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When Alex Pretti went out to protest ICE actions in Minneapolis on Saturday morning, he surely knew that Renee Good had been shot and killed about two weeks earlier. He surely saw at least some of the videos that have been circulating showing confrontations between ICE agents and Minnesotans: an immigration agent kneeing a man while he was already pinned down, another pushing a protester into the street in front of a bus. He surely knew that being white and speaking English without an accent would not protect him, because Good was white and spoke English without an accent. But still, he decided it was important enough to go out there anyway, in subzero temperatures. Pretti ended up in another Minneapolis tragedy, caught on video.
The cultural stereotype is “Minnesota nice.” These past two weeks, anger, persistence, and bravado are also in the mix among residents who have shown up to observe, film, or protest the actions of immigration agents. Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan, wanted the world to know that their son was a “kindhearted man” and a “good soul.” But in their statement they also called out “Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs” and referred to the “lies” the administration told about their son as “disgusting.”
Trump officials told their own story about Pretti, which is a variation on the one they told about Good. “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists,” Stephen Miller tweeted. President Trump’s statement twice mentioned the “gunman’s gun.” Pretti had a license to carry a concealed weapon. In the many videos of the encounter, the immigration agents surrounding him appear to remove his holstered gun before shooting him in the back.
On this week’s Radio Atlantic, our staff writer Adam Serwer joins from Minneapolis to reflect on the news of the shooting and argue that what’s happening in the city is a form of activism not seen since the 1960s, or maybe even the abolition years—perhaps even earlier. Serwer spent last week in Minneapolis talking with protesters. “They know that ICE has the guns. They know that if ICE kills them, this federal government will call them a terrorist and not even bother to investigate. And they’re still out there. Because they feel very strongly about finding a way to nonviolently resist a federal government that has openly said it’s there to persecute them.” In this episode, we hear recordings from the scene and get Serwer’s perspective on the showdown in Minnesota.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: Before we start, a warning: In this episode, you’ll hear audio of a shooting, and you can hear the shots clearly.
Okay, here’s the episode.
Brian O’Hara: Minneapolis police received a report of a shooting involving federal law enforcement in the area of East 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue, on the south side of the city.
Rosin: This is Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara yesterday.
O’Hara: This is a 37-year-old white male who is a Minneapolis resident, and we believe he is an American citizen—
Rosin: The victim’s name was Alex Pretti, and he was 37 years old. He worked as an ICU nurse at the city’s VA hospital—before he was shot by immigration agents on Saturday morning.
O’Hara: We have not been told any official reports of what has led up to the shooting, but we have seen the video that is circulating on social media.
[Sounds of screaming and gunshots]
Bystander: The fuck did you just do? What the fuck did you just do?
Rosin: Pretti was the third person in Minneapolis in just over two weeks to be shot by immigration agents, the second to be killed after Renee Good, who was shot in her car on January 7 by an ICE agent.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey spoke soon after Chief O’Hara.
Jacob Frey: I just saw a video of more than six masked agents pummeling one of our constituents and shooting him to death. How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?
[Music]
Rosin: After Pretti’s killing, the residents showed up with whistles and cellphone cameras out, a lot of anger and also some pride about how consistently in the last few weeks they have kept showing up, despite the below-freezing weather and the obvious danger.
[Sound of drumbeat]
Protester 1: Whose streets?
Group of protesters: Our streets.
[Sound of drumbeat]
Protester 1: Whose streets?
Protesters: Our streets.
[Sound of drumbeat]
Protester 1: Whose streets?
Protesters: Our streets—
Rosin: Atlantic producer Jocelyn Frank went out to the scene of the shooting in the hours after.
Jocelyn Frank: It looks like there’s gas canisters going both directions, forward and backwards, at the crowd.
[Person yelling]
Protester 2: Hey, can we get a medic?
Protester 3: We need a medic!
Protester 2: It was tear gas.
Frank: The driver just pulled over; it was tear gas.
Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. ICE agents have parachuted into different American cities for months, and locals have shown up to protest their presence, but none with quite the force and persistence of Minnesotans.
On Friday, tens of thousands of people participated in a blackout day of protest—no work, no school, no shopping—and a march in subzero temperatures.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has continued to label the protesters “domestic terrorists.”
