Uprising in Minneapolis

Although Donald Trump’s stormtroopers have been on the rampage against migrants since last spring, it took the recent executions of two white U.S. citizens, Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, to finally generate national outrage.

Good, a 37-year-old mom of three, was on her way home after dropping her child off at school on January 7, when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot her in the face four times. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who cared for military veterans, was aiding a woman protester who was shoved to the ground on January 24 and using his phone to video the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents who were attacking her. They then threw Pretti to the ground and shot him nine times in the back while he lay face down.

Good and Pretti were the fifth and sixth people murdered by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents during Trump’s second term.

On New Year’s Eve, an off-duty ICE agent shot and killed Keith Porter, a Black man who was also a U.S. citizen, in Northridge, California. Before that, the other victims were all Latino. As the Associated Press reported, “Last September, Immigration and Customs Enforcement fatally shot another person outside Chicago. Two people have died after being struck by vehicles while fleeing immigration authorities. And a California farmworker fell from a greenhouse and broke his neck during an ICE raid last July.”

Countless other people have been shot, beaten and injured by these trigger-happy goons—who travel in packs and whose primary aim is to terrorize immigrant communities, roaming migrant neighborhoods, breaking down doors and smashing car windshields, and lurking outside of schools to abduct parents picking up their children.

No agent has been charged for any violent crime so far. Quite the opposite: They have been hailed as heroes by DHS officials, who were claimed to be merely defending themselves from “domestic terrorists.”

This is because DHS doesn’t allow any “outsiders” to investigate its agents’ misdeeds, making them accountable to no one else. And as soon as federal agents brutalize someone, DHS rolls out its propaganda machine to spew one lie after another that blame the victims of ICE violence.

Hours after Good’s murder, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem stated, “This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism”—although multiple videos taken by witnesses on the scene show agents surrounding a flustered Good’s car as she desperately attempted to steer her car away from them. “I’m not mad at you,” she told them before they opened fire.

Noem and White House deputy chief of staff, white nationalist Stephen Miller, also described Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” who was planning to “massacre” agents. Yet his last words were to ask the woman protester he was trying to defend, “Are you alright?” DHS officials initially claimed that Pretti was “brandishing a gun” and the agents were merely defending themselves. But Pretti had a legally registered firearm at his waist, which multiple videos showed was removed by agents well before he was shot in the back. The only “weapon” he was brandishing was his cell phone to video the brutality unfolding in front of him.

“I know an occupation when I see one”

During Trump’s first year back in office, his presidency morphed into an authoritarian regime at breakneck speed, with no end in sight. Until now, that is—because, thanks to the courage of Minneapolis residents, there is a genuine sliver of hope that the growing resistance to Trump’s tyranny can succeed at least in slowing him in his tracks. While U.S. society remains extremely polarized between left and right, Trump’s support is shrinking, while the resistance is growing.

Trump has severely overreached in recent weeks. Beginning in December, Trump deployed what increasingly appears to be his own paramilitary force to Minneapolis, Minnesota—composed of 3,000 masked, heavily armed and sadistic immigration enforcement agents, weapons ready, locked and loaded. In comparison, Minneapolis’ local law enforcement numbers between only 800 and 900.

DHS officials have falsely claimed their agents had “immunity” from prosecution and also didn’t need judges’ warrants to enter people’s homes.

Having been given carte blanche by their own Department, bands of federal agents simply ignore cities’ local laws when they invade them. As one ICE agent recently informed local officials in Jersey City, New Jersey, “There’s nothing that you’re going to say that’s going to prevent us from doing our job.” When asked if the agents had a warrant, the agent responded, “We don’t need a warrant, bro. Stop getting that into your head.”

Whereas the Trump administration previously sent hundreds of federal agents at a time into targeted cities, thousands of these goons were sent in to occupy the mid-sized city of Minneapolis—effectively turning it into a war zone. Activist Ariel Gold reported in The Nation, “As someone who has spent a significant amount of time in the West Bank of Palestine, I know an occupation when I see one—and what is happening in Minnesota right now is an occupation.”

