Murder in Minneapolis: The State's Death Squad in Action

Alex Pretti will be remembered.

It ends with a man bleeding out on the cold Minneapolis pavement. His name was Alex Pretti. He was a 37-year-old ICU nurse who spent his days caring for American veterans. On January 25, 2026, he was murdered in a hail of bullets fired by federal agents. Video footage, raw and unforgiving, shows him trying to shield a woman who had been pushed to the ground by those same agents. He was pepper sprayed. His phone was in his right hand; his empty left hand was raised. This was not an arrest or mistake. It was another murder, a public execution, a declaration of power broadcast in blood and lies.

In a previous essay, “Trump’s Gestapo: ICE and the 53-Day Warning” (L&A, 2026), we diagnosed the sickness. We warned that the transformation of a government agency into a political police force, loyal not to the law but to the will of one man, was underway. The consolidation of power, the final, brutal phase that follows the chaos of the rise, is here. The events in Minneapolis represent a qualitative and terrifying transformation of federal law enforcement into a state-sanctioned death squad, murdering American citizens with impunity. This is not a slippery slope towards authoritarianism, but the arrival. The mechanisms of authoritarian control are being openly deployed on American streets.

Anatomy of a State Execution

To understand the depth of this transgression, we must first understand who Alex Pretti was. The state, in its immediate and reflexive dishonesty, painted him as a threat, a “gunman” who posed a mortal danger to armed federal agents — a lie designed to justify his murder. The truth, as is so often the case in these matters, is the precise opposite. Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, he was a man who, in the words of his grieving parents, “wanted to make a difference in this world.” A man named Mac Randolph, whose father was cared for by Pretti at the VA, shared a video of the nurse reading his father’s final salut after he passed. “He would be honored in Alex’ sacrifice,” Randolph wrote, “and ashamed of this current administration.” Pretti was a protector, a caregiver, the very antithesis of the monster the state needed him to be for their narrative to hold. His life’s work makes the lie of his death all the more obscene.

The lie was instant and absolute. Within hours of the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security under the leadership of Kristi Noem, and the Border Patrol led by Chief Gregory Bovino, claimed that agents had acted in self-defence against an armed man. But the video, captured by horrified onlookers, tells a different story. It shows Pretti attempting to protect a woman who had been shoved to the ground. It shows him being pepper sprayed with his empty hand raised. Then, shows the flash of guns and the crumpling of a body. The lie was not a mistake born of confusion; it was a deliberate and essential component of the murder operation. It is a tool of the authoritarian, designed to assert the state’s dominance not just over its citizens, but over reality itself. When the state can murder a man in broad daylight and then successfully convince a portion of the population that he deserved it, that he was the aggressor, it has achieved a level of power far beyond the scope of a democratic government. This is the essence of totalitarianism: not merely the ability to control behaviour, but the ability to control the very narrative of truth.

Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan, issued a statement that cuts through the fog of official deception with the clarity of grief and rage over their son’s murder. “I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly,” they said. “However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has 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.” These are the words of people who have watched their son brutally murdered by the state and then defamed by it. And they are correct. The video evidence corroborates every detail they describe. The state’s narrative crumbles under even the slightest scrutiny, yet the state persists in maintaining it.

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This execution was not a random event. It was the bloody crescendo of a campaign of terror that had been escalating for weeks. Just 18 days earlier, on January 7, another American citizen, Renee Nicole Good, was murdered by an ICE agent in the same city. Her death ignited a firestorm of protest, which the administration met not with de-escalation, but with overwhelming force. Approximately 3,000 federal officers were deployed to Minneapolis, creating what Governor Tim Walz rightly called a “federal occupation.” The city was transformed into a laboratory for urban warfare, a place where federal agents, unaccountable to local authorities, could operate with impunity. The murder of Alex Pretti was the logical next step. It was a message: we can do this, and we will. We can kill your citizens, on your streets, and there is nothing you can do to stop us. The very fact that the federal government would deploy such overwhelming force in response to protests against a killing suggests a regime that is acutely aware of its own illegitimacy and terrified of the people’s judgment.

