2026-01-28 20:30:00
A version of this story was originally published by The Watch, Radley Balko’s Substack publication, to which you can subscribe here.
Conservatives are fond of invoking the American founding, the framers of the Constitution, and the principles that drove the fight for independence. Those invocations have always been selective and opportunistic, but they’ve grown downright farcical as right-wingers contort themselves into knots to defend executive powers explicitly contradicted by the Constitution.
The Republicans’ veneration of the founders is particularly rich at the moment because, of all the abuses England heaped on the colonies, nothing angered them more than the Crown’s deployment of soldiers on city streets—and the streets of Boston in particular. Anger, resentment, and violence simmered in Boston for years before the Boston Massacre in 1770. The Declaration of Independence Trump hangs in his office came six years later, followed by the American Revolution, then the birth of the United States.
The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The founders were also students of history, and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the founders worried about, well, exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.
When I was researching my first book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, I found a remarkable archive of colonial-era newspaper articles published as a collection in 1936 by a historian named Oliver Morton Dickerson. The articles are from A Journal of the Times, a pro-patriot, anti-monarchy paper published in colonial Boston. Dickerson’s published archive, which runs from 1767 to 1769, documents the rising tension as English troops patrolled the streets of Boston.
The accounts are clearly biased in favor of the angry colonists, but they’re also consistent with other contemporaneous accounts of the occupation. They read like a social media feed—if social media had existed at the time. They also depict scenes remarkably similar to those captured in smartphone videos coming out of the Twin Cities.
We’re now at two dead in Minneapolis, with at least five killed by immigration officers overall. We’re at 42 dead since Trump was inaugurated last year if you count the soaring number of deaths in ICE custody, many of which appear to be from either neglect or abuse.
Even as I was working on this post, there were two alarming new developments: First, the Associated Press reported that the administration has been keeping a secret memo authorizing immigration to enter homes without a warrant to arrest people who have final removal orders (the memo itself suggests even a final removal order may not be necessary). This is remarkably similar to the general warrants or “writs of assistance” the British crown issued permitting soldiers to forcibly enter any home they suspected of harboring untaxed imports.
I’ll just state the obvious: If the Fourth Amendment permits the government to tear down your door with nothing more than an administrative warrant, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t exist. The argument that this only affects undocumented immigrants is both legally dubious and utter garbage—they’ve already used this policy to terrorize an American citizen.
The second alarming new incident was the murder of Alex Pretti. And within hours of Pretti’s death, administration officials promptly did what they’ve done after the previous shootings: slandered the victim, brazenly lied about what happened, and prevented local law enforcement from conducting their own investigation. They’ve also refused to release the names of the officers who killed Pretti, publicly praised those officers, and then quickly announced that those officers have been returned to the field.
The latter is a particularly sociopathic attempt to project strength. From the officers’ perspective, it’s a hell of a thing to kill someone. The notion that they’d bounce back within a couple days to go out and round up more immigrants is incomprehensibly callous. It’s also a demonstration of this administration’s contempt for human life and its dearth of basic humanity.
From the perspective of the people of Minneapolis—and the rest of the country—the message is clear: This administration believes that killing protesters is a thing to be celebrated and encouraged. They believe that performatively lying about these killings in the face of directly contradictory video evidence is a display of strength and power. And they believe that the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments forged after the violence in Boston are mere suggestions.
So, here are some excerpts from those newspaper accounts of the siege of Boston, along with comparative examples from the siege of Minneapolis.
Boston:
We now behold Boston surrounded at a time of profound peace, with about 14 ships of war, with springs on their cables, and their broadsides to the town! If the people of England could but look into the town to see the utmost good order and observance of the laws, and that this mighty armament has no other rebellion to subdue than what existed in the brain or letter of the inveterate governor and commissioners…
Minneapolis:
From the complaint the state of Minnesota filed in federal court:
In December 2025, the federal government initiated “Operation Metro Surge,” an unprecedented deployment of federal immigration enforcement agents…to the State of Minnesota, including into the cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Operation Metro Surge has instilled fear among people living, working and visiting the Minneapolis Saint Paul metro area. Thousands of armed and masked DHS agents have stormed the Twin Cities to conduct militarized raids and carry out dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional stops and arrests in sensitive public places, including schools and hospitals—all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.