While Democrats and Republicans squabble over increasing DHS funding in Congress, the department already has enough funding to last the next four years at its present level, thanks to Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill that sailed through Congress last summer, tripling its budget to $170 billion. The bill made DHS funding “more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.”

Using these enormous funds to go on a huge hiring spree, the DHS rapidly expanded its ranks by vastly lowering its (already ridiculously low) hiring standards. White supremacist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—which flourished during Trump’s first term, can now find gainful employment with the DHS, doing what they love: beating people up. As Kali Holloway noted in The Nation, after Trump pardoned all the January 6, 2021, rioters a year ago,

At the time, Heidi Beirich, formerly of the SPLC and now cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told The Independent that Trump had “brought back two organizations that have extremely long track records of violence” and worried that he had “emboldened those movements, made them more powerful, and given them the sanction of the highest office.” She was exactly right, except that at the time, it was impossible to imagine how fully true that could become—that there might come a time when those groups would not need to operate in the streets anymore, because they would be offered cover in what is essentially Trump’s secret police, where they can be armed, masked, empowered to detain, brutalize, and kill with near total impunity.

Targeting legal observers

The DHS has also used its financial windfall to invest in state-of-the-art surveillance technology, allowing them to identify protesters using facial recognition and cell phone tracking technology, and then adding them to a database for retribution, as CNN reported: The form is labeled “intel collection non-arrests,” and agents were instructed to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.”

The Intercept described how this DHS intel collection led to the forcible abduction of U.S. citizen Clayton Kelly—who had videoed federal agents shoot and wound another person ten days earlier—while still at the scene with his wife shortly after Pretti’s murder:

All of a sudden,” Kelly said, a federal agent “started running toward me, pointing and yelling, ‘That’s him. Get him.”

…“I kept telling them he’s a U.S. citizen. They said, ‘We don’t give a f—,’” [Kelly’s wife] said.

Kelly had previously undergone fusion surgery in his thoracic spine, a procedure that permanently joins vertebrae to stabilize the back. “Several agents piled on top of me,” Kelly said, and one put his knee on the site of his surgical wounds. “They were sitting directly on my spine.”

“I was screaming that I couldn’t breathe, but I had almost no air left,” Kelly said. “An agent pushed the pepper spray nozzle right into my left eye and sprayed. I turned my head so I wouldn’t get it in both eyes, but my left eye was completely burned.”

Pinned beneath multiple agents, Kelly said panic quickly gave way to fear that he might not survive. He said he was unable to catch his breath and felt his limbs go limp beneath the weight on his body.

Kelly was dragged to a waiting vehicle and then detained for eight hours without receiving medical attention before being released without charge. Agents did not return his phone to him and did not list a phone as being among his belongings.

The Intercept also noted, “Kelly is far from the only civilian to be brutalized by federal agents in Minneapolis this month. But his detailed account of his beating and detention offers a clear example of how the agents, ostensibly deployed to carry out immigration enforcement, have instead shifted their purpose to encompass a crackdown on dissent. In Kelly’s case, it raises the question of whether he was facing retaliation for acting as a witness.”

This is the context in which federal immigration agents told a woman protester, “You guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” referring to Good, and responded with taunts of “Boo Hoo” to outraged protesters after Pretti’s execution.

General strike on January 23

These are the circumstances under which ordinary people from Minneapolis organized their “ICE out for Good!” general strike on January 23—in response to the execution of Good on January 7 and just one day before the execution of Pretti.

On the day, in a temperature of minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit and a wind chill of minus 35 (so dangerously cold that most schools were closed due to weather), between 75,000 and 100,000 Minnesotans marched and rallied through Minneapolis More than 700 local businesses shut down for the day, while the strike drew the support of all major labor unions, including the Minnesota AFL-CIO.

While the massive numbers of protesters demonstrated the power of numbers in the streets, Minnesotans were also prepared to physically defend themselves from ICE—which thousands have already been doing since DHS goons began occupying their city in December.

Community groups have trained over 30,000 local people to use their smartphones to video the brutality of federal agents—which are then used as evidence to counter the lies of the DHS propaganda machine. Neighborhood by neighborhood, working-class people of all races have been organizing to rapid response networks to protect each other, which has evolved into an extraordinary sense of solidarity.

