Minneapolis: One block from where 37-year-old American nurse Alex Pretti was killed last weekend, Christian Collins Winn is fighting the federal government’s immigration crackdown in his own way.
An associate professor of theology and the pastor at Calvary Baptist Church, he doesn’t fit the profile of a crazed left-wing agitator. He’s not on the front lines, sticking cameras in agents’ faces, but he is supportive. Outside his church, his volunteers hand out coffee, cookies and hand warmers with a sign that says: “ICE OUT NOW!!”
When Pretti was shot metres away, Collins Winn and his team scrambled into action, providing much-needed hydration and shelter from the minus 20-degree cold.
When I ask him to explain what is happening in Minneapolis – and more broadly across the United States – he invokes (as others have) the Nazi intellectual Carl Schmitt, who theorised a “state of exception” whereby a leader purports to transcend the rule of law, and normal standards and sensibilities are suspended.
“When [ICE and Border Patrol] come in here, precisely what their authority is, is not completely understood or known, and that creates a situation of uncertainty about who is actually in charge,” Winn says.
“When local law enforcement show up, typically they don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know who’s really in charge, they defer to the feds – but that may change at some point.
“So, that entire situation of a cadre of ICE of agents showing up into a place creates this bubble of state of exception, and what is unleashed there is no longer regard for the Constitution, regard for legal democratic procedures that have been agreed upon or part of law, but rather, whoever has the right to violence and power. That’s happening here.”
Whichever way you look at it, the situation in Minneapolis is certainly exceptional. Since ICE began Operation Metro Surge last month, protesters have clashed with federal agents almost daily – sometimes violently – and sought to disrupt raids targeting suspected illegal migrants, including violent criminals.
In the process, agents killed two American citizens: Alex Pretti and Renee Good, both 37.
But Minneapolis may turn out to be where President Donald Trump’s state of exception ends. Pretti’s killing prompted something that is rare in modern US politics – outrage that transcended partisanship, and spread to not only the moderate wing of the Republican Party but to parts of Trump’s MAGA base and its influencers.
Several conservative Republican senators called for an independent investigation, including Ted Cruz of Texas. They were also dismayed by the rhetoric from senior Trump administration officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who called Pretti and Good “domestic terrorists”, and White House deputy chief-of-staff Stephen Miller, who labelled Pretti a “would-be assassin”.
“Escalating the rhetoric doesn’t help, and it actually loses credibility,” Cruz said on his podcast. “I would encourage the administration to be more measured, to recognise the tragedy. The politicians who are pouring gasoline onto this fire, they need to stop.”
Rather than playing golf in Florida, Trump spent the weekend of Pretti’s death in the Oval Office, as a massive snowstorm blanketed Washington. While there, he fielded phone calls from anxious Republicans, according to The Wall Street Journal, which interviewed Trump on Sunday and gauged that he was looking for an off-ramp.
The president intervened the next morning, dispatching his border tsar Tom Homan – who doesn’t hold a formal role – to oversee ICE operations in Minneapolis, and forcing out Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino, who quickly left town. Trump also paused his attacks on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, later praising their co-operation.
It was a clear recalibration of strategy and an attempt to “de-escalate a little bit”, as Trump himself said later in the week. It was also a significant political course correction from the president on immigration, arguably his signature domestic policy area.
“This is a big deal,” says Bill Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “The one thing that Donald Trump hates to do the most is back down on anything. He always wants to be on the offensive. But he didn’t get to be president – and get to be president again – by being indifferent to public opinion.”
The polls are clear. Soon after Trump took office and shut the southern border, more Americans approved of his handling of immigration than disapproved. That changed in the middle of last year, as ICE ramped up raids and expanded its remit from violent criminals to anyone believed to be in the US illegally.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found 53 per cent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s performance on immigration, and 58 per cent said ICE was going too far.
“The trend towards believing that he’s going too far did not start in Minneapolis last week,” says Galston. “That is a conclusion that people have been coming to slowly but in increasing numbers over the past two months. What’s happening now is that the people who have supported Trump even though they’re not part of the hardcore base are peeling away.”
Galston points out the White House itself appears divided between what he calls the Stephen Miller faction, which wants to go as hard as possible against all illegal immigrants, and those who wish to focus on deporting violent criminals.
“It is possible that replacing Bovino with Homan is an early sign that the faction that urges refocusing on criminal aliens is gaining the upper hand.”
Trump started the year celebrating the successful capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. But since then, he has backed down on his threats to annex Greenland, hesitated on striking Iran and now retreated on a major domestic matter.
“His modus operandi is always to probe the outer limits of the feasible,” says Galston. “If he encounters what he regards to be serious opposition, or it appears the costs of continuing to move forward exceed the gains, he often pulls back without conceding the overall objective. This is part of the art of the deal, as he understands it.”
