They Killed Alex Pretti, But They Couldn’t Crush Minneapolis

MINNEAPOLIS ― When Border Patrol agents fatally shot Alex Pretti early Saturday, people from all over the city instantly mobilized.

Eyewitnesses captured video footage of the horrific slaying and shared it on social media, and privately in Signal chats that residents have been using to help protect each other from the federal immigration agents who have been marauding through the city since the Trump administration sent them here in December.

Dozens of residents were on the scene within an hour, and it wasn’t long before hundreds more were pouring in, facing off with heavily armed federal agents. The officers stood stoically with their weapons and faces entirely covered. Residents stood just feet away, with cardboard signs and cute woven hats. They came to yell or to grieve, and some came because they just figured the community needed their help.

“I just geared up,” said Miguel, who said he was prepared to stay as long as necessary. “I don’t know what I came to do, but I just needed to be present.”

Officially, federal immigration enforcement agents are in Minneapolis to detain violent criminals who are in the country illegally. In reality, residents will tell you that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers are just nabbing Black and brown people off the streets and hauling them away.
It doesn’t matter if they don’t have criminal records; 5-year-old Liam Ramos was not a criminal, but they grabbed him in front of his house last week and shipped him off to a Texas detention center with his dad.

In reality, say residents, federal agents are routinely terrorizing neighborhoods with immigrants. They’re also killing citizens like Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who worked for Veterans Affairs, and Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother.

“Not again! Not fucking again!” one resident screamed at agents guarding the scene where Pretti was fatally shot.

Miguel had been standing toe-to-toe with the federal agents when he first arrived, separated by a flimsy stretch of yellow police tape that the agents set up as a line not to cross. He was in the crowd of men and women, people of all different races and ages, as they loudly chanted together, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Nobody crossed the tape line, but apparently the agents had enough, so they tear-gassed Miguel and others near him.

“They just didn’t take kindly to the insults being thrown at them, so they started just knocking tear canisters at us,” he said, his eyes runny and bloodshot. “I think what really set them off is eventually someone kicked a slab of ice in their direction and they didn’t like that, so they started shooting pellet guns at us.”

Jacob, another resident, said he saw someone throw a snowball at an ICE agent. That resulted in the agents crossing their line again and charging the crowd. “They started firing tear gas,” he said, with flash bangs exploding behind him as he spoke.

Tony said he’d only been there for 10 minutes before he was tear-gassed. Having just walked over from half a block away, he was exasperated as he described agents crossing their tape line to “charge all of us” and tackle some “other fucker” who had been insulting the agents.

“They threw a fuck ton of gas,” Tony said, splashing water on his face and looking at the huge plume of smoke rising down the street. “They’re shooting our neighbors, dude!”

The confrontation went on for hours, in subzero temperatures. But more and more residents came, wearing ski goggles and gas masks, and carrying homemade signs with anti-ICE messages. Most people hung back down the street, shouting messages like “Fuck ICE!” and “Fucking Nazis!” Some would drift up closer to the federal agents to yell at them, only to run back as officers sprayed more tear gas at them and set off flash bangs. Others arrived with cases of bottled water, handing them out to people to flush out their irritated eyes or to give them a drink after vomiting.

At one point, a tear gas canister eyewitnesses say was thrown by a federal agent exploded near a parked car, blasting out windows and setting it on fire. There was so much smoke in the air and so many loud bangs that, at moments, it felt like a scene out of a war movie.

But protesters weren’t instigating violence. People were mostly filming the standoff down the street, introducing themselves to each other and discussing the sheer insanity of the situation. One woman was giving out free hugs to several willing recipients. A bunch of guys dragged trash bins and even a couch into the middle of the street at one point, creating a barricade of sorts as federal agents were slowly trying to push people out of the area.

It was a profound show of unity and determination by this community, and just one day after 50,000 residents marched downtown to demand that ICE get out of their state. But people are still gripped by fear of these federal agents. Most people didn’t want to give their full names or even their first names when we spoke. Some didn’t want to talk at all.

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I spoke to a few people who lived on the block, but none were comfortable talking for long. One had just moved to this street on Friday, and was stunned by the scene unfolding in front of his apartment building that was cordoned off by police tape. Another man down the street said he woke up to the sounds of at least 10 gunshots fired at Pretti, and a woman who lived in the same apartment building as him said she’d just moved here three months ago with her two kids from the suburbs.

It’s cheaper to live in this neighborhood than outside the city, said this woman, who is Black. But now she worries for her kids’ safety.

“This shit is too much,” she said. “I want to go back to the suburbs.”