What Happened in Minneapolis
Michael Cavlan had settled into a routine of patrolling his neighborhood by car most mornings when, early on January 7th, he received an alert on his phone informing him about Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity near his house in Powderhorn, in South Minneapolis. The previous day, the Department of Homeland Security had announced that it was sending two thousand immigration agents to Minnesota to take part in Operation Metro Surge, a campaign of mass detention and deportation that the Trump Administration advertised as the largest D.H.S. undertaking ever. Cavlan, a salty, gray-haired nurse and union steward, is a first-generation Irish American; in 1969, his Irish Catholic parents, inspired by the U.S. civil-rights movement, had moved the family back to Northern Ireland to participate in its push for independence. Since the surge began, on December 1st, Cavlan had joined other Minneapolis residents in monitoring the presence of federal agents in town—“Just being there and making sure ICE wasn’t doing anything illegal,” he told me.
On the same morning, a short drive away, a therapist who asked to be identified as Bre was also patrolling, having woken up to an alert on her phone about ICE activity at her daughter’s former elementary school. “I put clothes on, and I drove straight to the school,” she told me. By the time she got there, the ICE agents had left, but she noticed a telltale convoy of S.U.V.s with tinted windows speeding down the street and decided to follow them.
Bre arrived at the intersection of Thirty-fourth Street and Portland Avenue, where she saw a group of ICE agents standing around as a crowd of people shouted at them. A woman’s body lay on the ground, surrounded by paramedics, and a man—a doctor, Bre later found out—was screaming. “He said, ‘They pointed a gun at me! They wouldn’t let me take her pulse!’ ” Bre recalled.
She noticed that the woman’s clothes had been cut off so that the paramedics could perform CPR. The sidewalk was icy, and the woman’s skin was exposed to the cold. “Her underwear was bloody,” Bre said. “I thought, Is this a miscarriage?” Unsure of how she could help, Bre left for an appointment. “I didn’t know until later that afternoon that she was one of us, and that she died,” she said. Cavlan, who had arrived there around the same time, knew exactly what he was seeing. He notified the Signal group that had sent him the initial alert. “I said, ‘Hey, dispatch, this is Irish. I’m here at the scene. ICE has shot somebody.’ ”
A few hours later, Bre would learn what happened the way nearly all of us did, through video. Renée Good—a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three and an American citizen who was, like Bre and Cavlan, monitoring ICE’s presence—tries to maneuver her Honda to leave the area after an agent tells her to “get out of the fucking car.” An agent in front of the car shoots Good multiple times, first through the windshield and then through the driver’s-side window. (“Fucking bitch,” he says afterward, in a video recorded on his phone that was released later.) The Honda continues down the street and crashes into a parked car, as Good’s wife, Becca Good, who was recording the altercation, runs after it.
Renée Good’s biography defied easy political categorizations: she was raised Christian in one of the most conservative cities in the country and had started a new chapter of her life in one of its most liberal. She grew up in Colorado Springs, in a community that Becca Hainsworth, who was friends with Good as a teen-ager, recalled as “very military-heavy, very religious-heavy.” Both were enthusiastic members of a Presbyterian Church in America youth group called Village Seven; Good was an occasional soloist on the worship team. “She had one of the most beautiful singing voices I’ve ever heard in my life,” Hainsworth said.
Good married her high-school boyfriend, Justin Sheppard, in 2009; he joined the Air Force, and they had two kids before divorcing in 2015. In her thirties, while pregnant with her third child, Good studied English as an undergraduate at Old Dominion University. Her second husband and the child’s father, an Air Force veteran named Timmy Ray Macklin, Jr., died in 2023, a few months after the two broke up.
Renée and Becca Good started their relationship that year, and, according to public records, Renée took Becca’s last name in the fall. The couple moved to Minneapolis from Kansas City in 2025. “I guess they made the decision that if Trump won the election, they were going to get out before the inauguration,” a former neighbor told the Kansas City Star. They settled in a neighborhood with a supportive network of queer families. In one of the only public statements she has made since Renée’s killing, Becca Good spoke of “a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other.” She continued, “Here, I had finally found peace and safe harbor. That has been taken from me forever.”
The agent who killed Good, Jonathan Ross, had worked for ICE since 2015, after previous stints in the National Guard and Border Patrol. In June, 2025, Ross was dragged by a vehicle driven by a Cuban immigrant whom he was attempting to arrest. (The driver, Roberto Munoz-Guatemala, was later convicted of a felony charge for assaulting a federal officer.) By midday on January 7th, members of the Trump Administration were arguing that Ross had acted in self-defense. Posting on Truth Social, the President said that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer”; Vice-President J. D. Vance called her a “deranged leftist”; and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and Trump’s homeland-security adviser, described Good’s interaction with Ross before her death as “domestic terrorism.” (D.H.S. has continued to claim that Good “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted to hit Ross.)
“This is literally one of the most docile, kind, sweet, empathetic, shy people I know,” Hainsworth said. She told me that, after she’d found out that Good still had a pulse when the paramedics arrived, she watched the video of the shooting “five thousand times over.” “I know Renée,” she said. “I know her facial expressions. I know what her face looks like when she’s scared, and she’s scared.” I asked her why she had watched the video so many times, and she started to cry. “I just didn’t want her to be alone, you know?” she said.
In Minneapolis—which had exploded into destructive mass protests following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer named Derek Chauvin in 2020—officials scrambled to prepare for a potentially similar response to Good’s killing. Joe Thompson, then a senior official in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office and one of the city’s few intermediaries between the local and federal governments, requested that immigration agents pause enforcement activities while the shooting was investigated. For several hours, it appeared that they had. Then, in the early afternoon, Jacob Frey, the mayor of the city, gave a press conference during which he told ICE agents to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” Not long afterward, two dozen Border Patrol agents descended on Roosevelt High School as class was getting out, prompting a confrontation in which the agents deployed pepper spray and arrested four people, including a teacher. (A D.H.S. spokesperson said that the agents had been pursuing a U.S. citizen who was “actively trying to impede operations.”) Minneapolis public schools cancelled classes for the rest of the week.
Frey told me that “get the fuck out” was not, as he put it, “in my talking points” for that day, but he stood by his speech. “People think of it as purely a message to ICE and the federal Administration,” he said. “But it was also a message to my constituents, because they need to know that there is a government on their side.” Some locals on the ground, however, felt let down. “The elected officials abandoned us,” Cavlan, who regularly volunteers as a street medic and has run for Senate as a Green Party candidate, said. “Mayor Frey, what was his big thing? He said ‘fuck.’ ”
By evening, a memorial had been set up at the site of the shooting. Bre quietly joined the vigil. “I didn’t talk to anybody,” she said. “I just kind of cried in the crowd with everyone.”
Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, told me that he’d spoken with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, on the day of Good’s death. She and Walz had been fellow-congresspeople from the Upper Midwest; Walz recalled exercising alongside her at the Capitol gym. “I had a very heated conversation that ended with me saying, ‘Well, I hope you can sleep well tonight, Kristi,’ ” he told me. “And she said, ‘I certainly will.’ ”
In the following days, as Minneapolis processed its outrage and grief, Trump deployed another thousand agents to the state. On January 13th, he posted on Truth Social, “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”
I arrived in Minneapolis, the city where I grew up, the next day, and was eating a cheeseburger at a bar as news broke of another ICE shooting. So this is how it will be now, I thought. I drove to the site, on Twenty-fourth Avenue North. Tear gas drifted through the air, punctuated by the sound of flash-bang grenades. The temperature was in the teens, and the streets were banked with ice. A few dozen protesters in parkas and assorted Carhartt winter apparel were standing in front of a line of masked and armed federal agents, who were guarding the house where the shooting had occurred.
The next morning, D.H.S. issued a press release with an account that was later found in court to have been fabricated. The government’s story, about “criminal illegal aliens” assaulting agents with a snow shovel and a broom, seemed almost quaint in its seasonal details. Security-camera footage and forensic examination by Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension eventually showed that an agent named Christian Castro, who had been pursuing a car driven by an immigrant named Alfredo Aljorna, shot Aljorna’s roommate Julio Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, through the closed front door of their house. Sosa-Celis, who had Temporary Protected Status that allowed him to live and work in the U.S., was shot through the leg; the bullet lodged itself in the wall of a child’s bedroom. (A D.H.S. spokesperson said that the agency had unknowingly relied on false testimony from two officers when preparing the press release; the officers were placed on administrative leave.)
Ten days later, another American citizen, Alex Pretti, was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, followed by a similar pattern of attacks and denials by federal officials. A government strategy was emerging: immigration agents using excessive force; officials casting blame before the facts were fully known; the government stalling investigations. After the third shooting, however, the American public’s incredulity about the official narrative became hard to ignore. Trump’s approval ratings tanked, and the ICE surges into American cities were replaced by less conspicuous methods. By that point, nearly four thousand of Minnesota’s immigrants had been detained, and the operation was costing taxpayers an estimated eighteen million dollars each week. The human—and moral—cost was far higher. In January, when Jonathan Ross killed Renée Good, the government’s treatment of local opposition to its immigration agenda still had the power to shock the country. In fact, her death marked the beginning of a new reality. ICE and C.B.P., two federal immigration agencies with law-enforcement wings, were now operating like militarized forces in the hearts of American cities, seemingly empowered to shoot and kill U.S. citizens with a posture of impunity.
The Trump Administration initially framed Operation Metro Surge as a crackdown on fraud. When Donald Trump took office in January, 2025, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office was in the process of securing convictions in a years-long investigation into a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which had stolen two hundred and fifty million dollars in pandemic-era federal-aid funds through false billing. The probe, which was first made public in 2022, had since widened to include autism clinics, adult day-care centers, and other recipients of Medicaid dollars. The ringleader of the scheme, who was recently sentenced to forty-one years in prison, was a white American named Aimee Bock, but a majority of the more than seventy people convicted were Somali Americans. “We had this huge problem, and we were grappling with it,” a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who had worked on the case told me. “And suddenly it’s being used not even for political reasons but just for, like, racist reasons.”
In mid-November, City Journal published an article by Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe claiming that there were ties between the defendants and the Somali Islamic extremist group Al Shabab, and that some money from remittances sent back to Somalia had ended up in terrorists’ hands. Right-wing pundits such as Matt Walsh began discussing the fraud as a failure of cultural assimilation. “Somalis have nothing to do with America or its culture or its history,” he wrote in one post. (A key source for the City Journal article later described the claims of aiding terrorism as “poetic license”; Joe Thompson, the lead prosecutor in the Feeding Our Future case, said publicly that there was “no indication” it had ever happened.) On November 21st, Trump, citing the existence of “Somali gangs,” posted on Truth Social that he would rescind Temporary Protected Status for Somalis in Minnesota. A couple of weeks later, he described Ilhan Omar—the four-term Democratic congresswoman from Minneapolis who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia—as “garbage.”
Many of the Minnesota officials and activists I spoke with were not all that surprised when the federal government launched the surge in December. “Trump has said a lot of really abusive, horrible things about the Somali community,” Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me. “It was an inevitable situation.” At first, the ICE agents focussed their deportation efforts on Somali businesses and neighborhoods, but the Administration had overlooked one crucial fact about the vast majority of the Somali community in Minnesota. “These are American citizens. They’re here legally. They got here on Delta,” Jacob Frey told me. “Once the agents realized that,” he continued, “they diverted their attention to Latino people and Southeast Asian people and everybody else.”
Over all, Minnesota has a relatively small number of undocumented immigrants, around a hundred thousand people. But the motive behind Operation Metro Surge may have been something else entirely. “I think Donald Trump just hates that he lost Minnesota three times,” Tim Walz told me. “He personally hates our progressive policies, and they decided that Minnesota was going to be a target, and it escalated from there.” Still, as David Wilson, a local immigration attorney, observed, “I just don’t think all of us really at the time saw the scale of it coming, or how committed they were to the bit.”
Luis Argueta, Jr., the communications director of Unidos MN, a Minnesota immigrant-rights organization, said the initial rumor was that the Trump Administration would be sending a hundred agents. “And we’re freaking out,” he told me. “We’re, like, ‘Oh, my God, one hundred agents!’ ”
The first agents to arrive from out of town seemed poorly trained to handle local opposition. Minnesotans who recorded videos of ICE arrests were threatened with Tasers, pepper-sprayed, shoved to the ground, or arrested. The agents would make disparaging comments—in declarations submitted in an A.C.L.U. lawsuit, a Somali American U.S. citizen who was taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where ICE had set up its headquarters, said an agent had told him that “Somalis drained Minnesota” and “should go back home”; another observer stated that, when he’d blown a whistle, he had been asked, “Are you getting raped right now? Is that a rape whistle?” There were signs, too, that agents might not be responsible with their firearms. On December 18th, an agent accidentally discharged his gun in a hotel room, hitting the headboard of a bed in the room next door. On December 21st, another agent fired shots at a Cuban national after he’d fled arrest. (D.H.S. claimed that the man had hit two agents with his car and that the shots had been fired in self-defense.)
The day after Christmas, a conservative YouTuber and self-described independent journalist named Nick Shirley released a video that would go on to amass almost a hundred and fifty million views. In it, he drives to about a dozen publicly funded Minneapolis child-care centers operated by Somali Americans. Some appear to be empty and closed; at others, the people answering the door deflect Shirley’s demands for information about enrolling a fictional child named “Joey.” Trump Administration officials promoted the video, and Noem posted that Homeland Security Investigations agents were “on the ground” looking into day-care centers. (A state agency later visited nine of the centers in the video and found that they “were operating as expected,” but, in April, federal agents executed search warrants at twenty Minnesota day cares suspected of fraud; one day-care owner featured in Shirley’s video was charged in the Feeding Our Future case and has since pleaded guilty.)
