Minneapolis: Local activist and chef Michael Wilson is leading the crowd in a tribute to Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti when a woman kneeling beside the memorial suddenly emits a guttural scream. “Peace,” she yells. “Peace.”
Then, another woman begins shouting: “I’m a nurse. We want peace.” Soon, the hundred or so other mourners gathered on the side of the road begin to follow these two strangers in a chant: “All. Nurses. Want. Peace.”
It is spontaneous, awkward and raw. But it is real. It is also freezing – minus 20 degrees – which does not stop the crowds growing as the day wears on.
Wilson takes back control. “This man was a medic, y’all,” he booms. “He was a nurse. For veterans. Wow, y’all. They’re telling us two plus two equals five. They’re telling us a nurse for the VA [Veterans Affairs] was a domestic terrorist.”
Pretti’s death on Saturday at the hands of federal immigration agents shocked the nation. But here in Minneapolis, where Renee Good, another 37-year-old American citizen, was shot dead by federal agents just three weeks ago, and where George Floyd was killed by police in 2020, there is something more than shock. There is all-out despair.
“I’m grieving,” says Debbie Claypool, a 58-year-old from nearby Fridley who works in advertising. “I’m grieving for democracy. This is fascism. I’m a child of a mother that was a German Jew in Nazi Germany, so this kind of hits home for me. This can’t happen. We’ve got to get rid of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].”
That seems to be the consensus view on the streets of Whittier, the suburb where Pretti was killed. Bus stops are covered in “F— ICE” graffiti. Shop windows are full of posters for protests or legal advice for immigrants: “Know your rights.” At the Spyhouse coffee shop, a graffiti tag takes it up a notch. “Kill ICE,” it says.
When Donald Trump was first elected president, he delivered a disturbingly dark inauguration speech on the steps of the Capitol. Mothers and children were trapped in poverty; rusted-out factories were “scattered like tombstones” across the country; crime and gangs and drugs were ruining lives.
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” Trump said.
But in Minneapolis, it feels like a particular brand of American carnage has taken hold. Squads of masked men patrolling the streets; federal police pitted against local; the government in conflict with its own citizens; hate scrawled on every corner and anger spewing from every mouth.
It’s a carnage of the soul, not the scenery. The city itself is a winter wonderland; something out of a film. Front lawns of storybook cottages and Craftsman bungalows are doused in white snow. Even with the sun shining all day, it’s so cold that there’s no chance it will melt.
The Trump administration has made an example of Minneapolis, more so than Los Angeles or Chicago, or any other blue city it has targeted. At the same time, 3000 ICE agents have been dispatched here, Trump and his team have mercilessly pursued the state’s governor, Tim Walz, over an alleged welfare fraud scandal involving Somali migrants, and accused him and other Democrat leaders of encouraging hysteria about ICE and thereby being responsible for the deaths of Good and Pretti.
“This level of engineered chaos is unique to Minneapolis,” Vice President JD Vance said on X. “It is the direct consequence of far-left agitators, working with local authorities.”
There is certainly an element of agitation and professional activism. At the memorial for Pretti, a woman leads the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer. Afterwards, she tells me her name is Josephine Guilbeau. She is from Ohio, and came to Minneapolis straight from the “Tech for Palestine” summit in San Francisco.
A former US Army intelligence analyst, Guilbeau was marched from a Senate hearing in handcuffs last year for interrupting to accuse senators of being complicit in war crimes in Gaza.
“I flew in this morning because I needed to mourn,” she says. “I want to mourn what I’m witnessing. I don’t want to make this normal. I don’t want anyone in this country to normalise what we’re witnessing.”
In this environment, it can be difficult to gauge what average citizens think. But polls show most Americans are uneasy about ICE’s tactics, and rate Trump negatively on immigration, even if they back his moves to close the southern border. That is especially so among Democrats, and Minneapolis is one of America’s bluest cities.
Outside the Spyhouse coffee shop, I ask passerby Liz Lee how she feels about what’s happening in her neighbourhood.
“It’s generally so unsettling even if you’re not a protester to feel like on any given corner, street, anywhere you just walk out of your home and there could be armed agents taking you down, taking community members down, detaining observers,” she says. “This, right outside our homes. It’s just wild.”
Lee, 28, says her neighbours have formed a group chat where they will share information about ICE agents’ activities nearby. “A lot of us are just peaceful observers,” she says. “We’re not getting involved, we’re not stepping in, and we’re still at risk of getting detained. It just seems against everything that this country was built for.”
But then, in an Uber heading downtown, I get a different perspective from a 30-something man who moved here 18 months ago from New York. He declines to tell me his name, stressing that he tries not to get involved in this kind of political debate.
“I don’t understand the protesters’ argument,” he says. “‘ICE out’. Alright. But they are federal agents sent here federally, with Supreme Court approval, getting people who ostensibly are here illegally. No country in the world allows people to sit there illegally. Although I don’t know if any country in the world goes [about it] like this.”
The Uber driver declares he is not a right-winger. “But I understand the right-wing argument more than I understand the left-wing argument. If the left wing wanted to come up to me and say to me, ‘We think the current immigration law is bogus, and it needs to be changed and more inclusive’, well then, alright, now I get your argument. I’m not hearing that argument. I don’t even know what the argument is.”
He repeats a common refrain from critics of these protests: How much of it is really about immigration, and how much is just hatred of Trump? Later, he adds: “I don’t have a problem with ICE doing their job, but I’ve got a problem with ICE doing their job poorly. If they’re shooting people left and right that don’t deserve to be shot, or otherwise could be handled better, well then I would prefer not.”
Back in the CBD, hundreds of demonstrators convened for a snap rally in the early afternoon, as the temperature peaked at minus 16 degrees. Among them was Carolyn Pare, 69, a former Minnesota resident who moved back to Wisconsin but returned to protest in the aftermath of Pretti’s death.
“We are three old, retired, white ladies,” Pare says. “Got a lot of time on our hands. Can dedicate that time to a bigger purpose than corporate reality – which we all lived in. Now we’ve decided we need to pay it back and tell people what it really looks like, and not let it happen.”
I ask Pare whether her views are widespread; if her friends and neighbours agree with her. She says Wisconsin and Minnesota are very different places, despite being adjacent states. Once again, the great American divide comes into play.
“Wisconsin is a red state, and they’re all a bunch of assholes,” Pare says. “Back here, they were never assholes, they were always really nice people that cared for one another … You’ll find pockets of rednecks [in Minnesota] that believe in bad things; for the most part, we just don’t.”
I ask Pare about the Trump administration’s argument: that the dead protesters should not have been there; should not have impeded a law enforcement operation; should not have gone looking for trouble.
“No!” she exclaims. “Nobody deserves to die. George Floyd didn’t deserve to die. Who are we that we’re all so judgmental that we can say who deserves to live and die? The reality is what we’re doing to people is just awful.”
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via Twitter or email.