The response from Democratic leadership, while welcome, reveals the depth of the crisis. Senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, declared that she would not vote for the DHS funding bill “as it stands,” stating that “Federal agents cannot murder people in broad daylight and face zero consequences” (Walters & Bekiempis, 2026). Senator Chuck Schumer called the events “appalling — and unacceptable in any American city.” These are strong words, but they are just words. What is needed is action: the defunding of these agencies, the prosecution of those who ordered and executed these killings, and the dismantling of the entire apparatus of federal law enforcement that has been transformed into a tool of political repression. The fact that such basic demands seem radical speaks to how far America has already fallen. The bar for what constitutes acceptable government behaviour has been lowered so dramatically that calling for accountability for murder is now considered a partisan position.

The Machinery of Death

The violence on the streets of Minneapolis is the most visible manifestation of a far larger, more insidious machinery of death. While the public’s attention is captured by the drama of street-level executions, a quieter, more bureaucratic form of killing is taking place within the sprawling network of ICE detention centres. In 2025, a record 32 people died in ICE custody, the highest number in two decades (Singh et al., 2026). They died of seizures, heart failure, strokes, respiratory failure, tuberculosis, and suicide. In many cases, they died because of deliberate and systemic neglect.

Consider the case of Maksym Chernyak, a 44-year-old Ukrainian who fled the war in his homeland only to die of a stroke in a Miami detention centre. An investigation by the Miami Herald revealed that a delayed 911 call may have cost him his life (Singh et al., 2026). Medical experts who reviewed his case raised serious concerns about whether he received adequate care. Or Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian woman who complained of chest pains and was allegedly denied access to a physician. These are not isolated failures, but the predictable outcomes of a system designed to dehumanise and break its captives. With a staggering 68,440 people held in detention by the end of 2025, 75% of whom had no criminal convictions (Singh et al., 2026), the system is a powder keg of suffering and death. These are not hardened criminals or security threats. They are asylum seekers, DACA recipients, families fleeing violence, swept up in indiscriminate raids and warehoused in a network of facilities rife with abuse.

The statistics tell a story of deliberate cruelty. December 2025 was the deadliest month in ICE custody, with seven people dead (Singh et al., 2026). As detention facilities across the US grow more crowded, human rights advocates, immigration lawyers, and lawmakers have reported unsanitary conditions, inadequate food, and poor medical care. Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, stated plainly: “This is a result of the deteriorating conditions inside of ICE detention” (Singh et al., 2026). The Department of Homeland Security predictably denied that conditions were declining, claiming that “consistent with data over the last decade, death rates in custody are 0.00007%” (Singh et al., 2026). But this statistical sleight of hand obscures the fundamental truth: 32 people died in 2025. Thirty-two. Each one a human being, each one a failure of the system to provide even the most basic duty of care to those in its custody. When a system is deliberately starved of resources, when medical care is systematically denied, when people are packed into facilities like cattle, the resulting deaths evidently are policy.

This network of deadly detention has a terrifying historical precedent. In the first months of 1933, before the formal establishment of the concentration camp system, the Nazi SA created hundreds of so-called “wild camps” (Wachsmann, 2015). In these makeshift prisons, political opponents were brutalised and tortured in basements, abandoned factories, and bars. These were lawless spaces where the guards were encouraged to show “no mercy.” The wild camps were the incubator for the Holocaust; the public could see the signs of torture on released prisoners. These camps served as a testing ground for the machinery of mass death that would follow. Today, ICE’s detention network, with its record-breaking death toll, its culture of impunity, and its systematic denial of basic medical care, is serving as the laboratory for a new form of American cruelty. It is a place where the state learns how to kill without accountability and manage death on an industrial scale. The parallel is not perfect, but it is chilling: a state-sanctioned network of improvised, extra-legal holding pens where a designated enemy is subjected to systematic neglect and brutality, all while the state pumps out propaganda insisting the camps are tough but fair.

