When federal agents fatally shot the US citizen protesters Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January during the nation’s largest immigration enforcement operation ever, it marked a turning point for the second Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Donald Trump in his second term had sparked outrage and huge protests with federal immigration officers descending en masse on one Democratic-run city after another in what some leaders called militarized “invasions”. Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, then Minneapolis saw lines of masked and armored officers swaggering into town to conduct street arrests, ambushes of day workers waiting in Home Depot car parks for hire, and neighborhood sweeps. Adults and kids were whisked off to detention and protests met with aggressive deployment of chemical spray, teargas, fists and batons. The killings in Minneapolis were the culmination of what appeared to many to be a federal shock force increasingly out of control while being defended by federal leaders – and public opinion broadly turned against this violence.
