On Saturday morning January 24, in Minneapolis, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “agents” shot and killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who worked at the Veterans Affairs hospital, where he was known for his care and compassion. Alex died helping another person under attack. On the footage we see him with a cell phone in one hand, and the other hand held up. As heavily armed ICE attackers spray a protester in the face with a chemical irritant, he reaches down to pull her up and they spray him too. Multiple agents then jump him and wrestle him to the ground. Bystander video shows the struggle as Trump’s secret police pile on top of him. Then one is standing up, holding Pretti’s pistil, and shots are fired. Within seconds the assassins move back and continue to shoot him, 10 in total as he lay prone on the ground. Israel fired 335 shots into the car where five-year-old Hind Rajab pleaded for her life in Gaza—her small voice was heard around the world because of the tape. Like so many humanitarians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, Alex Pretti was killed serving as a community first-responder.
Within minutes, the Head of US Homeland Security Kristi Noem, blamed Pretti for his own execution, claiming he was “brandishing” a gun and wanted to “kill law enforcement.” She called him a “domestic terrorist.” U.S. Border Patrol Commander, Greg Bovino chimed in saying the true victims of the shooting were federal agents. Despite footage showing the opposite, Bovino asserted that Pretti attacked officers with a firearm and “wanted to do maximum damage” and massacre law enforcement. Meanwhile, on X, White House Official Stephen Miller posted that Alex Pretti was an “assassin.”
But the videotape of Alex’s murder was running on a loop on television, as Stephen Colbert said in an opening monologue 4 days later. That same day Rock and Roll legend Bruce Springsteen released the protest song, Streets of Minneapolis. Zeteo identified DHS and ICE as part of a “brutalist murderous, regime terrorizing Americans” across the country. In an email to members, the legal advocacy organization Public Citizen, called them “unidentified thugs that are terrorizing the American people.”
Two weeks earlier, another ICE masked murderer named Jonathan Ross, shot 37-year-old Renée Nicole Good, a poet, mother and wife, three times in the head at point blank range. DHS immediately claimed that the shooting was justified because Good had tried to runover the agent. Kristi Noem, appeared in Texas, wearing a ridiculously huge cowboy hat, and called Renee Good a “domestic terrorist,” the same phrase she used for Alex 2 weeks later. But videos circulating online taken by bystanders showed the truth of the killing. From different angles they demonstrated that Renee Good was turning away from, not toward the killers. She presented no threat to Jonathan Good, and “the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired.” As Glenn Greenwald pointed out “automatically labelling Americans killed by ICE as “terrorists” is the Israelization of the US.
Vice President JD Vance asserted that ICE agents had “absolute immunity” and DHS refused to release the names of the men who collectively slaughtered Alex. So much of this process, the killings in broad daylight, the protection and failure to hold murderers accountable, the label of “terrorist” and the deliberate targeting of those who bear witness to state crimes mirror what Israel has done in Gaza. Palestinian journalists on the ground in Gaza have been labeled terrorists before being killed, like Al Jazeera’s Humza Al Dahdouh, who was first called a terrorist then targeted for assassination.
According to Zeteo, as “terrorist messaging” was being pushed by the White House, they were also doing “opposition research,” looking for something that would discredit Alex Pretti. The same happened to Renee Good after she was killed. Six lawyers from the US attorney’s office in Minnesota quit their jobs when the Department of Justice demanded a criminal inquiry to smear Good and her wife Becca.
When the videotapes exposed ICE’s deadly use of force, Americans recoiled. They were not buying official claims, and a poll found that ICE thugs are highly unpopular and Trump’s approval ratings sunk even lower. The footage could not be reconciled with the trash talk coming out of the White House and DHS. ICE tactics had previously been kept secret from the public, as Al Jazeera’s Lila Hassan reported, secrecy has been a way for ICE agents to “evade scrutiny.”
Anti-Trump sentiment accelerated and the public coalesced around the idea that we are now up against an out-of-control, and illegal force. As one writer put it, Trump has “lost the consent of the governed.” Even conservative commentators such as George Conway, joined in saying: “I just checked—it turns out that Art. II, Sec. 1 of the Constitution of the United States does *not* say ‘The executive Power shall be vested in a bunch of sociopaths who think they can do whatever the f*ck they want and make sh*t up as they go along.’”
Republican politicians are spooked, worried about the political damage being done in an election year. Unnamed politicians complained to Fox News, and according to Bill Melugin they were particularly critical of statements that “Pretti was intending a ‘massacre’ of federal agents in the face of videos that disprove such absurd claims.” They were losing the PR battle, and also “the base and the narrative.” Some called it “a case study on how not to do crisis PR” and disapproved of DHS assertions that Alex was planning a “massacre” to do “maximum damage” in the face of videos undercutting those claims.
Republican complaints have revolved not around the government killing of Americans, but around the bad PR they evoked.
Images of Israeli brutalists terrorizing Palestinians across the Gaza Strip bear a striking resemblance to the bystander-cell-phone videos taken in Minneapolis. The struggles of the people of Minneapolis fighting in solidarity with their communities, are the same struggles faced by Palestinians who have endured two and a half years of genocide. As Derek Sayer argues it was in “Gaza that the new world order of which these are symptoms was forged.”
Just as the TikTok videos exposing daily IDF horrors were blamed for the public’s revulsion to genocide, the recorded inconvenient truths from Minneapolis are getting in the way of carrying out the US policy of public terrorism.
Some assert that the violence in Minneapolis illustrates an Imperial Boomerang, and certainly ICE is using the Israeli playbook, “the same machinery of racialized control that has been refined in Palestine” has been “imported to American cities,” as Ahmad Ibsais wrote. But some interpret the concept as an indictment of the public, as we have tolerated violence against people elsewhere and it has come back home to us. But state violence continues in spite of our resistance to it. Just as we have protested here, and around the world, against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ICE is attacking the people of Minneapolis precisely because of its history of inclusion and now the protests against kidnapping their neighbors off the street. We have demanded that our government stop arming the genocidaires and vociferously demanded an end to ICE, just as Renee and Alex demanded an end to the kidnapping and incarceration of immigrants. The difference here is that in an election year, politicians may act to reign in ICE. But if we currently lived in a democracy, our government would have stopped the weapons transfers that continue to slaughter Palestinians long ago.
