Believe Your Own Eyes

Minneapolis, ICE’s collapse of credibility, and the end of the official story

Good morning! Minneapolis has become the epicenter of a national reckoning because it’s where the contradictions finally collided on camera, in public, with receipts. By now, the facts of Alex Pretti’s killing are no longer seriously in dispute outside the Trump administration’s preferred media bubble. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and lawful gun owner, was filming federal immigration agents as they pepper-sprayed protesters. Video verified by the New York Times, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal shows him holding a phone, not a weapon; stepping in to help a woman who had been shoved to the ground; being sprayed, tackled, restrained, and disarmed, and then shot multiple times while prone. The official DHS account, released within hours, claimed he “violently resisted” and posed a lethal threat. The video says otherwise. So do sworn witness statements. So does a judge, who felt compelled to issue a restraining order to stop federal authorities from destroying evidence. Pretti’s last words were, “Are you okay?”

That judicial intervention alone tells you how far off the rails this has gone. States should not have to rush into court to preserve evidence from the federal government in a homicide.

Pretti’s killing is the second fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this month. Renee Good, a mother of three, was shot earlier in January, immediately labeled a “domestic terrorist” by senior Trump officials, a claim later contradicted by video. Reuters now tallies five federal-agent shootings in January alone, alongside at least six deaths in ICE detention facilities since the start of 2026. That pace tracks directly with a massive escalation in enforcement, funded to the tune of $170 billion through 2029, and driven by arrest quotas that reward speed and intimidation over planning or discretion.

And here’s the part that blows up the central justification for all of it: nearly half of the people ICE is detaining have no criminal charge or conviction. These are civil violations, the legal equivalent of traffic offenses, being enforced with militarized tactics. The administration keeps invoking “the worst of the worst,” but the numbers don’t cooperate.

What makes this moment different is that the pushback isn’t just coming from protesters or Democratic governors. It’s coming from inside the system. The New York Times now reports what Legal Eagle, civil rights lawyers, and state officials have been warning all along: ICE and Border Patrol were never designed, trained, or legally intended to serve as urban crowd-control forces or general police. A Government Accountability Office report confirms most ICE agents receive no specialized crowd-control training at all. Border Patrol agents receive more, but for border environments, not dense American cities where First Amendment activity is the norm and constitutional protections are at their strongest.

Former and current DHS officials, including longtime Trump voters, are now saying this out loud. Morale is “in the dumpster.” Agents feel set up to fail. Leadership is pushing “turn and burn” tactics into environments they don’t understand. One former DHS lawyer went further, calling the department’s behavior “lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty.” Another ICE official admitted they no longer trust official government statements at all. That is not dissent from the fringe, that is full on institutional fracture.

The political response from the top has been… unhinged. Trump spent the weekend ricocheting across Truth Social, accusing Minnesota of a “criminal cover-up,” praising Fox News guests for smearing the dead, ranting about Canada being taken over by China, and claiming a “Top Secret fact” was exposed because a preservation group dared to sue over his $400-million White House ballroom vanity project, a project now under scrutiny for donor influence from corporations like Palantir, Google and Meta, with government business. It was less crisis management than a live demonstration of executive instability.

In a Wall Street Journal interview, Trump refused, twice, to say whether the agent who killed Pretti acted appropriately. He criticized Pretti instead, falsely portraying a holstered 9mm handgun as some kind of unpredictable death ray, despite video showing it never left its holster before being taken by an agent. He floated the idea of eventually withdrawing federal agents from Minneapolis, then immediately undercut it by saying they’d stay for “financial fraud,” a talking point that has nothing to do with immigration enforcement and everything to do with political retaliation.

The governors are no longer mincing words. Tim Walz has called the federal deployment an occupation and mobilized the National Guard, explicitly to keep the peace and distinguish state forces from masked federal agents. New York Governor Kathy Hochul went further, calling for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign or be fired, and for Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino to be removed as well. Her charge was blunt: when federal agents kill civilians and then block state investigations, democracy itself is being violated.

Even the gun debate, long calcified into pure tribal reflex, is starting to fracture under the weight of lived reality. Watching social media reactions locally, it’s been striking to see how inconsistent the justifications have become. Some self-described Second Amendment purists are now arguing that merely carrying a firearm anywhere near federal agents nullifies your right to live, full stop. Others are tying themselves into knots insisting that Alex Pretti’s holstered pistol somehow transformed him into an imminent threat, despite video showing it never left its holster.