The fusion of this violence with a purely political agenda is the final, defining characteristic of a secret police force. In 2025, a branch of ICE once dedicated to fighting drug smugglers was repurposed to scan social media for voices sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. This digital surveillance quickly translated into real-world persecution. Activists like Mahmoud Khalil and students like Rumeysa Ozturk were arrested, their lives upended, using a McCarthy-era provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the deportation of anyone whose presence has “adverse foreign policy consequences.” The legal justification is archaic, but the intent is clear: the state is using its enforcement apparatus to eliminate political opposition. The enemy is named, dehumanised and eliminated. The pattern is as old as tyranny itself, and it is now being deployed on American soil by American institutions.

The Authoritarian Playbook in Action

What is happening in America is a well-worn path, a playbook for democratic decay that has been executed in country after country, regime after regime. In their seminal work, How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt outline the process (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). It does not begin with a coup d’état, with tanks in the streets and a constitution in flames. It begins at the ballot box. It is a slow, deceptive erosion of democracy from within. Elected autocrats use the very institutions of democracy to kill it: gradually, subtly, and even “legally.”

The authors describe a process in which extremist demagogues emerge (as they do in all societies), but the critical test is whether established political parties work to isolate them or bring them into the mainstream (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). When fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to mainstream the extremist, democracy is imperilled. Once the would-be autocrat gains power, democracies face a second critical test: will the institutions constrain the autocratic leader, or will the leader subvert them? Institutions alone are not enough. Without robust democratic norms — shared understandings about how power should be exercised — constitutional checks and balances become merely political weapons, wielded by those in power against those out of power (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

This is precisely what we are witnessing. The courts are being packed; the media is being bullied into self-censorship or outright collaboration. The rules of politics are being rewritten to favour the ruling power. The murder of Alex Pretti and the operation of ICE’s detention network are the system working as designed by those who have captured it. Because there is no single moment in which the regime obviously ‘crosses the line,’ society’s alarm bells may not ring. Those who denounce the government’s abuses are dismissed as alarmist, as crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

The tragic paradox of the electoral road to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy to kill it. The murders by ICE are the logical endpoint of this process. The veneer of democracy is maintained: elections are held, courts convene, newspapers are published, but its substance is being hollowed out. The deployment of federal agents as a personal army, the creation of false narratives with impunity, and the systematic murder of citizens are the actions of an established authoritarian power that is testing the limits of its control. The fact that the administration can lie about the circumstances of Pretti’s murder, that it can deploy thousands of federal agents to occupy an American city, that it can operate a network of detention centres where people die of deliberate neglect — all with minimal legal consequence — demonstrates that the institutional constraints on executive power have been shattered.

The key enabler of this transition is the militarisation of the police. When law enforcement adopts the weapons, tactics, and mindset of the military, the population ceases to be citizens to be protected and becomes an enemy to be controlled. The language of war is applied to domestic affairs. Protesters become “insurrectionists,” and cities become “battlefields.” The actions in Minneapolis, where federal agents in tactical gear waged war on American citizens, are the ultimate expression of this transformation. The police are no longer of the community; they are an occupying force. This is not a new phenomenon because the militarisation of American police has been underway for decades, but it has now reached its logical outcome: the deployment of federal military-style forces against the civilian population in the service of a political agenda. The boundary between war and law enforcement has been erased.

This militarization serves a specific purpose in the authoritarian playbook. It normalises the use of overwhelming force against civilians. It creates a psychological distance between the enforcer and the enforced upon. It signals to the population that resistance is futile. When federal agents deploy with body armour, assault rifles, and tactical formations to arrest asylum seekers and political activists, the message is clear: you are not citizens with rights; you are enemies of the state. The 3,000 federal officers deployed to Minneapolis were there to occupy territory and suppress dissent. This is the machinery of authoritarian control made visible.