Hours after Pretti was shot and killed on Saturday, Stephen Miller tweeted, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.”
Newscaster (on Fox 9 Minneapolis–St. Paul): We now have a new statement from President Donald Trump. It says, “This is the gunman’s gun,” and it shows the picture of the gun that Greg Bovino just showed in the briefing here to—that DHS posted earlier. So, “This is the gunman’s gun,” writes the president, “loaded”—in parentheses—“(with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go.”
Rosin: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz once again pushed back.
Tim Walz: Well, as I said last week, this federal occupation of Minnesota long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement; it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of our state. And today, that campaign claimed another life. I’ve seen the videos from several angles, and it’s sickening.
[Music]
Adam Serwer: I was immediately getting different videos from my contacts in Minnesota, who were, like I was, shocked to see what was happening.
Rosin: This is staff writer Adam Serwer, who was in Minnesota on the day of the shooting.
Serwer: I heard the news that another observer had been shot while I was at a food-distribution site, and one of the first thoughts I heard out loud was people discussing how to route the food around the shooting because people still needed their food, their toilet paper, their diapers. It’s a testament to the commitment of the people who are involved in the mutual-aid stuff that they kept going.
And I think it also accentuates the importance, the risk, and the real selflessness that is involved in being an observer. Because the only reason we know that this happened the way that it happened was because so many people in that neighborhood were also prepared to witness if something terrible happened, and it did, and now we have many videos of it that contradict the direct statements of the federal government about the circumstances of this killing.
Without those videos, we wouldn’t have the kind of evidence that we have that the government is lying. Everybody can see what happened in those videos, and it doesn’t match what the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security are saying, what the president is saying, what the president’s advisers are saying. This was not a man who was being aggressive towards federal agents—he was filming them. And now we know how important it was that he was doing that, but also how dangerous it is and how brave the people who do that are.
I don’t know where it goes from here. But I do think, if nothing else, has awakened Americans to the kind of country we live in now—I hope this does it, and I hope people take it seriously.
Rosin: Adam spent several days in Minneapolis and St. Paul following organizers and volunteers. We spoke to him the night before the shooting to get his perspective on what’s happening on the streets.
Here’s our conversation.
Serwer: The type of activism that we’re seeing here is something, I think, we haven’t seen maybe since the 1960s, maybe not since the abolitionists, because what these people are doing—they’re trying to circumvent state power. There’s a very organized, localized resistance to ICE.
Many of the people I met are intensely patriotic people, and they feel that they are defending their country against, fundamentally, an alien force that is trying to destroy their community. They feel like they are filling the void that has been left by the inability of their local politicians to do anything about this.
What people here feel like it is, is just an attempt to shatter this community and ethnically cleanse it of people who Stephen Miller and Donald Trump don’t think should be here. But I also think that Trump has made it very clear—he said, Minnesota’s a “corrupt” state. They didn’t vote for me. And I think he has employed ICE and the Border Patrol as a kind of partisan militia against the parts of the country that he feels are too liberal, too Democratic, and are insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump.
Rosin: So the term partisan militia, which I’ve heard before, I’m curious what that actually looks like in the streets when you’re seeing these protests. How does that show up?
Serwer: Well, I think the point is to terrorize people. You have this woman who was killed, and the federal government has refused to investigate, and they’ve called her a terrorist, and they’ve tried to indict her widow. In some sense, there’s a palpable disgust that this community has responded not by cowering, not by submitting, not by being grateful for this sort of armed invasion that is meant to stress everyone out, but by trying to foil it.
We’re talking about a vast series of operations. It’s very decentralized—in some cases, it’s networks from the George Floyd protests that are coming alive again. And these people, they’re not being violent. They are not trying to spark violent confrontations with ICE. They know that ICE has the guns, they know that they have the mass, and now they know that if ICE kills them, that this federal government will call them a terrorist and not even bother to investigate, and they’re still out there. And they’re still out there because they feel very strongly about finding a way to nonviolently resist a federal government that has openly said it’s there to persecute them.
Rosin: That’s interesting. So you’re saying the very fact that people in Minnesota of all races have come together and unified in this way, like they did on Friday in this mass protest, is further antagonizing the administration—that’s your theory?
