Headlines from around the country paused on Minneapolis early this month when a federal immigration agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old protester, during a heightened enforcement operation. The story spread fast because of its gravity and because Minneapolis still carries deep scars from past incidents of police violence.
That attention made sense. A woman was killed by the federal government in her own community. But the way the story was framed made it feel like an exception, a shocking break from the norm. It wasn’t. It was one moment in a long stretch of aggressive enforcement that has contributed to harm, as we were painfully reminded this past weekend, when that tension reached another breaking point.
Alex Jeffrey Pretti was shot and killed during protests that grew directly out of Good’s death. His killing came from months of escalating confrontations between federal agents and the communities they were policing. By the time Pretti was killed, the situation had reached a deadly, no-win level where the presence of enforcement itself seems to guarantee violence.
For months now, ICE has operated with unnecessary force with raids that turn neighborhoods into zones of fear and armed agents showing up at homes and workplaces. The shootings only forced people to look at something that had already been happening in plain sight.
These operations have relied on intimidation as much as enforcement when people are met with weapons and agents who don’t answer questions. Even when no one is killed, the message is clear: compliance is demanded through fear.
What makes this harder to ignore is how routine it seems to have become. Each incident is treated as separate and small enough to move past. However, when these incidents are viewed as part of the same sweep of enforcement, they show a pattern of violence that appears to have been normalized because it targets immigrants.
Minneapolis should be seen as a clear example of a trend, not a lonely headline.
When an agency operates for months with this level of force, harm is not accidental. It is built into the system, and choosing to look away is choosing to accept that this kind of violence is an acceptable cost.