The Death Squad as the Final Form

We must be clear about what we are witnessing. A death squad is not merely a group of armed men who kill, but an instrument of state power, operating outside the law, targeting designated enemies. They do this with the implicit or explicit approval of the regime in power; the defining characteristic is impunity. The death squad operates knowing that it will not be held accountable for its actions. This is precisely what we see with ICE and the federal agents deployed to Minneapolis. They kill, they lie, and they face no consequences. They operate in the open, with the full backing of the executive branch.

The evolution from a law enforcement agency to a death squad is not instantaneous. It is a process of incremental transgression, each step normalising the next. First, the agency is given expanded powers. Then, oversight mechanisms are dismantled. Then, the legal constraints are reinterpreted or ignored. Then, the agency begins targeting political opponents. Then, the killings begin. By the time we reach the final stage, the transformation is complete. The agency is no longer a law enforcement organisation; it is an instrument of terror. This is where America is now.

This trajectory is not unique to America. The Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte witnessed a similar transformation. Police death squads, operating with explicit presidential approval, murdered an estimated 30,000 people in Duterte’s “War on Drugs” (Thompson, 2022). The killings were extrajudicial, the victims were designated enemies, and the perpetrators faced no accountability. Duterte himself is now standing trial at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The death squad members remain unrepentant, walking free on Manila’s streets. This is the future that awaits a nation that allows its law enforcement to become a death squad. This is the endpoint of the authoritarian trajectory. America is not immune to this path; indeed, it is already walking it.

The Illusion of Normalcy and the Fight for America’s Soul

The blood on the streets of Minneapolis has washed away the final veneer of plausible deniability. The debate is no longer about whether a line will be crossed, but about what America must do now that it has been. The state has demonstrated its willingness and its ability to kill its own citizens to enforce its political will, and to lie about it without fear of consequence. This is the point of no return.

There is a profound danger in normalisation, in the public confusion that allows these atrocities to be dismissed as aberrations or isolated incidents. This is the strategy of the electoral autocrat: to make the unthinkable seem normal, to exhaust the public’s capacity for outrage. The condemnations from figures like Senator Patty Murray and Senator Chuck Schumer are vital signs of life in American democratic institutions, but they cannot be the end of the story. Rhetoric must be met with action. The funding for these rogue agencies must be severed. The officials who lie and the agents who kill must be held accountable. The detention centres must be closed. The entire apparatus of federal law enforcement that has been transformed into a tool of political repression must be dismantled.

The transformation of law enforcement into a murdering death squad is the final stage before total authoritarian consolidation. The choice is no longer between left and right, between different visions of American policy. The choice is between democracy and a nascent fascism that is already tasting blood on American streets. The time for warning is over. The time for resistance is now. Every day that passes without decisive action is a day in which the regime consolidates its power, the machinery of death becomes more entrenched, and the possibility of democratic restoration recedes further into the distance. The blood of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, murdered on Minneapolis streets, and the 32 who were killed in ICE custody in 2025 (Singh et al., 2026) cries out for justice. The answer to that call will determine the road America walks.

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References

L&A. (2026) ‘Trump’s Gestapo: ICE and the 53-Day Warning.’ Plague Island, 18 January. Available online: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/trumps-gestapo-ice-and-the-53-day [Accessed 25 January, 2026].

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018) ‘This is how democracies die.’ The Guardian, 21 January. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/jan/21/this-is-how-democracies-die [Accessed 25 January, 2026].

Singh, M., Murphy Marcos, C., & Simmonds, C. (2026, January 4). ‘2025 was ICE’s deadliest year in two decades. Here are the 32 people who died in custody.’ The Guardian, 4 January. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/04/ice-2025-deaths-timeline [Accessed 25 January, 2026].

Walters, J., & Bekiempis, V. (2026) ‘Minneapolis shooting latest: Alex Pretti’s parents say ‘please get the truth out’ after son fatally shot by federal agents.’ 25 January, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/jan/24/minneapolis-shooting-live [Accessed 25 January, 2026].

Wachsmann, N. (2015). KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Thompson, M.R. (2022). Duterte’s violent populism: mass murder, political legitimacy and the “death of development” in the Philippines. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 52(3), 1-20.