‘This is what fascism looks like’: terror in Minneapolis reminiscent of civil war

Wearing helmets, gas masks and camouflage fatigues, the federal agents took aim and prepared to open fire. “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 ongoing immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. 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 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin causing the Holodomor, or “death by hunger”, in Ukraine.

It is the same vengeful petulance that in the past week alone has seen Trump lash out at Canada and other Nato allies over perceived slights in Davos during his quest to conquer Greenland.

Trump seems to reserve a special loathing for Minnesota because he lost the presidential elections there in 2016, 2020 and 2024, despite most neighbouring states voting in his favour. He recently made the false claim that he won Minnesota all three times. In reality, no Republican – not even Ronald Reagan – has prevailed there since Richard Nixon in 1972.

Minnesota is home to the biggest Somali community in the country, making it a target of Trump’s animus: this week, he described Somalis as “low-IQ people”, not even trying to conceal his racism. It is also home to Somali-born Ilhan Omar, a progressive congresswoman who gets under Trump’s skin. The state’s governor, Tim Walz, is a trenchant critic of the president who was Kamala Harris’s running mate in the 2024 election that she lost to Trump.

In addition, toward the end of his first presidency, Minneapolis was the scene of the police murder of Floyd, a Black man. Floyd’s killing sparked Black Lives Matter protests that surged all the way to the doorstep of the White House. America felt febrile and fragile in those days. This is another of those moments.

Trump has deployed 3,000 ICE officers and Customs and Border Protection agents to the ground in Minnesota, vastly outnumbering the 10 biggest local and state police agencies there combined. Many operate with masks, weapons and swaggering impunity – but insufficient training in de-escalation techniques.

Local politicians have been roughed up; legal observers hauled off without charge; schoolchildren teargassed; motorists dragged from their cars. Even Native Americans, whose ancestors lived here long before the US existed, have been stopped and questioned. Simply filming these agents is enough to be branded a domestic terrorist.

Garrett Graff, a journalist and historian, wrote on his Doomsday Scenario blog this week: “This is what fascism looks like – there is no bright line between democracy and autocracy, it’s a spectrum, and not all of the country will experience that switch at the same moment in the same way. But let’s be clear: there is a US city living under occupation by fascist presidential secret police right now.”

That conclusion was hard to avoid on Saturday. TV pictures showed the air thick with teargas as agents forced one protester to the ground. He could be heard shrieking: “I’m a United States citizen! You’re gonna kill me! Is that what you want? You want to kill me?” Nearby a woman was kneeling and screaming as a man tried to comfort her.

The protester fatally shot by a federal officer was identified as ICU nurse Alex Pretti. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed that officers fired “defensive shots” after a man with a handgun approached them. Walz accused the authorities of a “rush to judgment” and called the shooting “sickening”.

The DHS and other government authorities have already shredded their credibility with false and misleading claims in the past. A chorus of Democrats reacted in horror to the shooting and called on ICE to get out of Minneapolis, with some urging Congress to cut off its funding.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on the X social media platform: “Americans are being killed in the street by their government. Our Constitution is being shredded and our rights are dissolving. Resist. Senate [Democrats] should block ICE funding this week. Activate the National Guard. We can and must stop this.”

The past week in Davos felt like an inflection point when western leaders drew a line in the sand over Trump’s bullying over Greenland and said: no more. Pretti’s death could be a similar moment of reckoning for Democrats and others in the domestic arena to call time on Trump waging war on his own people.

JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, told the MS Now network: “We’re in a precarious moment and I just think that, if we do not stop this now, if we don’t abolish Trump’s ICE and make sure that we have a trained force that is following the law, this is going to erupt into something really terrible.

“It already is, but it could get vastly worse.”