Minneapolis A city in terror and a moment of reckoning

Wearing helmets, gasmasks and camouflage fatigues, the federal agents took aim and prepared to open fire.

- David Smith

“It’s like Call of Duty,” one could be heard saying via a TV mic, referring to a first-person shooter military video game. “So cool, huh?”

This was the scene on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday after armed agents, wearing masks and tactical vests, wrestled 37-year-old Alex Pretti to the ground and shot him dead. The killing took place just over a mile from where Renee Good was fatally shot on 7 January, a scene that itself was less than a mile from where police murdered George Floyd in May 2020.

“How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?” the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, demanded at a press conference on Saturday, referring to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the city. An angry crowd gathered and swore profanities at federal officers, calling them “cowards” and telling them to go home.

Donald Trump spoke of “american carnage” in his first inaugural address nine years ago. The US president has surely delivered it by deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the streets of a major city in order to create a spectacle of terror reminiscent of a civil war - or a video game.

In the first year of his second presidency, Trump’s ICE deployments have been carefully aimed at cities that are Democratic-led and often black-led, as if imposing collective punishment for their defiance. In this, he is borrowing from an authoritarian playbook reminiscent of Saddam Hussein of Iraq targeting the Kurds, or the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin causing the Holodomor, or “death by hunger”, in Ukraine.