trying through various means, including lawsuits against Democratic-led states, to get hold of state lists with the goal of compiling a national voter database. Defenders of democracy say this effort is clearly aimed at the manipulation of elections, including, of course, the 2026 midterms, possibly through large-scale disenfranchisement of voters.

As if to erase any lingering doubt about its dictatorial goals, the administration raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia last week to seize ballots from the 2020 election — part of its ceaseless campaign to rewrite that history and, again, to lay the groundwork for steering or delegitimizing future elections. The very next day, Bondi’s Justice Department arrested the journalist Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, and another reporter, Georgia Fort, vice president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, for covering an anti-ICE protest at a Minneapolis church.

How many abuses of the country’s policing power must a president carry out before we look at one another and acknowledge that we live in a police state?

As Trump’s approval ratings sag, his team’s actions shout to the heavens: No matter, we’re taking over. We will do what we want, the law and the Constitution and Radical Left Judges be damned. If you get in our way, we can and will arrest you, detain you, beat you, deport you, or gun you down — without consequence. Who’s going to stop us?

Given all this, there’s been perhaps too much high-fiving over Trump’s shuffling of the ICE leadership in Minnesota, and too much media coverage suggesting the administration has backpedaled. Greg Bovino’s out: great. Tom Homan’s in? The border czar, who led Trump’s family separation policy in his first term and apparently took a $50,000 cash bribe, is the good cop here? This is a tactical, superficial retreat, not a change in policy. The County Attorney in Minneapolis, Mary Moriarty, said over the weekend that there’s been no change in the abusive, unconstitutional behavior of ICE and CBP agents in Minnesota.

At some point, maybe soon, the Department of Homeland Security will draw down the number of agents in Minneapolis, and eventually it will declare victory and end the Minnesota surge. But the regime’s larger campaign is still very much on. We’re hearing that the next destination for an ICE incursion is Ohio — including Springfield, with its substantial Haitian population that Trump infamously slandered in the 2024 presidential debate. The Biden Administration had granted temporary legal status to 350,000 Haitians to live and work in the U.S. While inviting in White South Africans instead, Trump revoked the Haitians’ legal status in an executive order that’s scheduled to take effect February 3rd — opening them to deportation.

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I’m wary of formulations based on the notion of “who we are” — as in, “We’re about to find out who we really are as Americans.” What exactly does it mean to talk of a “we” in the U.S.A.? The 340 million of us are all over the place.

How about a different question: How many of us will step forward?

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller may have really believed that most Minnesotans, especially the White majority, would stand by and accept — or even cheer — the brutal harassment and kidnapping of their Black and Brown neighbors. In fact it’s not clear what the majority of White Minnesotans think about all this. What matters, and what’s been beautiful to witness, is that tens of thousands of people of all shades have bundled up and gone into the snowy streets to say Oh no you don’t. They’ve struck a powerful blow for freedom and democracy.

It’s revealing, and deeply significant, that the brutal excesses of the mass deportation campaign broke through in a new way following the federal murder of protesters. Among the people who’ve died at the hands of ICE in the past year, the story of one man shot and killed in Chicago last September bears similarities to Renee Good’s murder. Unlike Good, Silverio Villegas-Gonzales was an undocumented Mexican immigrant and the agents were out to arrest him. Like Good, though, Villegas-Gonzales was shot while driving his car, seemingly trying to flee the scene. The incident barely made a blip in the news cycle.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti are U.S. citizens and they’re White. No doubt those factors made them particularly sympathetic victims to many Americans. But it also matters that they decided to go out and place themselves, literally and figuratively, between the federal goon squad and the vulnerable Minneapolis residents those goons were trying to snatch up. For their acts of peaceful but forceful dissent, Good and Pretti paid with their lives. For the regime, the resulting images have proved untenable — as untenable as Bull Connor’s fire hoses and attack dogs in Birmingham in 1963, as untenable as the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorialized that the killing of Alex Pretti was a “moral and political debacle for the Trump presidency.”

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We’re here, folks. We can put aside the parlor debate, now a decade old, about how far Trump and his co-conspirators might want to go, might someday go. It is happening. The authoritarian takeover can still be stopped. But to stop it we’ll need everyone, every single person who opposes this emerging police state, to find a way to push back, to speak up, to say No. Not on our watch.

This moment goes beyond normal left-right politics, as a protester in Minneapolis told a local TV station. “I couldn't care less about people’s opinions of this side, that side, this color, that color, this political view, that political view,” the woman said. “We’re all human beings … and we need to fight for our humanity.”

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