We Are All Minneapolis

Lexington January 24, 2026

[a personal response to today’s news]

Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the local VA hospital, known by neighbors as an amiable man in his neighborhood, was murdered by federal ICE agents today in Minneapolis.

Alex was not the target of any investigation. He was using his iPhone to film the violent threats of ICE agents in the street, and he was talking to another woman filming the scene. ICE agents approached him and the woman, wrestled him to the ground, and after he had been subdued, one agent took out a gun and fired up to ten shots, killing him. His last words, to the woman who was pinned to the ground near him as they were pepper-sprayed, were “are you alright?”

We are at war. No sense mincing words. Until we tear the present DHS agency down to the ground and start with a new structure, no one in America is safe. The agency was formed with a dramatic flourish to propagandize and support George Bush’s war on terror, to protect America from foreign threats like Osama Bin Laden, but has morphed into an instrument of state terror as appalling as Syria’s Mukhabarat under Assad, or the military of Argentina during the Dirty War. These groups killed their own citizens in the streets as a show of terror and repression.

This will not stand in America. Yesterday I was overjoyed seeing 50,000 people turn out in zero-degree weather in Minneapolis to demand ICE OUT, accompanied by a general strike. Hundreds of businesses closed on Friday, and more importantly, the AFL-CIO, the Teachers Union, the Transit Workers Union, and the SEIU all participated. They tore up no-strike clauses in their contracts, or gave members permission to not come to work. Supportive demonstrations broke out all over the country, including more than 1,000 people at the Bayside Mall in Dorchester, site of both Target and Home Depot, two companies reviled because of their cooperation with ICE.

Alex Pretti’s murder pushed aside the international outrage over ICE abducting a 5-year-old, Liam Conejo Ramo, as his father returned him home from pre-school. ICE used Liam as bait to knock on his door to see if anyone else was home. Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, are from Ecuador. Adrian has an asylum claim being adjudicated and no criminal record.

We are seeing in Minnesota that terrorizing the community, threatening and killing people, acting like the violent thugs they are, causes more and more people to rise up against them. Videos are being collected for future prosecution. The Minneapolis police refused to allow ICE to remain at the scene, and ICE was evacuated. The National Guard is being called up by the governor to keep order against riots, but also against ICE. In the presence of the National Guard, Minnesotans are allowed to exercise their American rights of free speech, assembly, and protest.

What is the glue holding Minnesota together under this assault, the worst attack by the government on an American city at peace, not torn by riots or unrest, since the Civil War? The glue is love and community. My sister’s child lives in South Minneapolis. They have been texting about their tight neighborhood group—suddenly everyone knows everyone, and the sense of solidarity is amazing.

We have that here too, not under such extreme brutality. But the group of people who work with LUCE monitoring ICE, the group that monitors flights at Hanscom, the groups who help with court watch, or refugee assistance, or who attend the weekly demonstrations at the ICE office in Burlington by Bearing Witness, all of that is our community, and these bonds will only strengthen as our communities, our values, our lives are threatened.

There is no way to win against repression except by overwhelming love for your neighbor, and the knowledge that both of you are in this situation together. That is why hundreds more people spring into the streets in Minneapolis in the face of such terror. That is why people call me up at Lexington Alarm and say I want to help, what can I do.

Our politicians and electeds are so far outside of this mindset it is frightening. Katherine Clark is not using her position as a base of power. She opened a disastrous and disappointing community meeting saying how she agrees with the anger, but then says she can do nothing about it and urges us to elect Democrats. We will, but what they miss, in the legislative bubble, is that out in the real world people are fighting for their lives in the greatest emergency this country has endured in generations. Without that visceral feeling that everything you love is under threat, she, and most of our elected leaders, just plod along hoping to survive until a better time.

Even in Minnesota, leaders like Tim Walz, who I respect, are following the lead of the people out in the streets who are so angry. He is the one urging people to keep videoing the crimes, as they already were doing. He knows the anger. He shares it himself. But for those who can’t share that anger, we must go on without them.

Next time you do something for the resistance—make a phone call, come to a standout, hold a sign, write a letter, get a friend involved, skip work, grieve with friends, contribute to lawyers funds, or above all, step in to help LUCE, BIJAN, MIRA, the primary organizations defending, representing, and supporting terrorized immigrant families with mutual aid—do it for Alex Pretti. He could have been any one of us. And any one of us could be next if ICE is allowed to bring its terror tactics here.

Life here is not normal. Three people were seized at Burlington Mall last week. 15 were arrested in Brockton and Framingham. I got a call from a lawyer in New Hampshire who said her client, a man with a credible asylum claim being processed in a legal way, was seized in Portland, leaving behind a pregnant wife and three children. She only found out he was in Louisiana after he called and she could see the flight record we kept of the prisoner movements from Lexington to Alexandria, Louisiana.

So hug each other. Love each other. Fight for each other.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide.”