Serwer: I think that’s why [Vice President J. D.] Vance was sent. This whole administration is sort of a parody of, like, a women’s-studies class on masculinity. And so these guys come here, and they feel like they have the guns; they have the masks; they have the uniforms; they have the equipment. And all we’ve been hearing about for years is sort of the weakness of liberals who won’t even defend their own ideals, and then they come here, and it turns out that “the libs,” broadly speaking, they turn out to be a lot braver and made of a lot sterner stuff than they expected.
You have ICE agents saying things making reference to [Renee] Nicole Good’s death, like, Didn’t you learn your lesson?, and these people are still out there.
Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Serwer: And I think that irritates them because it’s a kind of bravery that they did not expect. They did not expect the steel that exists in this community, because they had persuaded themselves that all of these people were weak, that they would submit, that they were “virtue signaling,” that they didn’t really believe in the concept of multiracial community or multiracial democracy. They would stick a sign outside of their house or whatever, right—All are welcome here—but it’s not like they would actually welcome anybody into their homes. And instead, you see this intense sacrifice from people who are neglecting families, jobs just to try and repel what they feel like is an invasion.
Rosin: You’ve talked about the protester side of it. What do you think the Trump administration is trying to accomplish there? ’Cause it’s pretty unusual what’s happening.
Serwer: I think that this community is, ideologically—according to the Trump administration, it should not exist. When you listen to people like Stephen Miller and J. D. Vance talk this, like, blood-and-soil stuff, they imply that you can only have community with people who look like you. So theoretically, a multiracial, multifaith community like Minneapolis and St. Paul, people shouldn’t get along. People should be lonely and atomized and hate each other because they’re so different from each other.
This sort of blood-and-soil nationalism that has taken over the elite of the Republican Party is really a reflection of being extremely online. When you come here to Minneapolis, what you see is people who feel intensely about protecting their neighbors, regardless of who they are.
I have never seen anything like this, and I’ve covered a lot of protests, you know what I mean? I was in Ferguson. I’ve been to protests before; I’ve been to rallies. This is different because it feels like people are actually at risk in a way that they were not before. I wouldn’t have necessarily thought that before Renee Good’s killing and the reaction to it. But now these people all know that something could happen.
And I think that raises the stakes in the fact that people, instead of withdrawing from what they were doing, if anything, what they’ve told me is that these Signal chats where they do patrols or where they organize, they fill up fast because there’s so many volunteers that they have to make new ones because there are limits. So I think responding to that violent incident by becoming more motivated to defy a government that has already made clear how it will treat you in that situation, I do think that’s brave.
Rosin: I see what’s moving you. They know that what they’re risking could be their life. You could get shot in this situation, and they’re doing it—not only are they doing it anyway; they’re doing it, like, tenfold.
Serwer: They’re doing it anyway, and I will say, some of them are scared.
Rosin: Yeah.
Serwer: When they’re following ICE, when they find an ICE van or an ICE truck, they will follow it around the neighborhood, and eventually, the ICE truck will give up. They’ll get on the highway, and they’ll leave the neighborhood. These people know that they might run into another ICE van; they might get boxed in. The guy might come out and take their picture and be like, I know where you live. I just ran your plate. So these people are scared, but they’re acting anyway. And I think that matters because they don’t have the government on their side.
While the federal government has sort of tried to escalate what they’re doing, these people have all taken trainings where they know exactly where the line is, as far as the law. They’re following traffic laws. They’re trying to hew to establish First Amendment precedent when it comes to what they’re allowed to do. They know what to say if they’re stopped, to say, I have a First Amendment right to observe. It takes bravery to do this. And the fact that they’re scared doesn’t mean they’re not brave. It means they are.
[Music]
Rosin: When we come back: how race plays into this. Adam makes a case for why it’s significant that the two victims were white.
That’s in a moment.
[Break]
Rosin: Adam, can you tell me how you see race or identity playing out on the ground in Minnesota, Renee Good’s identity, for example?