Before the surge, the regional ICE office had a hundred and ninety staff members overseeing five states; over the course of January, about three thousand agents passed through the St. Paul field office, more than the ten largest Minneapolis-St. Paul metro-area police forces combined. They were joined by another thousand agents from C.B.P., including a large contingent from Border Patrol, led by their “commander-at-large,” Gregory Bovino. The deployment of Border Patrol officers to the interior was unique to the surges, which began in Los Angeles in June, 2025, and the officers had become known for their volatile behavior in urban environments. A former Assistant U.S. Attorney described the ground plan in Minnesota: “They were, like, ‘Occupy Minneapolis like it was Falluja.’ ”
Good’s killing soon became the biggest news story in the country—one poll found that eighty per cent of registered voters had watched video footage of it—but the Administration blocked attempts to investigate the case. Mary Moriarty, the county attorney for Hennepin, which encompasses Minneapolis, told me that her office had initially discussed a joint investigation with the U.S. Attorney’s office, the F.B.I., and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, as was typical. Then, according to Moriarty, the B.C.A. was informed that there would be no coöperation and was denied access to evidence. “We were told that that came from the Administration,” she said.
Within a week, Todd Blanche, then the Deputy Attorney General, announced that no criminal civil-rights investigation into Good’s killing would take place. Department of Justice sources leaked to the press that the department was instead, in a chilling turn, planning to investigate Becca Good, Renée’s wife, for a potential charge of assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer, and to look into her ties to activist networks that monitored ICE agents. The prospect set off a wave of internal turmoil: six lawyers from the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office who’d reportedly been tasked with the investigation resigned. These included members of the office’s upper management and Joe Thompson, the lead on the benefits-fraud case that was the ostensible reason for the surge in the first place.
By then, the government’s priorities were already familiar to local prosecutors. Andrew Winter met me one slushy morning in February at a Caribou Coffee in South Minneapolis. Winter had retired from the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office in August, 2025, several months before the ICE surge began. A tall man with a laconic Midwestern affect, he was a career civil servant. “I’ve never worked in the private sector,” he told me, with evident pride.
Winter said that the emphasis on immigration enforcement had started early in Trump’s second term. Initially, there was the executive order that Trump signed in February, 2025, declaring that he and the Attorney General would now provide “authoritative interpretations of the law” that the rest of the executive branch had to follow. Winter’s office soon saw a marked rise in requests to build illegal-reëntry cases, in which deported immigrants who return to the U.S. are tried in U.S. criminal court instead of simply getting deported again. Winter described the ensuing “pressure campaign” as “aggressive and overt.” The message, he said, was “We’re doing business differently because ICE has this new authority in town.”
There were other changes as well. Winter was the section chief for national security, overseeing cases involving assaults on federal officers. “In the old days, this would be an area where we, as prosecutors, would use our discretion,” Winter told me. As quotas for immigration arrests increased that spring, he was asked to press felony charges for even minor aggressions against agents. “If the Administration heard about it, they’d be, like, ‘You have to charge everything,’ ” the former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Minnesota office told me.
Winter recalled that he had been told, in the early spring of 2025, to bring a felony assault charge in a case where an ICE officer was left with “a visible welt but not grievous injury” after the arrest of an immigrant who was a convicted felon. “It was just kind of part of the wrestling match,” Winter said, of the welt. He tried to argue that the case wasn’t worth the effort: “I’m, like, ‘I get to call this ball,’ and they’re, like, ‘No, you don’t.’ ”
Winter acquiesced, he told me, saying, “All right, let’s investigate the shit out of this thing.” As he interviewed witnesses, “more questions were raised than were answered about what exactly happened,” as he put it. Winter doubted that a grand jury would side with ICE. “I made my pitch,” he said, “and the upshot of that meeting was ‘Yeah, you know what? Misdemeanor sounds good.’ ” He started filing the paperwork only to learn that the detainee had been deported weeks before. The entire investigation had been a waste of time. “It was very emblematic,” Winter said. “It was such a nothing burger. This is stupid shit for the chief of national security to be spending his or her time on.”
Then came the surge. As ICE agents took to the streets and clashed with residents, the pressure to charge activists with assault grew. On January 12th, Gregory Bovino held a call with U.S. Attorneys in Minnesota in which he reportedly expressed anger about their restraint on the issue. But many people in the U.S. Attorney’s office had been seeing the confrontations firsthand and thought that some claims of assault might have been exaggerated. It was a pattern that had been established in other cities: the news site Block Club Chicago found, in a review of incident reports released by court order after the ICE surge in Chicago, in the fall of 2025, that “agents regularly counted a single action by a civilian—such as kicking a tear-gas canister back at agents—as multiple assaults, one for each agent present, regardless of whether an included agent was actually impacted.” In one such report, a single tear-gas cannister kicked back was recorded as forty-four assaults.
The government’s tactics met their limit in court, however, in part because ICE and C.B.P. field officers had little experience collecting evidence or building cases for prosecutors. “State and local police officers are good witnesses,” Bruce Nestor, a defense attorney in Minneapolis, told me. But an ICE agent is “not really used to doing investigations, or even making written reports,” he said. “They’re normally just grabbing individuals who are in their database as someone lacking lawful immigration status.” Nestor represented five U.S. citizens who were charged with felonies for assaulting federal immigration agents during the Minnesota surge. Four of the cases have been dismissed, and the fifth is scheduled to be dismissed in December. “That’s really unique to me in my experience in federal court going back thirty-four years,” he said.
Immigrants who were denied bond hearings began challenging mandatory-detention policies in federal court through habeas corpus, under which the government must legally justify a person’s detention. More than a thousand habeas petitions were filed in Minnesota courts between December and February (compared with only seventy-three habeas petitions during the previous year). With the loss of staff and the flood of cases, the D.O.J. had to bring in outside legal assistance, often lawyers from the military, ICE, or other government agencies.
“The system sucks. This job sucks,” Julie Le, who was one of the new hires in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota, said in court in early February, after a federal judge asked why the government had not followed judicial orders to release detained immigrants. “Sometimes I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full twenty-four hours of sleep.” Le, who came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam at fourteen, had transferred to the U.S. Attorney’s office from ICE, where she had represented the government in immigration court. Her first day at her new post, January 5th, coincided with the second wave of federal agents arriving in Minneapolis; the U.S. Attorney’s office, she later told me, was “drowning” in habeas petitions and consistently being defeated in court. Other government lawyers avoided being transferred to the overworked office—“They don’t want to put their names on losing cases,” she said. (Le lost her job after her February comments.)
