Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
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. Video showed several agents tussling with Pretti and bringing him to his knees. He resisted as the agents grabbed his legs, pushed down on his back, and hit him repeatedly. Once he was pinned, agents yelled that he had a gun, and then one agent pulled a gun that appeared to match the profile of a firearm DHS said belonged to Pretti. Another agent, with his own firearm, shot at Pretti’s back at close range. He kept firing at Pretti, followed by another agent who fired additional shots into Pretti as he lay motionless. Within five seconds, at least 10 shots were fired.
Police officers kill civilians, but what’s striking about both the fatal shootings of Pretti and Renee Good were how avoidable they were — a reasonably-trained urban cop would have probably de-escalated both clashes without killing anyone. 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. “This level of engineered chaos is unique to Minneapolis,” J.D. Vance recently posted. “It is the direct consequence of far left agitators, working with local authorities.” Stephen Miller, the architect of the ICE surge and where the true dark heart of the Trump administration resides—a man who fundamentally believes in an America purged of immigrants—has repeatedly lied about Pretti, claiming he was on a mission to assassinate an ICE agent. There is, quite literally, no evidence of this being the case, and the video completely contradicts the false reality MAGA is now constructing.
A stronger, stabler, and ultimately more popular regime could trick enough Americans into believing these kinds of lies. The Bush administration lied to the country after September 11th and predicated a whole war on the fiction that weapons of mass destruction lay in Iraq. But George W. Bush and Dick Cheney presided over a nation hungry for retribution and deeply fearful of another terrorist attack. Bush, for a period, boasted an approval rating above 90 percent; as destructive a president as he would be, he was, in the first months after 9/11, a comforting presence, one millions of Americans turned to in the wake of a cataclysm.
No such event exists today. Vance is right in one sense: all of this is “engineered.” But it’s MAGA at the machine, or trying to be, 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.
None of it is working. Americans have a much warmer view of immigration today than they did under Joe Biden. ICE is startlingly unpopular. Soon, abolishing ICE will be an actual mainstream position, and unlike the defund the police movement it will not damage the Democrats’ electoral prospects. ICE is not the military or the police; it is a horrid paramilitary birthed by the Bush administration in 2003 that has been weaponized under Trump.
Americans have no special fondness for ICE. An ICE agent, unlike a local cop, isn’t a fixture of the community or popular culture. He is a marauder, an invader—fundamentally alienating. The voters who back ICE to the hilt and believe the MAGA fictions represent a rump faction of American life. For now, that may be all that matters to Trump, who obsesses over his base and little else. If the cult is held together, what else is there to worry about?
It’s right to be alarmist. It’s also right to consider the logistics of strongman rule. What comes after Minneapolis? Is Trump’s ICE army large enough to destabilize more cities, larger ones especially? The answer is probably no. ICE is already swarming, and will spend the next three years randomly arresting, detaining, and trying to deport people, wherever they might be.
The chaos of Minneapolis, though, might start to chasten Trump, in the same way he dimly understood there was no enduring political benefit to randomly deploying National Guardsmen. This is, understandably, not all that comforting, since more bloodshed will still come. MAGA can’t actually win this fight—winning would mean building the sort of world where Americans actually yearned for their ICE agents—but it can do inordinate damage as it loses, as it fades from relevance following an inevitable midterm drubbing, straining to matter under the aegis of a reviled lame duck president.
This regime is weak, any serious mandate long leaked away. The weak, however, are still dangerous. There is more darkness waiting before dawn.
