America’s New Civil War Over Truth and Humanity
Could you be next?
Could the Jan. 24, 2026 killing of a white American male enable Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, further weaponizing his personal ICE/Border Patrol and bringing a formally militarized Operation Metro Surge into a quiet neighborhood near you?
Saturday morning, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old white male American intensive care unit nurse with no criminal record and a firearms permit, was filming protesters when he tried to help a woman shoved by ICE/Border Patrol on the streets of Minneapolis. He was wrestled to the ground by a group of federal agents. Suddenly, two federal agents fired at least 10 shots into Pretti’s prone body, according to a Times analysis of verified videos posted on social media. Another video shows an agent clapping with delight.
CNN did a frame-by-frame analysis of Pretti’s murder, contrasting it to lies asserted by DHS.
With no supportive investigation, Trump and other federal officials quickly blamed the victim and local officials for Pretti’s killing.
“The Mayor and the Governor are inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “LET OUR ICE PATRIOTS DO THEIR JOB! 12,000 Illegal Alien Criminals, many of them violent, have been arrested and taken out of Minnesota. If they were still there, you would see something far worse than you are witnessing today!”
Mr. Trump and DHS posted a photo of a firearm that federal officials claim belonged to Pretti, who DHS claims wanted to do “maximum damage.”
The Border Patrol Union posted a statement on X, that reads in part: “When a supposed “peaceful” protester brings a weapon (such as a loaded handgun) and brandishes it, there are going to severe consequences and repercussions… We have full confidence that when more facts are revealed, our agents and officers will be shown to have utilized justifiable force in eliminating the threat.”
The weapon Pretti was “brandishing” was a cell phone.
“Increasingly, U.S. citizens have taken to the streets to protest what many have described as a military-style occupation of an American city in which federal agents are using aggressive and violent tactics,” the New York Times reported with video evidence.
But the Trump administration wants the public to believe propaganda, calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist” as an absurd affront to the truth.
This is a familiar Trumpian “blame-the-victim” playbook. Remember that 17 days ago, Renee Good, a 37-year-old lesbian poet and mother of three, was shot three times by an ICE agent in her chest and left temple and Trump administration quickly labeled her a “domestic terrorist” and exonerated the ICE agent who killed Good.
“We have seen these kinds of operations in other places, in other countries, but not here in America. Not in a way where a great American city is being invaded by its own federal government,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey during a press conference.
“How many more residents, how many more Americans, need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?” Frey asked angrily.
“They killed a man, created chaos, pushed down protesters, threw gas indiscriminately and then we’re left to clean up,” said a fed-up Gov. Tim Walz.
Rachel Sayre, the director of the city’s emergency management department, gave a chilling perspective. “My background is in international humanitarian response in conflict zones. In Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Iraq and Ukraine. What I’ve seen here is what I’ve seen there: a powerful entity violently and intentionally terrorizing people, making them afraid to go outside, so they can’t earn a living, so kids stay out of school. This has a lasting, generational impact,” she said. “In these times, you see the best and the worst. The worst is the terror and the feeling of helplessness. The best is, and will continue to be, our community’s response.”
The Pretti’s killing came one day after a peaceful demonstration by 15,000 people in below freezing temperatures to send the message: “ICE Out of Minnesota: A Day of Truth and Freedom.” More than 700 business closed in solidarity and others shut down as union and medical workers and educators walked off the job, joining students from closed schools and faith leaders from around the country.
They told of the unrelenting fear caused by ICE. “Our patients are terrified to come into our clinic and come into our hospitals,” a resident physician named Avalon told FOX 9.
Young Somali American Abdi Hassan, 19, told NBC News he lives in constant fear and carries identification everywhere. “I might just be snatched up for no reason,” he said. “It’s been scary lately. It’s terrifying.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has filed a lawsuit against ICE’s Operation Metro Surge – which is costing taxpayers $18 million per week - and ICE OUT day prompted solidarity actions elsewhere, including Los Angeles, New York, Salt Lake City and Seattle.
Reminiscent of the Black economic boycotts of the civil rights era, the ICE Out boycott also demanded federal charges against ICE agent Jonathan Ross seen on video killing Renee Good. Despite a frame-by-frame analysis by the New York Times of cell phone video showing Good turning her car away from Ross, Trump’s Justice Department decided to not investigate Ross, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche told Fox News on Jan. 18.