Serwer: I think, even in the aftermath of the killing, the focus on her being a woman, being a lesbian, being a white lesbian, liberal woman, that fixation on her identity, I think, is not coincidental. If this is supposed to be this very masculine civilizing mission—you’re coming to the jungle to bring back civilization—the lesbian who writes poetry is braver than you (Laughs.), that probably will set you off, or even that this person is not as afraid of you as they should be, which is not giving you the emotional satisfaction that you wanted from coming down here in a mask and a gun. I don’t think it’s necessarily a coincidence that the first time that someone got killed, that it was a white woman.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who are white who are involved in activism here, and they say things to me like, Whatever privilege I have doesn’t protect me the way I thought it did, but it does protect me more than other people, and I’m going to use it to help them. This is not me saying this—they see themselves as having a racial privilege as white women that it is their duty to use on behalf of other people who don’t have that privilege. This woman who is, like, spending all of her afternoons driving from house to house bringing food to families, to me, that’s heroism.
When people talk about community, you know what I mean, there’s this whole right-wing nationalist theory of community and cohesion, and We can’t let in immigrants from countries that are too different from us because they won’t be cohesive. But then these people don’t feel that way. The people where these people actually live don’t feel that way. The way that they feel is: You’re not gonna take my neighbors from me.
But again, what this is, is these are very diverse communities, and these people feel like they are obligated to put their lives on the line to protect their neighbors.
Rosin: Right, right. Oh, I see. So in some sense, the coming together of people in Minnesota is a rebuke to the nativist argument that, in order to have cohesion, you all have to be the same race.
Serwer: In order to have a real country, you have to all be the same. There’s that anecdote about how Trump said something like, Stephen Miller would like it if everybody in the country looked like him. But Minneapolis is saying, No, that’s not true. That’s not good. That’s not what we want.
And I think that is the exact kind of, sort of, quote, unquote, “woke” sentiment that really drives Trump people crazy. One conservative influencer, after Renee Good was killed, said she was “pro-Somali.”
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Serwer: Well, what does that mean?
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Serwer: That is some 1860s racism right there.
There’s so much deference from law enforcement and the courts, and the Trump administration has felt very comfortable lying about the nature of incidents that have led to confrontations with ICE, so much so that there have been so many felony cases that have fallen apart because the federal government has misled the courts on the nature of that behavior.
I think it’s worse than the rules have changed. It reminds me of the sort of Jim Crow South in the sense that there are rules that are written down, but you don’t know that, if they break the rules, that anybody will be held accountable for it.
J. D. Vance, the vice president, walked back his statement about absolute immunity that he made in the aftermath of Good’s death. They could say one thing, but they’re doing another, right? He said, If ICE engages in misconduct, we’ll investigate, but they didn’t investigate. They said, She was a terrorist, and said, We’re not gonna look into it.
Rosin: You’ve used the term about Trump authoritarian innovator. Do you feel like there’s some innovation going on right now in Minneapolis and elsewhere?
Serwer: I think the use of federal agents for this kind of semi-occupation is a kind of innovation because he’s been foiled in the courts using the military, who might actually be a lot more disciplined in their treatment of civilians.
Rosin: I see. So it’s, like, the off-brand use of immigration agents, who are supposedly there to find undocumented immigrants, using them against protesters.
Serwer: Yeah, look, and these guys are all kitted up, with their body armor and their green, and there’s a little bit of a cosplay element to it. They are really federal agents, but they look like military for reasons, I think, probably, of intimidation.
Rosin: Mm-hmm. I wanna ask you about the racial-profiling element of this. There was the story of these off-duty Minnesota police who alleged racial profiling by ICE officers, and there’ve been other stories like that. What are you seeing is changing around this question of who you can pick up, how you can decide if someone’s a suspect?
Serwer: Well, there was a Supreme Court emergency-docket case, or “shadow docket” case, involving racial profiling, and the Supreme Court overturned the injunction against ICE, against the federal government doing that.
Rosin: Right, Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh’s argument that agents could stop people based on ethnicity or accent.
Serwer: Right. In Kavanaugh’s concurrence, he’s like, Well, it’s common sense if someone’s in a Home Depot parking lot speaking Spanish that they might not be a citizen. Basically, he’s Elmer Fudd sticking a giant box of dynamite under the 14th Amendment and jumping up and down on the pump. You have just obliterated equal protection of the law.
