The Twin Cities have been in the news non-stop this month, as Operation Metro Surge—an initiative kicked off by unsubstantiated reports of daycare fraud—has resulted in countless disappearances and two high-profile murders by federal agents. Renée Good and Alex Pretti were both fatally shot by ICE agents while doing nothing that would provoke lethal action, as confirmed by numerous videos of both shootings.
In addition to the murders, ICE agents have illegally and often violently detained and transported hundreds if not thousands of U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants alike to detention centers as far away as Texas. Children as young as five have been indiscriminately targeted, and Minneapolis has offered families the option of virtual learning to avoid the possibility of students being targeted while traveling to or at school. This concern is grounded in incidents such as the one that took place at Roosevelt High School not long after the shooting of Good, wherein ICE agents deployed what appears to be tear gas on a crowd of students. The Department of Homeland Security maintains that no tear gas was used, despite video evidence of a chemical irritant being utilized by officers against students.
This pattern of denial despite clear video evidence is also seen in the Department’s response to the shootings of both Good and Pretti. In the case of Good, the Department of Justice refused to open an investigation into her murder while simultaneously moving to investigate the activism of Good and her widow. Additionally, Secretary Noem would go on to falsely claim that Good had attempted to attack the agents with her car and called her a domestic terrorist. In a later interview, Noem claimed that Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot an unarmed woman until she died and proceeded to call her a “fucking bitch” was doing “exactly what he’s been taught to do in that situation.”
The case of Alex Pretti follows a similar pattern of denial and defamation. While the DOJ has opened an investigation into his murder, it comes after Pretti had already been significantly slandered by Noem, who claimed he was threatening agents with a gun. The President echoed this rhetoric, shaming Pretti for protesting while carrying a gun that he had a legal license and a Constitutional right to possess. While Pretti did have a gun, it was legally concealed on his person and was never raised against the agents. At no point did he draw it, and when agents began assaulting him, they did not appear aware of it. Analysis of the footage by the New York Times determined that Pretti had been disarmed by the time he was shot 10 times. Six of those shots were fired after Pretti was already motionless on the ground.
Many experts state this violence was an inevitable and intentional result of Metro Surge, and it has been called an act of stochastic terrorism committed by the Administration. This term is used to describe actions by public figures that obliquely encourage acts of terrorism to be committed by those they influence. This term would include, say, a public figure falsely stating that a certain ethnic group was eating people’s pets, thus resulting in an increase in hate crimes toward that specific group. It would most definitely encompass sending thousands of armed, poorly trained—as evidenced via Noem’s assertion that Ross was acting entirely as trained—operatives into a heavily populated city.
Due to this, many are calling for the immediate withdrawal of ICE from the Twin Cities, along with the impeachment of both Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump. Their part in creating the circumstances under which these human rights violations have occurred and simultaneous attempts to ignore and outright lie about the murder of civilians by federal agents are stark and undeniable.
While legal action has been moving at a slower pace, within the Twin Cities things are moving quickly. The entire community has mobilized in opposition to ICE, with hundreds partaking in daily direct action in the form of tailing ICE officers, delivering groceries, and recording attempted arrests. Additionally, tens of thousands have turned out in protests such as the general strike on January 23rd. On the national stage, donations to organizations such as Stand With Minnesota or the ACLU of Minnesota have surged.
