01/27/2026
In less than a month, ICE agents have killed two American citizens in Minneapolis. The tableau is dark and the federal pressure is unrelenting. Minneapolis is not a particular hub of migrant activity, but it’s a Democratic-run city that has been a special obsession of the far right. MAGA Republicans have exploited a fraud scandal to demonize the Somali population there, and the fact that Minneapolis was ground zero for the George Floyd uprisings of 2020 has lent it, despite its relatively small size, an outsize place in the right-wing imagination.
Now, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old V.A. hospital registered nurse, is dead, taken to the ground after he apparently tried to approach federal agents while holding a phone.
“What’s striking about both the fatal shootings of Pretti and Renee Good were how avoidable they were,” political columnist Ross Barkan writes. “Good and Pretti simply did not have to die, and neither posed a threat to the lives of the ICE agents who killed them. But the Trump regime has attempted to erect an alternative reality where both were marauding ‘domestic terrorists’ who brought this carnage on themselves, along with the liberal Democrats of Minnesota.”
“Trump is a malicious liar, as are those around him, and the party line is that ICE can do no wrong, especially in Minnesota,” Barkan writes. MAGA is hoping to convince the nation that the ICE surge of Minneapolis, just like the National Guard invasions of Los Angeles and Chicago and Washington D.C., is noble and true, reflections of some kind of popular will.
But none of it is working.
Read Barkan’s full column on how Trump’s losing the war in Minneapolis: https://nymag.visitlink.me/cWaCFC