Minnesota judges began issuing opinions against the government. One order prevented federal agents from moving detainees out of state within seventy-two hours of being arrested; another demanded that the government return confiscated belongings to released detainees. The Trump Administration tried to portray the criticism as politically motivated. After Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the Minnesota federal district court, threatened to call in the acting director of ICE to explain why the government had not complied with nearly a hundred court orders during the surge, a D.H.S. spokeswoman described Schiltz as “just another activist judge who is clearly more concerned about politics than the safety of Minnesotans.” Schiltz, a sixty-five-year-old Duluth native and a devout Catholic, had clerked under Antonin Scalia and was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush. “I take solace in the fact that he did not live to see me branded as a progressive activist judge,” Schiltz said, of Scalia, at an event at the American Enterprise Institute in February. “It came as a surprise to me. It probably would have come as a surprise to him as well.”
Within a few weeks, the number of court orders ignored by the government had reached two hundred. Schiltz issued a rare public rebuke after Daniel Rosen, the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, argued that his office “didn’t deserve” the criticism it had been getting from the district’s federal bench. “What those attorneys ‘didn’t deserve,’ ” Schiltz wrote, “was the Administration sending 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without making any provision for handling the hundreds of lawsuits that were sure to follow.”
In March, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government on the issue of mandatory detention, limiting the use of habeas petitions in Minnesota going forward, even as appeals courts in other districts have continued to rule the policy unconstitutional.
After Good’s death, Bre’s commitment to monitoring federal agents by car, which activists called “commuting,” became all-consuming. “I was in the chats all the time,” she told me. “I would wake up and fall asleep with my phone in my hand.” One day, her teen-age daughter, on the way to choir practice, witnessed ICE detaining someone outside her bus; Bre sent her children to stay with relatives in the suburbs. She was aware that protesters were under surveillance. “My face was scanned all the time,” she said, referring to facial-recognition software used by federal agents through their phone cameras. Agents would lead activists who were following them right back to their own homes, Bre told me. “I was really fearful that something would happen to me,” she said.
As federal agents increasingly used chemical irritants on crowds, Michael Cavlan began spending less time patrolling and more time treating people who’d been hurt. He recalled a post that he’d made at the time: “It was, like, ‘Today I was pepper-sprayed twice and I was teargassed twice. It must be Tuesday.’ ” Memories of the Troubles resurfaced. “I know that smell,” he said, of the tear gas. “It wasn’t as bad as in Northern Ireland, but it wasn’t too far away from it.”
At the height of the surge, Minneapolis resembled a place hit by a hurricane: donated groceries piled in driveways and church parking lots, waiting to be distributed to people afraid to leave their houses; citizens wearing safety vests and whistles standing in groups outside local businesses and schools. At one elementary school I visited, some forty per cent of the student body had stopped attending class in person.
The immigrants arrested were picked up outside their places of work, while bringing their kids to school, at the bus stop, at the grocery store, at the laundromat. Ordinary citizens were often left to deal with the aftermath. One observer told me about witnessing the snatch-and-grab detention of a Hispanic man: ICE had abandoned his car in the middle of an intersection. (Witnesses sometimes call such vehicles “ghost cars.”) “It was smashed in on one side,” she said. “And his phone was on the floor of the car, and his wife was just sobbing on the line.” The observer parked the car while trying to speak to the detainee’s wife in Spanish. “There isn’t even time to let them grieve. It’s just, like, ‘All right, sorry that your loved one got taken. When do you want to get the keys from me?’ ”
Kristi Noem had promised, as she put it in a two-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar ad campaign promoting mass deportation, that, “if you come here the right way, your American Dream can be as big as these endless skies.” But it became clear that even immigrants who had followed every legal pathway were still at risk of getting detained. On January 9th, D.H.S. had launched a pilot program called Operation PARRIS (for Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening), targeting the more than five thousand refugees in Minnesota who had not yet received green cards. Asylum seekers were also taken into custody; Alison Beckman, a senior clinician who works on the policy team at the Center for Victims of Torture, a pioneering institution that offers clinical care, told me that the center’s clients had stories of detention “strikingly similar to the ones that they tell us about what happened to them in their country—a group of masked men throwing you in a car, taking you somewhere, holding you, not telling you what’s happening.”
The detained were often quickly moved out of state. Those who managed to secure release under habeas corpus brought back accounts of harrowing, disorganized odysseys through an ad-hoc mass-detention bureaucracy. Jorge (not his real name), an Ecuadorian national in his fifties who has lived in Minnesota for more than two decades, told me that he had been flown all the way to the Guayaquil airport before ICE realized he’d been granted release. The plane continued to its next destination, in Peru, then returned to the U.S., while Jorge remained chained up on board. “It was twenty-eight hours in shackles,” he said. Around three weeks after his bail was posted, he was finally released in El Paso, Texas, without his phone or wallet, which ICE had lost. A refugee from Eritrea named Daniel (not his real name) was similarly ejected onto the streets of El Paso, after being flown there in chains. “I don’t even know where Texas is,” he told me. Daniel had arrived in the United States with permission a year and a half before the surge, but he was detained for a “reinterview.” When he was released, a week later, it took him nearly thirty hours by train and car to get back to Minneapolis. Shortly after returning home, he received his green card in the mail.
According to ICE data, more than seventy-five per cent of the people arrested in Minnesota during the surge had no criminal history. Manuel (not his real name) lives with his wife and two sons in a sleepy northern suburb of Minneapolis, in a white split-level house a block from a park. The family came from Mexico in 2021, crossing the border through the desert. “I could see a better future for my kids here,” Manuel told me. When we spoke in the furnished basement of his home this spring, pieces of black foam with which the family had covered the windows during the surge still hung over a sill lined with houseplants. Manuel, who has a painting business, was detained by ICE one morning in mid-December, in what he believes was a random stop based on his appearance, as he pulled up to a Sherwin-Williams paint store to buy supplies. He spent most of the next two months in the Campbell County Detention Center, a jail in northern Kentucky that contracts with ICE, living in a cell with eighty-six other people. The shower water was scalding; the meat in the food smelled off. “You had to hold your breath to eat it,” Manuel said. (A spokesperson for D.H.S. said in an e-mail, “Any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention facilities is FALSE.”)
In February, Manuel passed through detention centers in Indiana and Louisiana on his way to El Paso; he was expecting to be sent back to Mexico. But, unbeknownst to him, his wife had successfully filed a habeas petition, and he was put on a plane back to Minnesota. Manuel doesn’t speak English, and didn’t understand that he was being let go until he was released from the Whipple Building into the cold. “Thank God I met these good people who helped me and had a car waiting warm outside,” he said, of volunteers from a group called Haven Watch, who got Manuel an Uber back to his house that night and, in the weeks that followed, assisted his family with groceries, unpaid back rent, and connections to legal services.
