01/27/2026
For months, Jacob Frey, the Minneapolis mayor, felt a growing dread watching the number of federal immigration and Border Patrol agents swell from dozens to hundreds to thousands, all deployed to his city to carry out President Trump’s promise of the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in American history.
“We’ve seen constant, constant, escalation,” Frey said. “The [police] chief and I were both publicly and privately expressing deep concern of the possibility, even likelihood, that somebody was going to get seriously injured or killed.”
Then Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother, was fatally shot in the head on Jan. 7 by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent during one of the many protests erupting in the city against the actions of federal agents. On Saturday, it happened again.
Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, was shot with 10 rounds and killed by a Border Patrol agent after a group of officers wrestled him to the frozen ground in front of a doughnut shop where he died.
Those fatalities, in a span of little more than two weeks, marked a new and alarming phase in a two-month confrontation between the residents of an American city, carrying phones and whistles, and armed officers of the U.S. government. It has yielded jarring images that, to many outside of Minneapolis, seem from a foreign land—unmarked vehicles of masked men prowling city streets, and the martial scowl of Gregory Bovino, the uniformed lead of Operation Metro Surge, tossing a chemical gr***de at protesters.
Broadly, the conflict reflects the nation’s split views of immigration policy, an issue that helped carry Trump to the White House a year ago. To many Minneapolis residents, it has become a fight against an occupying army bent on subduing their progressive city.