Apparently, the DOJ wanted to investigate Good for possible criminal liability, prompting several significant resignations – including the FBI supervisor in the Minneapolis field office who oversees fraud and public corruption cases. A federal magistrate judge rejected DOJ’s warrant application because Good was dead.
Everyday people are sickened by the Trump administration’s violent tactics – including wantonly shooting at, detaining, arresting and deporting people without due process, including US citizens, who federal agents “suspect” might be “criminals” because of their accents, skin color or failure to produce identification. ICE and Border Patrol agents indiscriminately use chemical pepper spray and assert that an ICE memo allows agents to break down homeowners’ doors without a warrant – which blatantly violates the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.
That’s what happened to Chongly “Scott” Thao, 56, a naturalized US citizen, who was dragged out of his home in St. Paul on Jan. 18 after armed ICE agents broke down his door, wouldn’t let him show identification, handcuffed and dragged him into 14-degree weather wearing only boxer shorts and covered by his grandson’s blanket. He was later returned home without an explanation or apology.
“I was praying. I was like, God, please help me, I didn’t do anything wrong. Why do they do this to me? Without my clothes on,” Thao later told Reuters. “We came here for a purpose, right? ... To have a bright future. To have a safe place to live….If this is going to turn out to be America, what are we doing here? Why are we here?”
In Minneapolis, no one’s safe with 3,000 poorly trained, militarized federal agents roaming the streets looking to fill a White House quota of 3,000 migrant arrests a day.
On Jan. 14, the Jackson family was driving home from their son’s basketball game when they got caught between protesters and ICE. “Officers threw flash bangs and tear gas in my car. I got six kids in the car […] My 6-month-old can’t even breathe. This was flipped over,” Shawn Jackson told a FOX 9 reporter, holding up his child’s car seat.
Jackson’s children were stuck in the car. Bystanders rushed to help, but their 6-month-old baby stopped breathing and lost consciousness. Destiny Jackson desperately performed CPR.
“He was just lifeless, like he had foam around his mouth,” Destiny said later, after her children were treated at a hospital. “He had tears coming out of his eyes…My kids were innocent, I was innocent, my husband was innocent, this shouldn’t have happened,” Destiny said. “We were just trying to go home.”
In a since-deleted X post, DHS appeared to blame the Jackson family. “It is horrific to see radical agitators bring children to their violent riots,” adding, “PLEASE STOP ENDANGERING YOUR CHILDREN.”
More DHS gaslighting. But more stories are coming out. Like 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos who was returning home from school Jan. 22. As ICE approached, his father ran to their home to warn Liam’s mother. An ICE agent tried to use Liam to get family members to open the door with promises that no one would be detained. When that failed, despite multiple offers to take the preschooler, ICE swept up Liam and his father and sent then to an ICE facility in Texas,
Liam is the fourth student from the Columbia Heights School District taken since the ICE crackdown, District Superintendent Zena Stenvik said at a press conference. ICE was “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait… Why detain a 5-year-old? You can’t tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal,” Stenvik said.
DHS confirmed that Liam and his father Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias are being held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, which has been sued for inhumane conditions. Their family attorney, Marc Prokosch, said the family “has been doing what they’ve been asked to do” since they started their asylum process in 2024.
“That child is in the least restrictive setting possible,” Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino told reporters, noting that father and son had not been separated. “I don’t think it gets any better than that.”
“I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children,” Bovino said. “Let me say that again, experts in dealing with children, not because we want to be, but because we have to be.”
Meanwhile, a judge ordered ICE to release a 2-year-old girl from Ecuador taken with her father during a traffic stop on Thursday. In an emergency filing citing asylum claims and a warrantless arrest, attorneys say, “Respondents have taken a 2-year-old into custody – an escalation of violence that is unspeakable, cruel and without any legal basis or justification.”
The toddler was ordered released by 9:30 pm on Jan. 23 and returned to her mother. But CNN reports that the father and the 2-year old were on a commercial airline flight to Texas by 8:30 pm, despite the court order issued at 8:11 pm that they should not be removed from Minnesota,
While thousands of people are trying to help families too fearful to leave their homes for groceries, work or school, the generational harm and trauma to which Minneapolis’ Rachel Sayre referred is being ignored as the ICE cruelty continues.