That argument rings especially hollow if, like me, you have stunning photos of a pro-Trump rally held in 2020. Right on Boardwalk in Coos Bay, Oregon, where demonstrators wearing tactical vests, openly carried not just sidearms but military-style rifles, AR-15s slung across chests, magazines visible, weapons far more lethal than the handgun Pretti legally carried. No one suggested their mere presence with firearms justified lethal force. No one called them terrorists. They were treated as folk heroes, patriots exercising their 2nd Amendment rights.

Now the standard has flipped overnight, and only for one “side.” A nurse with a phone and a holstered pistol is retroactively cast as a violent agitator, while heavily armed political rallies just a few years ago are memory-holed or reframed as wholesome civic engagement. Think Kyle Rittenhouse.The hypocrisy isn’t subtle, it’s glaring.

What’s even more telling is that this isn’t just a liberal critique anymore. The NRA itself, not exactly known for siding against law enforcement, pushed back against the rush to justify Pretti’s killing, warning that lawful gun ownership does not evaporate because someone is exercising their First Amendment rights as an observer, and that demonizing a dead citizen before an investigation is complete is dangerous. When even the NRA is urging restraint, it’s a sign the old talking points are failing.

What’s playing out now isn’t a principled debate about guns or public safety. It’s a loyalty test, and the rules change depending on who’s holding the weapon, who they voted for, and who the federal government has decided to frame as the enemy.

Then there’s the media ecosystem. Fox News has largely laundered the administration’s narrative, avoiding video analysis and framing Pretti’s presence itself as provocation. The New York Times documented the contrast starkly: selective facts, loaded language, and the familiar suggestion that protest is inherently suspicious when it challenges federal power. It’s not hard to see how that messaging feeds the reactions you’re seeing locally, people justifying the killing not because the evidence supports it, but because they’ve been trained to distrust their own eyes.

Which brings us to the most unsettling through-line of all. From DHS recruitment ads parroting Nazi-era slogans, “Which way, American man?”, lifted almost verbatim from a 1970s neo-Nazi tract, to official government accounts posting fascist-style imagery and slogans like “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” to masked federal agents in tactical gear patrolling American streets as if they were occupied territory, the pattern is no longer deniable. Add to that senior officials labeling civilians “domestic terrorists” within hours of their deaths, before investigations even begin, and a White House culture that rushes to smear the dead rather than examine state violence, and you start to see the shape of what’s happening.

This isn’t just aesthetic excess or online trolling bleeding into governance. As Mehdi Hasan laid out bluntly this week, it’s the normalization of extremist language, symbolism, and logic inside the machinery of the state itself. When Homeland Security leaders echo collective-punishment rhetoric, when top administration figures borrow language straight out of fascist propaganda, when officials with documented Nazi sympathies circulate through senior roles with minimal consequence, and when career professionals inside DHS describe their own department as lawless, cruel, and unrecognizable, the problem is no longer confined to the fringes, it has been institutionalized.

How much longer are Americans willing to accept a government that tells them not to believe their eyes, while wrapping repression in the language of patriotism and law and order.

Minneapolis didn’t ask to become a test case. It became one because the federal government chose to turn civil immigration enforcement into a domestic show of force, without the training, legal grounding, or moral authority to pull it off safely. The videos didn’t create the crisis, they just made it impossible to deny.

That’s why this moment feels different. Not because justice is guaranteed, it isn’t, but because the lies are failing faster than they can be replaced. Judges are intervening, and states are pushing back. Insiders are breaking ranks, while public opinion is shifting. Even some of the old talking points are starting to wobble under their own weight.

Marz and I are headed out for a few hours of personal time and overdue maintenance, nothing dramatic, just the kind of tending that keeps you upright when the world feels tilted. Make no mistake: we hold you all in our thoughts every night during our moonbeam vigil.

Keep the pressure on the GOP. Keep showing up, and witnessing and documenting what’s happening in your streets and your communities. Above all, keep believing your own eyes, because that is precisely what they’re trying to take from you. History has a long memory, even when power pretends otherwise.