Natasha Lennard called the general strike “the most extraordinary day of mass resistance to Trumpian fascism to date” in The Intercept.

She argued that the Minneapolis strike “must be treated as a powerful new phase of resistance against Trump’s regime—a task that can only be achieved by building on and repeating it, adding that the ordinary people taking part “protested, transported, fed, and watched over each other, an outgrowth of weeks, months, and years of community care and abolitionist resistance. Their collective actions mark a breakthrough in the fight against the American authoritarianism of our time.”

She added, “It is only a future with mass social strikes, or general strikes, involving large-scale disruption on the immediate horizon that has the chance of stopping Trump’s forces.

“The task ahead of us, in the face of the government’s unending violence and cruelty, is to take up, share, and spread the practices modeled by networks in Minnesota.”

The Minneapolis general strike was not initiated by unions, although it eventually gained support from many of them. Nor was the strike a “spontaneous” revolt against ICE.

Four aspects of the grassroots resistance in Minneapolis were built purposefully by local activists:

Community organizations, many of them around for decades with strong roots in working-class and migrant communities, laid the groundwork for the general strike in the weeks before it took place.
Activists with experience in the Black Lives Matter uprising after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 (which also happened in Minneapolis), along with veterans of the Palestinian liberation struggles, including the encampments in 2024, worked alongside community organizers together to organize an effective resistance to ICE—rather than creating a “turf war” pitting competing organizations against each other (which has too often ruined joint action among leftists in the past).
Local union activists pressured their own unions to mobilize for the general strike, although the vast majority of workers who took part did not belong to a union. This reflects the weakness of organized labor in the U.S. after four decades of an employers’ offensive aimed at crushing unions. It is also the case that union leaders are historically often only reluctantly convinced to endorse a general strike after rank-and-file workers have already taken broad-based strike action.
But perhaps the most important aspect of the grassroots resistance has been the bravery of local people, including white U.S. citizens, in the face of DHS agents’ brutality. Using a smartphone to film the violence of federal agents is why they murdered Alex Pretti.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) executive director Stefanie Fox described,

In the weeks since Porter and Good were murdered, the response from thousands of everyday people has been to show up to help resist. Our LA member remarked on the energy of a recent community defense training put on by a coalition the JVP chapter is active in. “I was so moved to be in the room with all these everyday people who just saw someone get murdered for doing this work, and their response is to show up and ask where they can sign up.”

Every neighborhood in Minneapolis, and sometimes each block in the neighborhood, has a communication thread for rapid response. Tens of thousands of people are working together: assessing safety, patrolling for ICE agents, checking license plates, alerting each other, dispatching protective presence where it is needed. There are masses of people that will show up at any hour of the day or night to try to get between ICE and their neighbors.

In addition to rapid response community protection, Minneapolis neighbors have built mutual aid structures to care for one another abundantly. There are systems for delivering food and supplies to neighbors that are unsafe to leave their homes; organizing rides to and from work. During our conversation, one of the JVP-Twin Cities members let out an excited “yes!” when a text came through: A huge pallet of diapers and menstrual pads had just been delivered to one of the community organizations serving as a hub for resource distribution.

Throughout it all, there are easy ways for new people to get trained up and find a role, and for communication among and between all these systems…

The sense of solidarity in Minneapolis has spread across the country like wildfire since the deaths of Good and Pretti—with protests and student walkouts and that number from the dozens to the thousands in cities, large and small.

The execution of Good and Pretti demonstrate that the targets of Trump’s mass deportation campaign extend beyond immigrants but also to expand his authoritarian rule over the entire U.S. population—including its citizens. As if to demonstrate this point, federal agents arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who is Black, in Los Angeles after he and his (now independent) news crew covered an anti-ICE protest at a Minneapolis church. As Nation columnist Elie Mystal described, “The Trump administration arrested Don Lemon like he was a fugitive slave.”

On February 4, the Trump administration announced it is withdrawing 700 federal agents from Minnesota, a small victory.

While the outcome of the Minneapolis uprising cannot be predicted, it provides a model for how the combination of class and social struggle—and most of all, solidarity—holds the potential to effectively combat Trump’s authoritarian aspirations in the months ahead.