As Mother Jones reported, “just hours after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in her car, US Border Patrol agents descended upon Roosevelt High School, ‘began tackling people,’ and ‘handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders,’ according to reporting from Minnesota Public Radio. The Department of Homeland Security denied that tear gas was used; the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers said in a statement that agents did use a chemical irritant.”
The unexpected attack prompted Minneapolis Public Schools to cancel classes district-wide for the week and forced them to set up remote learning following right-wing attacks, a district spokesperson said, including at a charter school attended by one of Good’s children.
But the attacks and intimidation after Good’s death only galvanized the humanity of in community members to rally around neighbors, including Becca Good - who ran to Renee’s crashed car to try to save her bloody wife - but couldn’t.
Neighbors organized to protect each other. “As masked men dressed for war surrounded the car my friend Patty and I sat in, all I could think about were the moments that had led to my neighbor Renee Good’s death [four days earlier]. “I’m not mad at you,” she had told her killer. These agents, who I had to assume were from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (they never identified themselves), were already banging on our windows and recording us. Then they pepper-sprayed the intake vent of the car. They were definitely mad at us,” Brandon Sigüenza reported Jan. 23 in Slate. “’Have y’all not learned?’ an agent provocatively asks a legal observer in a video that’s been circulating among volunteers, two days after Good was killed.”
On Jan. 14, one week after Good’s murder, another ICE officer shot 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg, then arrested him and two other undocumented men at their home.
A week later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem claimed on X that the agency had arrested more than 10,000 undocumented immigrants in Minneapolis, though she provided no evidence.
As the Trump administration continues to blatantly lie, more ordinary people are beginning to feel “morally disgusted,” says out journalist Lydia Polgreen.
“As a longtime foreign correspondent, I have covered civil wars in countries across the globe. Not so long ago, I would have rolled my eyes at the notion that one could erupt anywhere in America, much less in my once placid home state of Minnesota. And yet there I was, eyes stinging and throat burning as tear gas wafted over me, watching heavily armed agents of the federal government invade a quiet residential neighborhood five miles as the crow flies from the suburb where I went to middle school,” she wrote in her Jan. 19 New York Times essay “In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War.”
“But when I landed in Minneapolis on Monday and saw the size, scope and lawlessness of the federal onslaught unfolding here, I understood that Good’s killing was emblematic of its true mission: to stage a spectacle of cruelty upon a city that stands in stark defiance against Trump’s dark vision of America.”
Minnesota, Polgreen says, “is under siege….It is an occupation designed to punish and terrorize anyone who dares defy this incursion and, by extension, Trump’s power to wield limitless force against any enemy he wishes.”
And then there is Jesse Fee, a 17-year-old high school junior who went to the State Capitol to demand that ICE leave Minnesota. “ICE might not break into my house and try to take one of my family members, because we’re all white,” Fee told Polgreen. “But I’m not going to not care just because it’s not going to happen to me. That’s irresponsible, that’s disrespectful, and it’s sinful, honestly.”
Trump and his ilk, she concludes, “seem unprepared” for “a state full of ordinary people…who’ve decided that watching their neighbors being dragged away is an intolerable sin.”
On the other hand, we need to understand the Trump-backers who swarm to a scene to gawk at what looks like a video game in real life. “Like Call of Duty! So cool, huh?” – one man was heard saying off camera on MS Now as federal agents fired tear gas and flashbangs into a crowd protesting fatal ICE shooting.
Jesse Fee may play “Call to Duty” but unlike the faux macho-wanna-bes, he seems called more to the action of compassion.
In fact, perhaps a victory to strive for in this moral civil war is an American Dream conceived by Black gay author James Baldwin in the early 1960s – a joyful fighting spirit we witnessed during this Martin Luther King Day parade.
“I’m terrified at the moral apathy - the death of the heart which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters,” Baldwin said during an archived NPR interview. “I want us to do something unprecedented, and that is to create a self without the need for enemies.”
Thank you for reading, stay safe and look out for one another.