In the battle between President Donald Trump’s regime and Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis is winning.
The proof is evident: In a Jan. 25 interview with Fox News, Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), who chairs the House Oversight Committee, suggested that the Trump administration should consider taking US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents out of Minneapolis in the wake of agents fatally shooting 37 year-old US citizen Alex Pretti.
“If the mayor and the governor are going to put our ICE officials in harm’s way, and there’s a chance of losing more innocent lives or whatever, then maybe go to another city and let the people of Minneapolis decide, ‘Do we want to continue to have all of these illegals?’” Comer said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
As new details emerge from the killing of Pretti—an intensive care unit nurse at Minneapolis’ Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) hospital—the evidence is rapidly stacking up against the regime. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) maintained that Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun” and “violently resisted” arrest when officers confronted him.
However, multiple video angles of the shooting show officers taking away Pretti’s handgun (which he bought legally and had a permit to carry) moments before an agent fired multiple shots with his own sidearm. In a statement to NBC affiliate KARE, Pretti’s parents pointed out that video shows their son “had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed.”
“The sickening lies told by the administration about our son are reprehensible and disgusting,” Michael and Susan Pretti stated. “Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs.”
FBI Director Kash Patel maintained that the agent who shot Pretti was correct to do so, telling Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo: “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple. You don’t have the right to break the law and incite violence.”
In response to Patel’s comments, Sarah Longwell—publisher of anti-Trump conservative website The Bulwark—posted a thread to Bluesky listing roughly a dozen examples of “MAGA protesting with guns and not getting murdered for it” between 2020 and 2023. Writer Nick Pettigrew also observed: “The people who’ll tell you today’s murder victim in Minnesota shouldn’t have turned up to a protest carrying a gun are the same people who said Kyle Rittenhouse [a teen who killed two people with an AR-15 rifle at a 2020 protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin] was perfectly entitled to do the same thing.”
Pretti’s killing came just weeks after the fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Renee Good, who was shot in the face by ICE agent Jonathan Ross after being seen on video captured by Ross turning her steering wheel all the way to the right before attempting to drive away from ICE agents. The video disproves the administration’s claims that Good was attempting to run over agents with her vehicle, and a New York Times analysis of the video shows that Ross was never actually struck by Good’s vehicle before he shot her. Aside from Good and Pretti, ICE agents in Minneapolis also shot and injured Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, and nine other people in various US cities since September of 2025.
Minneapolis is the regime’s model of how it aims to rule
The regime clearly wants to prove a point in Minneapolis. Reuters reported in January that the administration is making preparations to send an estimated 1,500 troops to Minneapolis. This is on top of the approximately 3,000 federal agents already in the city, which Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) says outnumber local police in Minneapolis and St. Paul by a “three-to-one” margin.
ICE’s operation in Minneapolis—which is dubbed Operation Metro Surge—is purportedly focused on the city’s population of Somali immigrants, who number roughly 84,000 across the metro area. The Associated Press reported that 58 percent of Somalis in Minneapolis are native-born U.S. citizens, while 87% of the foreign-born Somalis living in the area are naturalized U.S. citizens.
But despite the relatively low number of undocumented Somali immigrants who lack authorization to live in the U.S., the administration has accused the Somali population of committing widespread fraud based largely on a video by far-right YouTuber Nick Shirley. The 23 year-old vlogger alleged that numerous daycare centers operated by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis were scamming taxpayers out of billions of dollars and that nothing was being done.
This is despite former President Joe Biden’s administration thoroughly investigating allegations of “massive fraud” in 2022. In February of that year, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) — who is herself a Somali immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen—sent a letter asking the Biden administration to get to the bottom of “fraudulent misuse of federal funding.” In 2018, Fox affiliate KMSP reported that state officials had been “aggressively investigating daycare fraud since 2014.” Shirley didn’t uncover anything new—he simply hadn’t done any research prior to filming his video.
It’s also important to note that Minneapolis and St. Paul both saw a “drastic decline in murders” between 2024 and 2025, according to Axios. Minnesota Public Radio reported in late 2025 that violent crime in the Twin Cities has been on a steady decline since 2020 and 2021. All of this begs the question: If the allegations of fraud have already been thoroughly investigated, and if Minneapolis’ Somali population is mostly made up of U.S. citizens, and if both homicides and violent crime are declining, why the massive deployment of federal agents?
The answer, according to Georgetown Law’s Julia Gegenheimer, is simple: Because Minnesota is a blue state, Minneapolis is a deep-blue city, and the Democrats who lead the city and state are outspoken critics of the regime. Gegenheimer told Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern that the administration’s use of the phrase “domestic terrorist” to describe Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is deliberate, and asserted that the regime is aiming to subject both Democrats to political violence “by turning them into the enemy.”