He tried to walk it back in a recent case, where, like, Obviously, it violates Fourth Amendment to engage in racial—but you can’t walk that back. That genie is out of the bottle. Stephen Miller is out here saying, We’re only taking white refugees and putting travel bans on every non-white country in the world.
It’s very clear what they’re doing: They’re engaged in a demographic-engineering project in order to make America whiter. And to some extent, it’s working. I’ve heard anecdotes from people who are saying that there are people here who have citizenship who are leaving because they don’t wanna deal with it. And I talked to some protesters, and some of them were second-generation immigrants from countries where their parents were like, We came to America so that we wouldn’t have to deal with this, and it’s shocking that it’s just like the place that we fled.
Rosin: Right.
Serwer: And I think that’s extraordinary because Trump keeps talking about how horrible those places are, and in the eyes of these people who fled those places, he is making America more like them.
Rosin: Right, right. I see the ways in which they’re ignoring the rules and doing what they want, but between the Kavanaugh stops, the Kavanaugh ruling, and then this other ruling about what counts as obstruction, what counts as peaceful protest, it does feel like the rules of how people can resist federal authority are actually really shifting right now.
Serwer: They’re definitely trying to do that. There was that protest at the church where they breached the church—the pastor is associated with ICE. And the Justice Department tried to charge Don Lemon, who was there filming the whole thing, and he said, We’re reporting; we’re not here with the activists. He was very clear about that. But the Trump administration wants to make content for its right-wing posters on X. So they’ve been trying to reportedly indict Don Lemon for doing his job.
I think the problem is, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, it feels like, to a lot of law professors, that a hundred years of precedent has been tossed out, and now the only rule is: Mr. Trump gets what he wants.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Serwer: So there are a number of cases, very big cases, that are gonna be decided soon that are gonna tell us how far the doctrine of “Mr. Trump gets what he wants” goes here, but it certainly feels like that’s the only real constitutional rule anymore.
Rosin: On the one hand, we’ve been talking about some dynamics that are specific to Minneapolis—to its history, to how people came together here. But I wanna ask you about other cities. I’m thinking about Portland, Maine, for example, where immigration agents are deployed right now and which, like Minneapolis, has a Somali American community.
Serwer: What’s happening in Minneapolis is, to some degree, it’s about lessons learned in other cities that have been subject to these kinds of deployments. And I think there’s no reason for them to go to Portland, Maine; they said they were coming to Minnesota to deal with fraud, which obviously makes no sense because the people involved in that—that case is already ongoing.
But it does make sense if you’re like, The president doesn’t like Somali people, which he’s been very clear about. He thinks they’re, quote, unquote, “trash”; he doesn’t want them here. Then, in that context, sending federal agents to Portland, Maine, has some logic to it because, after all, they’re just there to treat Somali Americans like shit—excuse my language. If you’re just racial profiling, if you’re just trying to harm this community, then it makes sense that you would send federal agents to Minneapolis and to Portland.
The justices on the Supreme Court are subject to the same rationalizations that the rest of the conservative movement is in terms of jettisoning their stated values in order to appease Trump. I think their inability to stand up to him is related to that.
Rosin: You wrote a famous headline during Trump’s first term, also the title of your book, The Cruelty Is the Point. Now, that was back in the first term. How do you see that as having evolved?
Serwer: Last week, the Trump administration arrested a prominent Black activist here in Minneapolis who was involved in the protest at that church, and they used AI to Photoshop a picture of her being arrested. She was not crying, and then they used AI to make her look like she was crying when she got arrested. And I think that’s extraordinary because what it said was reality did not provide them with the humiliation of a Black woman who exceeded her station, in their view, that their audience was craving, and so they had to use AI to complete the fantasy. And the fantasy was: Look at this Black woman suffering because we got her.
But I do think that, as an ethos, it’s very clear that they get off on cruelty, that a lot of the people who support them get off on it—not everybody. I think there are a lot of Trump people who voted for Trump who are appalled by this. But for that extremely online far-right audience, they want more of it. It’s not enough.
Rosin: Adam, thank you so much for talking to us today, and stay warm.
Serwer: Thank you.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Natalie Brennan and Ethan Brooks, with reporting from Jocelyn Frank. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and composed original music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
