Activism / January 25, 2026
Minneapolis has become ground zero for the Trump administration’s war on immigrants and growing resistance to it.
Protesters clash with law enforcement in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026, after federal agents fatally shot a man – the second time a Minnesotan has been shot this month.
(Arthur Maiorella/Anadolu via Getty Images) MInneapolis— On Saturday morning, I followed the sound of the whistles to the sound of the flash bangs. A man on the street corner wiped his eyes while holding a gas mask. “Are you doing well?” I asked. He shook his head. “I should have put my mask on sooner,” he told me. I fired alone as I approached the mass of protesters that were just beginning to gather. The eye protection crystallized like a windshield in the cold. When the sun rose, I couldn’t see anything. I took off the mask. Riot police advanced alongside federal agents already in formation behind yellow tape marking the crime scene. Metal scraped against cement as protesters began forming a barricade from dumpsters, a mattress and a car. The makeshift fortress was intended to protect the growing crowd from non-lethal weapons. But it also illustrates the persistence of community members in the face of escalating state violence.
Saturday, three months to the day after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s speech opening salvo in Minneapolisfederal agents were filmed shooting a legal observer at point-blank range several times, including after his body went limp. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old lawful gun owner, according to Police Chief Brian O’Hara, was pronounced dead at the scene. The gathering of protesters was declared illegal shortly after.
The shooting, which took place immediately after a citywide strike, further cemented Minneapolis as the starting point of the Trump administration’s war on immigrants and growing resistance to it. The previous afternoon, tens of thousands of people had descended on downtown Minneapolis, armed with cardboard signs and snow goggles, as part of the national campaign. first general strike in eight decades. Since Jan. 7, when ICE agent Jonathan Ross was filmed shooting 37-year-old Renée Good in the face, residents have called on ICE to leave the city. Ross has not been arrested or charged.
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On the streetcar to U.S. Bank Stadium, where an afternoon march celebrating the strike was beginning, a woman with a yellow stole around her neck told me she was part of a clergy delegation, the largest since Standing Rock, of 100 people. stopped at the airport earlier in the morning. As we took to the streets, chants of “ICE out, damn ICE!” » filled the air. On the sidewalks, people took off their boots to slip on hand warmers. Somewhere along the way I was handed a newspaper. His claim on the front page was simple: general strike, nationwide.
“It’s crazy,” a nearby man said to his companion. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Then he added: “I hope people don’t get hurt.” »
In 1934, during the city’s last general strike, Minneapolis police killed two unarmed protesters in an event known as Bloody Friday. This led the governor to declare martial law and deploy the National Guard, not to break the strike, but to subdue the police. The question today, as then, is not whether order will be restored, but of what order and at what price.
In a video of Pretti’s death, whistling can be heard, as well as a bystander shouting, “What’s wrong with you?” while the officers push the ICU nurse to the ground. Then the gunshots start. It didn’t take long for several videos of Pretti’s death to begin circulating. “Definitive angle,” a friend texts after sending me one. “Execution.” Shortly after Pretti was pronounced dead on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security shared a photo of his gun, which he apparently was unarmed before he was shot.
When the rise of ICE began, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz told residents two things: stay peaceful and document the atrocities. This weekend, he echoed the call, also made by Mayor Jacob Frey, for ICE to leave. “The President must end this operation. Remove the thousands of violent, untrained officers from Minnesota. Now,” Walz posted on But what it would take for Walz — himself a retired sergeant — to mobilize the National Guard to confront ICE remains unclear.
Trump, a white-collar criminal and convicted rapist, says ICE operations take “the worst of the worst” off the streets, language Noem imitated at her October press conference from Whipple. At the time, Trump federalized the National Guard and attempted to deploy it to cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, an approach that the Supreme Court said likely violated the Posse Comitatus Act.
Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send troops to Minneapolis, a doctrine for which courts tend to give the executive branch much more deference, according to Syracuse law professor William Banks. So why didn’t Trump invoke the Insurrection Act on January 6? “He was leading the insurrection, that’s why,” Banks said.
“The Insurrection Act is considered the largest, and really the only, exception to the Posse Comitatus Act,” law professor Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel, told me. “The founding fathers had an aversion to a large standing army because they feared it would be used as a tool by a despot. »
The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was in 1992, during the Rodney King riots, at the request of the governor of California. President Rutherford Hayes also invoked it at the request of state officials during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. It remains to be seen what will happen if it is invoked against a governor’s wishes.
“I dispute any assertion that it is the people of my district, the people of this city, who are in any way responsible for the escalation that we are seeing in the streets,” council member Aisha Chughtai, who represents the 10th Ward, where Pretti was murdered, said Saturday. “There is only one group of people here who are inciting violence and making the situation worse: federal agents. They are the ones whose behavior needs to be monitored right now.”
According to The Minnesota Star Tribunethose who witnessed Pretti’s shooting were taken to Whipple, ground zero of ground zero. Federal authorities also reportedly tried to convince local police to leave the scene. Until now, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has been excluded from the investigation, as it was after Good’s death. On Friday morning, before the general strike, about 100 protesters in Whipple were tear gassed — a tactic banned in international wars in 1925. I had headed in that direction after hearing rumors that water cannons were being prepared for use on the crowd, but I arrived late because the police had closed the roads leading to the building.
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“They came and blocked all sides, then started gassing people,” one protester later told me. It was his sixth consecutive day away from the facility. She described officers dressed in dark uniforms and fatigues, moving in the most organized manner she had seen. “This is new since my last visit here,” she added, pointing to the chain-link fence that overlooked us.
The day before, Vice President JD Vance came to Minneapolis to call for greater cooperation between ICE and local police and to defend the detention of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy currently detained in Texas. During the strike, the blue bunny hat that he wore when he was taken into federal custody could be seen drawn on protest signs. At another facility in Texas, if a collection of tents This is how a man arrested by ICE in Minneapolis recently died – the third death since early December. ICE called it suicide. Earlier this month, authorities also said Geraldo Lunas Campos committed suicide at the same facility, but witnesses reported he was suffocated by staff and an autopsy later ruled it a homicide caused by asphyxiation.
So, even Before After Pretti’s death, the scope of the resistance widened. Those who participated in the strike harbored a growing list of grievances, some based on basic human decency, others on constitutional principles. The protesters are against ICE, against militarization of the DOJagainst the entire administration. They understand that Trump defends American values – the white supremacist kind – and that ICE’s operations are a continuation of this nation’s racist history, which the president would like to erase while reconstituting.
But the demonstrators also defend American values, the least harmful. They fight for the Constitution, for states’ rights, for children, for the people.
By Saturday evening, the space that police had blocked off and guarded earlier in the day had been filled by community members, who gathered for another vigil. A man places a candle at Pretti’s memorial while holding the American flag. At the same time, national reluctance continued to grow. Following Pretti’s death, Democratic senators said they block a financing invoice this includes additional investments in the Department of Homeland Security, increasing the risk of another government shutdown. ICE is already the single best financed federal law enforcement agency, while spending on immigration enforcement far eclipses that of many large armies. But whether a broader general strike or government shutdown comes to fruition, will Minnesotans be in the streets?
You bet.
Alyssa Oursler Alyssa Oursler is a journalist based in Minneapolis.