Haven Watch was launched after a woman named Natalie Ehret and her sons attended protests at the Whipple Building one night. “My older son noticed two girls wandering in the cold with no coats, and they didn’t have a phone,” Ehret told me. He offered to let them sit in his mother’s car and use her phone to call relatives. Ehret then went back to the Whipple Building to help other newly released detainees. “Initially, it was just me and my husband,” she told me. “When word spread, it became this massive effort with dozens of people.”
Detainees were frequently held for weeks or months; some had lost their leases, their belongings, and their jobs. “When they’re releasing people, it’s never free and clear,” Ehret said. “They’re wearing ankle monitors or under an order to self-deport.” (Both Jorge and Manuel were granted only a temporary reprieve until an immigration judge decides their cases.) When we first spoke, in February, Ehret was about to take a man to a doctor’s appointment. He had jumped from a roof in an unsuccessful attempt to evade arrest. “He broke an ankle and shattered his other foot,” Ehret said. “ICE made him walk on his feet for days, which did more damage.”
Ehret, a self-described suburban soccer mom, had been an attorney, but left the workforce a couple of years ago to care for her older son, who was in treatment for brain cancer. Her youngest son was still in middle school. She remembered the height of the surge as being like “trying to drink from a fire hose.”
Haven Watch has raised $2.5 million to support detainees after they are released from custody, but there were many others like Ehret in Minneapolis: a group of parents who raised more than six hundred thousand dollars to assist immigrant families at their children’s elementary school; a thirty-year-old actor named Sulia Rose Altenberg, who helped distribute more than a million dollars in rent relief; John Wilson, the C.E.O. of a biotech firm called Wilson Wolf, who donated twenty-nine million dollars to rent-relief efforts.
Minneapolis has long been a civic-minded metropolis, where even the choice of vegetation on highway medians can become the subject of extended public debate, in a state with a history of protest going back to the nineteenth century. The Great Northern Railway strike of 1894, organized by the union leader Eugene Debs, helped rail workers fight for better wages; the Teamsters strike of 1934, in which two Minnesota strikers were killed by police, paved the way for the passage of the National Labor Relations Act the next year. And the American Indian Movement originated in Minneapolis in 1968, establishing community patrols to monitor police who were harassing Native American groups. Each movement left behind a network of activists. During the surge, the most important of these turned out to be those founded during the upheaval that followed George Floyd’s murder, when residents gathered in nearby parks to organize block associations led by captains.
After Good was shot, less than a mile away from where Floyd had been killed, these block associations set up vital new alert systems and patrols to monitor ICE activity using long-established group chats on Signal. As federal agents stormed the streets, they encountered a system of rapid communication on the ground, and thousands of people who had received training as legal observers.
In mid-February, the city of Minneapolis made a preliminary estimate that the cost of the surge on the local economy had been more than two hundred million dollars. To keep businesses afloat, Minnesotans held video-game live-stream fund-raisers and organized “cash mobs” to descend on struggling local restaurants. There were symbolic actions as well. The ICE OUT! Minnesotan Ice Fishing Rally, on Lake Harriet, had sloppy joes and themed beer koozies. A coffee shop called Modern Times temporarily rebranded itself as Post Modern Times and switched to a donation-only model so that it wouldn’t have to send revenue taxes to the government. “We are done making money for the fascists that occupy our city,” the owner wrote on social media.
Ehret told me that institutional support was minimal; the Red Cross had offered her group some care packages with blankets, but, she said, “we had nowhere to put them.”
The volunteers had a growing awareness that the federal government was eager to prosecute individuals who opposed their policies. “I was using apps to make phone calls and making sure my address wasn’t listed anywhere,” Ehret said. “My dad’s, like, ‘I lay up worrying about you every night.’ ”
On January 24th, Kayla Schultz woke up and decided to go commuting in her neighborhood. Schultz, who is twenty-five, works in health care and at the time had a second job as a bartender. “My life is very calm and peaceful,” she told me. “I have a little orange cat, and he’s kind of my little guy.” She had begun volunteering, she said, because she “saw too many videos of people getting kidnapped. It was complete lawlessness—children and mothers and fathers and grandparents just getting taken off of the streets without any investigation.”
Schultz got started a little earlier than usual that Saturday morning. “It was my friend’s one-year-old’s birthday party, and I wanted to get a couple hours in,” she told me. She was driving her regular loop through Whittier—a neighborhood of immigrants, working-class families, young professionals, and students who attend the Minneapolis Institute of Art—when word came in over Signal about a confrontation just two minutes away.
Schultz drove up as a group of agents was arresting an anti-ICE observer in the middle of the street. The agents “kind of had them on the ground,” she said. (The person, Wynnie Savageford, would later describe being tackled, dragged face down, and handcuffed.) Schultz leaned on her horn. An agent threatened to arrest her for honking. “I don’t listen to illegal orders,” she told me. “Basically, I told him to fuck off.” A car coming from the other direction started honking, too. The agent “punched the moving car,” Schultz noted, so Schultz yelled something about “who was doing the illegal things here.” Her window was cracked open an inch. “He got all up in my face and screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘You fucking cunt!’ ”
Just when it seemed that the agents were packing up, Schultz heard a commotion. In the video she recorded from her car, two women in winter coats can be seen confronting an agent by a doughnut shop called Glam Doll. The agent begins herding them toward the other side of the street. “Things started to get violent,” Schultz said. “And then, within minutes, things just devolved into pepper spray.” She watched as agents pushed three observers—the two women had been joined by a bearded man in a tan coat—directly in front of her vehicle. In her video, the man steps between the agents and one of the women. An agent douses him at close range with pepper spray. “And that,” Schultz said, “is when they dogpiled Alex Pretti and shot him.” He was shot ten times in five seconds.
Pretti, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse who worked in the intensive-care unit of the local Veterans Affairs hospital, died from his wounds. Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, the agents who fatally shot him, had been deployed to Minnesota from C.B.P. units in Texas. In the hours following Pretti’s death, the Trump Administration stuck to its usual script. Pretti had been carrying a permitted weapon, which remained holstered during the exchange; another video appears to show an agent removing it from Pretti’s belt moments before he was killed. But, within four hours, Stephen Miller described Pretti as a “would-be assassin” and a “domestic terrorist”; Kristi Noem claimed that Pretti, while “brandishing” a weapon, had “attacked” agents; and Gregory Bovino said, “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Videos taken that day from multiple perspectives, however, show Pretti being held on the ground and an agent pepper-spraying him before pulling out his gun and shooting him point-blank. In another video that went viral, Stella Carlson, the woman filming, starts yelling over and over, “What the fuck did you just do?” She pleads for an ambulance. “You’re fucking killing us!” she finally shouts.