Republican strategist Kevin Madden, a senior partner at Penta Group and former adviser to Mitt Romney, says it remains to be seen how durable Trump’s shift will be. But he notes that at the start of a midterm election year – in which Trump is expected to campaign heavily – the White House is especially attuned to criticism from its friends and allies. “They’re just much more sensitive right now to some of the negative feedback loops.”
Playing with fire
The events in Minneapolis over the past month are not just a battle for one city in one state, but a tug-of-war over the future of the union.
On one side are local Democratic leaders who, as in Illinois, California and New York, don’t want federal immigration agents in their cities, refuse to let their police and justice systems co-operate with immigration enforcement, and are pushing back forcefully on what they portray as systematic overreach by the Trump administration and its “modern-day Gestapo”.
On the other hand, Trump’s team, particularly hardliners like Miller – a driving force behind the operation – say Democrats are blocking the enforcement of federal immigration law, providing a haven for violent criminals, whipping up hysteria among their citizens and encouraging people to insert themselves into dangerous police operations. Moreover, they believe Democrats want illegal immigrants to remain in their states so they can fraudulently vote in elections – even though evidence suggests that is very rare.
“The Democrat Party yearns and fights and struggles for nothing more than a fully open border to the Third World,” Miller said this week. He often speaks of this as an existential threat to the union.
Reconciling these warring worldviews seems next to impossible. In Minnesota, both sides accept the status quo cannot continue, but remain at odds over the solution. Frey, after meeting Homan on Tuesday, insisted his city “does not and will not enforce federal immigration laws”. Trump took umbrage with that, and posted on Truth Social that Frey was “PLAYING WITH FIRE”.
If Pretti’s death represented a test case for the outer limit of what Republicans and even Trump would accept, Minnesota now looms as a test for whether the two sides of politics can bridge the gulf between them to fix a crisis. Homan sounded optimistic when he fronted the cameras on Friday (Australian time).
“I’ve heard many people want to know why we’re talking to people who they don’t consider friends of this administration,” he said. “Bottom line is: you can’t fix problems if you don’t have discussions.”
Homan said in his meetings with Minnesota leaders, it was agreed that ICE was a legitimate agency enforcing laws passed by the US Congress, though they did not agree on whether local police should work with ICE. But crucially, it was agreed that county jails may begin notifying ICE of the release dates of people deemed public safety threats, so that ICE can take custody of them in prison rather than trying to arrest them on the street.
A public arrest required as many as 16 people, Homan said, including a large arrest team to cover the entrances of the property, and a security team to protect the arrest team from attacks by protesters.
“What could have been done with one person in the safety and security of a jail, now we got 15, 16 people out there doing it. I know that causes stress in the community,” he said. “If we get these agreements in place, that means less agents on the street … This is commonsense co-operation that will allow us to draw down on the number of people we have here.”
Homan said a plan to reduce ICE’s presence in Minnesota was already under way. Reuters reported ICE agents have also been issued with new guidance not to communicate or engage with agitators: “It serves no purpose other than inflaming the situation.”
Bill Galston says that in fact, a compromise position is possible, and both sides are not as far apart as it might look. Immigration became a serious electoral vulnerability for the Biden administration in 2024; it can damage the Republicans, too, if most people feel the Trump administration has become too extreme.
“There’s a centre of gravity of opinion in the country, and that is that Joe Biden let too many people in with too few checks, and that some of them are dangerous criminals, others despite being here illegally are contributing to the economy and the community, and that the focus in the first instance ought to be on the bad actors,” says Galston.
“I think mainstream Democrats and the Homan faction in the administration could probably somehow find their way to agree on that.”
Such a compact would disappoint progressive Democrats who want to abolish ICE and have something close to open borders, and it would also disappoint the Miller faction of the Trump base.
“But it would leave the country in a better place. And I think that both political parties would have an easier time sustaining their positions in the court of public opinion,” says Galston
In Minneapolis, I suggest to pastor Christian Collins Winn that some people would regard Minnesota’s refusal to co-operate with federal immigration enforcement as its own “state of exception”, where the usual laws and norms do not apply.
He counters that many of the people detained by ICE are asylum seekers or refugees, and many who are considered undocumented already have a tax file number and pay taxes. “Something like 90 per cent of the Latino community in the Twin Cities area already has that, in my understanding.”
But for Collins Winn, the bottom line is biblical. “We’re people of Shalom,” he says. “But we’re also people who attune ourselves, or try to attune ourselves, to deeper laws, which means loving your neighbours. Some of the political back and forth is important, but at the end of the day, this is a church. When you remove the welcome mat for refugees, or you remove the welcome mat for asylees, I think that is simply counter to the gospel.”
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