“It is profoundly disturbing,” Gegenheimer said. “And the reason why this feels different to you is that it is a bit of a different flavor. It’s pitting the federal government against the states and creating tension where it doesn’t need to be.”
The regime likely aims to use its heavy-handed tactics in Minneapolis—which include the arrest of toddlers as young as two years old, and using a five year-old boy “as bait” in an attempt to arrest his family—as an example to emulate in future operations in other predominantly Democratic cities and states. ICE agents have been going door-to-door demanding residents show their citizenship papers, and internal documents show that ICE agents have been instructed to break down doors even when residents don’t answer their knocks. And after the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed a lower court order preventing the tear-gassing and arrest of peaceful protesters, the regime’s masked secret police is back to using chemical weapons banned in war zones on U.S. citizens expressing their First Amendment rights.
Attorney General Pam Bondi recently revealed the regime’s goal in Minneapolis is not immigration enforcement, but voter disenfranchisement. Bondi sent a letter to Gov. Walz telling him that ICE would leave his state as long as he agreed to provide the Trump administration with its voter registration database. Walz responded to Bondi’s letter by telling her to get busy releasing the rest of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Bondi’s letter proves that the regime aims to bludgeon blue cities and states into submission with overwhelming cruelty, and then rig the electoral process to ensure it will remain in power in perpetuity. This is arguably the model for how the Trump administration aims to target the Democratic opposition during the remainder of Trump’s second term.
Minneapolis is the model for how the people can resist fascist tyranny
As cruel as the regime has been in Minneapolis, the resilience of the local community has remained unshaken. Whenever the regime deploys its masked agents to terrorize another U.S. city, Americans can look at how Minneapolis has resisted the administration and copy their tactics to protect their neighbors and vulnerable populations.
In response to Operation Metro Surge, Minneapolis residents have organized a hyper-local network to meet needs while minimizing immigrants’ exposure to federal agents. NPR reported that when a 12 year-old girl got her period for the first time, she was afraid to go to the corner store out of fear of being picked up by ICE agents. When she told her father—who himself stays at home out of fear of apprehension—he urged her to stay home, and instead called his local pastor.
The pastor called a member of his congregation, who then called her neighbor. The neighbor called her daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, and they brought menstrual pads to the pre-teen girl’s house by driving through back alleyways. The girl let her neighbors in through the back door. The following day, the girl spoke to a nurse at an underground clinic for immigrants who are too afraid to leave the house for a doctor’s visit.
CNN reported in January that Minneapolis has a volunteer network of roughly 5,000 local residents who alert their neighbors when ICE is in the vicinity, tail ICE vehicles through neighborhoods, blow whistles when ICE is conducting an operation, and film all ICE activity for transparency and potential future accountability. The community’s diligent efforts have not gone unnoticed by the regime, with the DHS complaining on its official social media account that agents are unable to even use public bathrooms without throngs of angry residents following them, blowing whistles, and telling them to get out of the city.
“At each gas station where the agents stopped to use the restroom, groups of agitators appeared, yelled at them, stalked them, and even tried to prevent law enforcement vehicles from leaving, creating unsafe conditions,” the DHS wrote on X. “At one stop, individuals in the crowd threw food at the agents.”
Minneapolis’ resistance to the Trump regime even led to the city’s first general strike since 1934, according to Jacobin. On Friday, January 23, hundreds of local businesses shut down in solidarity with workers in a city-wide general strike, while as many as 50,000 people took to the streets for a massive peaceful demonstration. And they did so in sub-zero temperatures, with the wind chill as low as 40 degrees below zero.
The courage of Minneapolis stands in stark contrast to the abject cowardice from well-heeled institutions on display for much of 2025. Last year, major corporations donated more than $251 million to Trump’s second inauguration. Columbia University agreed to give the administration $200 million in exchange for keeping its federal grants. Major law firms have agreed to contribute a combined $940 million in pro bono legal services to advance the regime’s ideological goals. Massive media conglomerates like ABC gave Trump millions of dollars in order to settle baseless lawsuits.
Despite having far less assets and financial resources to fall back on, the people of Minneapolis have defiantly stood up to the Trump regime’s occupation of their city through a combination of love, solidarity, and militant nonviolent resistance. One day, ICE will leave Minneapolis, and local residents will commemorate the day the regime conceded in the face of popular resistance for years to come. Americans should look to Minneapolis as a model for how to fight back against fascist tyranny, and mark Tuesday, Nov. 3 as the day when they can turn their resistance against the regime into electoral power, take back control of the legislative branch, and start using the powers of Congress to hold this criminal regime accountable.
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