After the shooting, Schultz found herself in the driver’s seat of a car facing what she described as a “bunch of really anxious, trigger-happy agents.” She told me, “I can’t remember being intentional about almost anything that I was doing other than checking at least twenty times that my car was still in park.” The agents ordered her to leave. The shooting had happened so close to her front bumper that she had to put her car in reverse to get out. She tried to do so carefully, in order “not to make anyone so nervous that they felt like they had to kill me,” as she put it. She drove less than a block and then pulled over. “Just because—what do you do?” she asked. “Go home after that?”
At the moment of the shooting, Bre was already on her way to the scene, responding to one of the same Signal alerts about agents in the area. It was the second time that she showed up in the immediate aftermath of a shooting in a month. “I could see E.M.S. arriving and starting to do first aid on him,” she said.
Locals gathering at the site of Pretti’s murder were stunned and furious. “I ceased to be me,” a Whittier resident, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. She and her friends were shouting at the agents. “I just kept saying, ‘How can you live with yourself?’ ” Bre told me that, even as agents started flooding the scene, she saw one group bundle into a Jeep Wagoneer and drive out.
The calls to 911 that morning document residents’ growing frustration with local law enforcement. Federal agents began unleashing rubber bullets, flash-bangs, and tear gas on the crowd. “There’s bombs going off,” a caller reports, referring to the flash-bangs. “You guys gotta get down there.” The operator reassures the caller that there are responders at the scene. “I’m not seeing anyone,” the caller tells her. “It’s Afghanistan. This is insane.”
Michael Cavlan was there as federal agents filled the frigid morning air with tear gas; rinsing people’s eyes in subzero temperatures was ill-advised, so he set up a triage area inside the bathroom of a restaurant called the Copper Hen. He believes that law enforcement jammed cell service; his calls and texts home wouldn’t go through. “I’m male, I’m a nurse, I carry,” he told me, meaning that he had gone there armed. When he finally arrived home that afternoon, his wife was frantic. “She thought it was me,” he said.
A few days later, a video emerged of Pretti kicking the back of an ICE vehicle in an earlier altercation. “Alex Pretti’s stock has gone way down,” Trump wrote. At the same time, more information began to emerge about Pretti. He had grown up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he was a Boy Scout and sang in the Green Bay Boy Choir. Colleagues at the V.A. attested to his commitment to his profession. “I want the world to know they murdered a fucking amazing guy,” a doctor named Dimitri Drekonja, who worked with Pretti, told me. Pretti was an avid mountain biker, and the two had been planning to go biking together once the weather turned warm. “He was a super-competent nurse,” Drekonja said. “He would tell you exactly what was going on, what he was worried about, to give you a very succinct assessment, which I always appreciated.” On January 24th, Pretti’s parents, who learned about their son’s death that day through the media, had released a statement. “Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital,” they wrote. “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.”
That night, a candlelight vigil for Pretti was held in Whittier Park, as temperatures remained below zero. On January 30th, more than a thousand people gathered on Lake Bde Maka Ska to spell out a giant S.O.S.
Operation Metro Surge continued for several more weeks, but in retrospect Pretti’s fatal shooting prompted the beginning of a retreat. Several Republican senators called for an investigation into his death and defended his Second Amendment right to carry a gun, as polls continued to show public opinion turning against Trump on his handling of immigration, one of the key issues on which he had successfully campaigned in 2024.
In late January, the Administration sent Tom Homan, Trump’s newly appointed “border czar,” to Minnesota to take over operations. “You could almost feel it de-escalating the minute that he came in,” Chris Madel, a Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota who’d dropped out of the race over the Party’s management of the surge, told me. “He was literally one of the only adults in the process,” Madel said, of Homan. “And I count Republicans and Democrats among the children.” Bovino, the face of Border Patrol’s aggressive strategy in Minneapolis, was sent back to California.
Tim Walz told me that he’d received a call from Trump that week. “He was just flabbergasted, saying, ‘What’s wrong with Minnesota?’ And of course I said, ‘Not a damn thing,’ and then he proceeded to tell me how it worked so well in Louisiana, and I proceeded to tell him, ‘You didn’t shoot people and execute them in the streets in Louisiana.’ ” (“We, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” Trump posted on Truth Social after the call.) Walz received a follow-up call from Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, a sign to the Governor that the Administration was “trying to figure out how to get out.”
On February 12th, Homan held a press conference at the Whipple Building. A bald and somewhat jowly man wearing a sober gray tie patterned like graph paper, he put on his reading glasses and declared that Operation Metro Surge would be ending, and that most of the out-of-state agents who had come to Minnesota would be sent home. “The Twin Cities and Minnesota in general are and will continue to be much safer for the communities here because of what we have accomplished under President Trump’s leadership,” he said. The Administration’s goals for mass deportation, he added, had not changed. He told protesters to tone down the “hateful rhetoric,” saying that, if they didn’t like what ICE was doing, they could “go protest Congress.”
In the weeks that followed, many of the operation’s main characters left office. Kristi Noem was ousted as Secretary of Homeland Security; Corey Lewandowski, a top D.H.S. adviser, also departed. (The awarding of federal contracts by him and Noem is now under investigation.) Bovino retired. Pam Bondi, the head of the D.O.J., lost her job, reportedly more for her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files than for the legal morass that resulted from the surge in Minnesota; Trump nominated her deputy, Todd Blanche, who had announced that there would be no investigation into Good’s death, to succeed her.
I had returned to New York in late January, but a few days after Homan’s speech I flew back to Minneapolis. A wet snow was falling as I drove into town, snarling rush-hour traffic. Reminders of the surge were still everywhere: posters honoring Good and Pretti were plastered over billboards and on telephone poles; businesses had signs on their front doors forbidding ICE agents from entering. In Mercado Central, a mini-mall of Latino-owned businesses on Lake Street where I ate posole in a near-deserted cafeteria, flyers advertised a GoFundMe to help save the venue from closure. Across the street was the shuttered former home of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, a place I had gone as a kid each spring to make papier-mâché costumes for the theatre’s annual May Day Parade, a local neo-pagan ritual dating back to the seventies which has always been a little hard to explain to outsiders. Now the theatre was marked with black spray paint that read “ICE SMALL DICK ENERGY!”
With the number of agents in town reduced, residents tried to re-start their lives. Bre helped set up support groups for people who had been present at the scene of Good’s or Pretti’s death, including some, like her, who had been at both; her hope was to maintain the ties they had formed, because, she told me, “this isn’t over.” Those who had witnessed the violence wondered if there would be any kind of legal consequences. The D.O.J. had announced at the end of January that there would be a federal investigation into Pretti’s shooting, but had offered few specifics since then. “I have doubts that it’s gonna go anywhere, or be allowed to go anywhere, by our government,” Kayla Schultz said. (“This matter remains under active investigation,” a spokesperson for D.H.S. told me.)
Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Good, reportedly continues to work as an ICE agent in another jurisdiction. Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, the agents who shot Pretti, were placed on administrative leave. D.H.S. has still not officially named the agents responsible for either killing. “We’ve been asking them these very simple questions since the beginning—‘Who killed Alex?’ They won’t tell us,” Steve Schleicher, an attorney representing the Pretti family, told me. He added that the family has “basically been ignored by the feds” and has never been contacted by them. “They murdered our child,” Susan Pretti, Alex’s mother, recently told ABC News. “People need to be held responsible when they murder people in this country. Period.”
In the absence of federal coöperation, Mary Moriarty, the Hennepin County Attorney, told me that her office had created a public portal to collect evidence and testimonies from witnesses. She is also pursuing other cases of misconduct by ICE agents during the surge. On April 16th, she charged an ICE agent from Maryland named Gregory Donnell Morgan, Jr., with two felony counts of second-degree assault for pointing a gun at two citizens on a highway a couple of miles from the Whipple Building.
According to court records, Morgan was hired in the fall of 2025 and deployed to the surge in late January. Ryan Pacyga, Morgan’s Minneapolis-based attorney, told me, “ICE has these guys rent vehicles, like you and I would go to Avis or Budget, and drive them up here.” Pacyga argued that Morgan had been operating in a “hostile environment,” without the tools of a law-enforcement officer, such as sirens, an intercom, or floodlights, and that he had been scared. “If you were an ICE agent and you’re told, ‘Get up here in a rental vehicle’ and ‘This is a really dangerous area,’ wouldn’t you be scared?” he asked. He suggested that Morgan was being used as a “test case” for state prosecutors considering bringing charges against federal officers for their actions in Minneapolis. “All eyes are on this one,” Pacyga said. “I feel a little bit like he’s a political prisoner, if you will, or a pawn in a much larger battle between two opposing movements, and he’s just caught in the middle.”
On May 18th, Moriarty’s office charged Christian Castro, the Texas-based ICE agent who’d shot Julio Sosa-Celis through a closed door and claimed that he was attacked, with second-degree assault and with falsely reporting a crime. He was arrested later that month, in Texas, but was released from jail on August 27th, after Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, refused to extradite him back to Minnesota, a decision upheld by a federal judge. Whether the federal government allows the state to subpoena federal witnesses, such as the agents involved in these cases, may indicate how any charges against the officers who killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti might proceed.
“J. D. Vance has repeatedly said that federal officers or agents have absolute immunity, and that’s simply not true,” Moriarty told me. “The law is that if somebody—and it doesn’t matter who they work for—violates state law in Minnesota, we certainly have the right and the jurisdiction to charge.” The standoff between the state and the federal government that this could create, she acknowledged, is “complex and really kind of unheard-of.”
In July, after months of failed negotiations, the federal government turned over evidence from the Good and Pretti shootings to Moriarty’s office, including, she said, body-cam footage, interviews with agents, and Good’s vehicle.
“We are making very good progress on these cases, particularly Pretti right now,” Moriarty told me. “We want to make sure we get this right.”
As Tom Homan had promised, the end of Operation Metro Surge did not curtail the Administration’s campaign of mass detention and deportation. In June, Republicans in Congress approved another seventy billion dollars in immigration-enforcement funding, which did not come with any of the accountability measures proposed after the Minnesota surge, such as requiring judicial warrants for home entries, restricting agents from wearing masks, or making body cameras mandatory. Speaking in front of photographs of Good, Pretti, and Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old wearing a bunny hat whose detention made national news in January, Tina Smith, the senator from Minnesota, asked Congress if it had forgotten “the great damage done by this rogue, dangerous, secret police force” and criticized “the complete failure to agree to even the most basic guardrails on ICE, the same kind of guardrails that your local police department agrees to live by every single day.” In July, the government detained more than forty-nine thousand people, the highest monthly total of Trump’s second term. The same month, ICE agents shot and killed two more people, both in their vehicles: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who had lived and raised a family in Texas for more than thirty years, and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian living in Maine who had a three-year-old child. (A D.H.S. spokesperson said that both shootings are being investigated.)
In April, I visited the Fort Snelling Immigration Court, which is housed inside the Whipple Building and serves Minnesota and the Dakotas. The court observers I met there, who have run a monitoring project since 2017, told me that it is increasingly difficult for anyone to get legal status. “We have such a long frame of reference of how it used to function,” Amy Lange, the manager of the project, told me. “How proceedings unfolded, how our laws were implemented, what procedures and protections people were afforded. And then we just saw it all explode.” In a courtroom, I watched as a judge repeatedly informed immigrants seeking asylum that they would likely not qualify. “Just because something bad happened to you, that’s not persecution under the law,” he said.
The newest judge at the court, hired by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, is an attorney named Nathan Hansen, who had no previous experience in immigration law; the Minnesota Reformer, a local news organization, reported that, in 2024, Hansen deleted more than a hundred thousand social-media posts about subjects such as Pizzagate and the “Haitian invasion of Ohio.” Earlier this summer, news broke that D.H.S. would reopen a shuttered jail owned by the private-prison contractor CoreCivic in Appleton, Minnesota; it will serve as a sixteen-hundred-bed detention center to support the ICE field office in St. Paul. After a national push by ICE to convert warehouses into detention centers received widespread public backlash, the reopening of private prisons, many of which were shut down after the Biden Administration largely banned them in the federal system, has become a more discreet way for the government to expand its detention capacity. At least sixteen such facilities have started up again since 2025, with potential plans for more in North Carolina and Oklahoma, among other states.
Meanwhile, under the pretext of preventing fraud, the federal government has repeatedly withheld funding to Minnesota, freezing, for example, nearly two hundred million dollars of Medicaid spending for the state in July. The government has also investigated Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, and Keith Ellison for conspiring to impede federal immigration enforcement; subpoenas demanding information from them were blocked by a federal judge earlier this summer. The D.O.J., too, has kept its sights on Minnesota. It has sought to gain access to the state’s voter-registration databases under the pretext of a criminal probe into ostensible noncitizen voters. It has also aggressively targeted activists. By the end of February, it had charged thirty-nine people in connection with an anti-ICE protest at Cities Church, in St. Paul, on January 18th. (The case is ongoing.) The D.O.J. has also charged more than forty Minnesotans with impeding or assaulting federal officers. As of July 30th, at least nineteen of these cases have been dismissed, in some instances after sworn affidavits by agents were directly contradicted by video footage or other evidence. “It is without a doubt in the court’s mind,” a federal magistrate judge said, that one agent “did not have any personal knowledge of the events described in the affidavits that he submitted to the court.”
Emmett Doyle is a burly and bearded union carpenter and musician in Minneapolis who writes and performs folk music about the struggles of the working class. His instruments include a balalaika and a penny whistle, and his website shows him onstage wearing a kaffiyeh, a canvas Carhartt jacket, and a baseball cap that reads “Class War Veteran.” Doyle has long offered his musical services at picket lines and protests in Minneapolis, but before the surge began in Minnesota he had stepped back a little, feeling what he described as “activist burnout.” He told me, “I was just working as a carpenter, playing open mikes, and trying to set myself up for the next stage of my life.”
That changed after Renée Good was killed. Doyle went to the site of her shooting that morning. “Like a lot of the rest of the crowd, I was shouting at the ICE agents, you know, calling them murderers,” he said. He noticed at one point that he was standing on red-stained ice. “I realized later that after Renée was shot someone had dragged her from her car to perform CPR, and I had actually been standing on her frozen blood for a significant part of that morning.” Doyle began patrolling the streets of his neighborhood and wrote a series of surge-related protest songs, including his most popular, “Dick Blizzard,” about a day that protesters threw dildos at agents outside of the Whipple Building.
On Tuesday, June 16th, Doyle was sitting in his car, typing the address of that day’s job into his phone, when a dozen or so armed federal agents suddenly swarmed his vehicle. “They’re pulling me out, and I’m confused as hell,” he said. He was one of fifteen people charged that day with federal crimes in Minneapolis, including conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, in part through the use of rapid-response networks and Signal chats.
On the way to the federal courthouse, Doyle recalled, the agents asked him where he got his tattoos. “I go, ‘Look, guys, I’m entirely certain that if I tell you who did my tattoos she’ll never ink me again.’ ” One of the agents told Doyle that he liked punk bands, such as Slipknot and Korn. The questions became more leading, with the agents inquiring about the activist scene. “It was all an attempt on their part to elicit information from me,” Doyle said.
At the courthouse, he was locked in a cell, where he started singing Irish Republican jail songs. A request was shouted from a cell down the hall for “Dick Blizzard.” “I hear this chorus of laughter and all these voices, and I realized, ‘Oh, I know that person, and I know that person,’ ” Doyle said. “They selected just a cross-section of, like, mostly rank-and-file union organizers and artists, musicians,” he added. “It did seem like they disproportionately targeted queer people, but also, you know, it’s Minneapolis. We’re, like, the queerest city in America.”
For all his jocularity, the charges against Doyle are serious, carrying a potential sentence of six years in prison. Among the groups taking credit for the arrests was Joint Task Force Vanguard, a D.O.J. initiative to target groups that promote “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” as Trump put it in a memorandum last fall. Doyle had tracked the cases of activists charged with federal crimes for protests at Broadview, an ICE facility in Chicago; the charges have since been dismissed. He also followed the trial that recently convicted eight people of providing material support to terrorists and other charges related to an anti-ICE protest at the Prairieland Detention Facility, in Alvarado, Texas, during which a protester shot and wounded a police officer; the defendants, whom the D.O.J. referred to as “Antifa terrorists,” were sentenced to a combined four hundred and fifty years in prison, the government’s first major success in prosecuting what it has begun calling “far-left extremism.”
Still, Doyle’s arrest took him by surprise—the surge had ended months earlier, and he had not been one of the hundreds of U.S. citizens arrested at its height. In the government’s indictment, Doyle is described as passing out, from the back of a U-Haul rental van, shields decorated with the Palestinian flag or the words “ICE Out” during a protest at the Whipple Building. During a training for activists, he was said to have called using shields a way of “fighting with the fascists rather than just going at them just chest to chest.” He is also named as the live musical act at the tenth-anniversary party of the Ray Rainbolt Memorial Shooting Club, a local organization described in the indictment as an “Antifa affinity group” that offers L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly firearms training.
Most of the fifteen people named in the June 16th indictment have been released and are awaiting trial. The Administration seems intent on prosecuting widely used protest strategies—such as blockades outside federal buildings, which are typically charged as misdemeanors—as violent crimes against the government. “It’s an attempt to use an antiterrorist framework that’s been used by the government abroad against political opponents at home,” Gabe Van de Water, another one of the arrestees, told me. Federal agents picked up Van de Water at a gas station as he was on his way to his first day of work at a delivery company. The indictment notes that he helped plan and fund-raise for a March 1st protest at the Whipple Building in which demonstrators blockaded a nearby street. “They want to call us extremists,” he said.
On July 16th, the State Department hosted a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” during which Stephen Miller described “radical leftists” as “enemies of civilization” and “deformed.” “Here in the United States,” he said, “we have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism.” In grand-jury hearings, the government alleged that participants in the conspiracy against immigration enforcement in Minnesota included the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the Democratic Socialists of America, and a Minneapolis bike shop called the Grease Pit.
Doyle sees his arrest as evidence of the government’s fundamental misunderstanding of the resistance in Minneapolis. “They seem to think that there’s this cancerous little cell, and that if they cut it out then all the people of Minneapolis will go back to, you know, passively accepting jackbooted thugs in our streets,” he said. He thought that agents had acted in an unwarranted militarized fashion. “I think a huge part of fascism is performative violence. It’s the aestheticization of brutality, and it goes hand in hand with the broader logic of Metro Surge, which was ‘Flood the streets of this notoriously rebellious city’—you know, the place of the 2020 George Floyd uprising—‘with just the most violent, unhinged, brutal officers in Trump’s private army,’ and then have the whole nation watch as they brutalize us. And what they got instead was the whole nation watched as Minneapolis stood up and showed the country how to resist them.”
On July 24th, six months after Alex Pretti’s death, his mother posted on Instagram to mark the anniversary. “No-one has been held accountable, no apologies, not a single phone call from any government official, hospital personnel, or the Mpls police dept.,” she wrote. “How does one live knowing that I have no power to change what has happened?”
The city has sought catharsis in its own ways. This year’s May Day Parade ended, as it does each year, with a ceremony before a small lake in Powderhorn Park, where puppeteers celebrate the return of spring. This year’s ceremony also reënacted the winter’s grief: a family hiding in their house; cardboard ICE agents; puppeteers with whistles; the deaths of Good and Pretti. I know, as someone who has lived away from Minneapolis for many years, that outsiders might see all this as idealistic; I also know how deep the sincerity goes.
“We live out the world as we want it to be, not as it is,” Sulia Rose Altenberg, the organizer of a rent-relief fund, told me, of the culture in Powderhorn, where she grew up. “We’re, like, ‘What if we lived in a utopia where puppets drove civic action?’ ”
During a stretch of warm days this spring, I saw Minneapolis residents sprawled out in the sun in the city’s many parks. Baseball season had started again, and the anti-ICE posters plastering downtown now incorporated the Twins logo. I stopped at the memorials for Renée Good and Alex Pretti, still maintained in the places where they had died. Good’s had a sign that said “I’m not mad at you, dude”—a paraphrase of her last words to Jonathan Ross before he shot her. Pretti’s had a banner. “Rest in Power, Alex,” it read. “Any Righteous Person Would Have Done the Same.” ♦