Defendants claim this unprecedented surge of immigration agents is necessary to fight fraud. In reality, the massive deployment of armed agents to Minnesota bears no connection to that stated objective and instead reflects an alarming escalation of the Trump Administration’s retaliatory actions towards the state.
Defendants claim to have deployed over 2,000 DHS agents to the Twin Cities—a number that greatly exceeds the number of sworn police officers that Minneapolis and Saint Paul have, combined. Operation Metro Surge is, in essence, a federal invasion of the Twin Cities.
This operation is driven by nothing more than the Trump Administration’s desire to punish political opponents and score partisan points—at the direct expense of Plaintiffs’ residents. Defendants’ actions appear designed to provoke community outrage, sow fear, and inflict emotional distress, and they are interfering with the ability of state and local officials to protect and care for their residents. After weeks of escalation, including a DHS agent shooting into an occupied vehicle on December 21, 2025, in Saint Paul, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) agent shot and killed a Minneapolis resident on January 7, 2026.
Other federal courts have already found that Trump’s justifications for sending troops into Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland were based on lies and gross distortions of the reality on the ground.
Boston:
[It] appears that the Commissioners of the Board of Customs had repeatedly complained of being obstructed in the execution of their office.
The proceedings of Council that “what happened on the 10th of June, seems to have sprung wholly from those who complain of it, and that it seems probable, an uproar was hoped for and intended…and there was no occasion for men of war to protect them.”…
[In] their unanimous opinion, the civil power does not need the support of troops; that it is not for his Majesty’s service, nor the peace of this province, that any troops be required…”
Again from the state of Minnesota’s complaint:
Defendants have targeted Minnesota for the latest unprecedented surge not based on any real or legitimate concern for the enforcement of immigration laws or promotion of public safety, but rather in service of Defendants’ goal to score political points. If the Defendants’ true goal was to detain and deport dangerous individuals, they would not accomplish it through what DHS describes as “consensual” (namely: random) encounters with people on the street. And if the Defendants’ true goal was to prioritize detaining and deporting the highest number of immigrants with no legal right to remain in the U.S., they would not be targeting Minnesota for what Defendants refer to as the largest ever immigration operation. Data suggests that just over 1.5% of Minnesota’s total population are noncitizen immigrants without legal status, less than half the national average rate.
On information and belief, that small percentage includes individuals whose presence has been long known to DHS and who have kept regularly scheduled appointments with DHS. Many states have higher rates of reported non-citizens relative to their populations, including Utah, Texas, and Florida. The administration has made no similar efforts to surge federal immigration agent deployments into cities in Utah, Texas, or Florida. Incredibly, the reported non-citizen population of Utah, Florida, and Texas (combined together) is nearly the size of the entire population of Minnesota…
And as for the pretext that the immigration crackdown was about combatting fraud in the Somali community:
[W]hile the “Feeding our Future” fraud case was in no way new, and in fact was a case involving collaboration between state and federal resources to bring perpetrators to justice, President Trump and others in his Administration have repurposed the case in recent months in order to use the pretext of “fraud” concerns as an excuse to engage in all manner of unlawful actions.
Pertinent to this lawsuit, the Trump Administration recognized that the Feeding our Future scheme involved a large number of Somali immigrants, and since then, have used the case to disparage the entire Somali community, and Minnesota’s Democratic politicians and policies.
On November 21, 2025, President Trump posted on social media that Minnesota “is a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity,” and that he was therefore “terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota.” Then, on Thanksgiving Day, President Trump posted a lengthy screed, falsely claiming that “Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone…”
The White House has similarly expressed that the 2,000 deployed DHS agents have been sent to Minnesota to help with “targeted, door-to-door investigations at locations of suspected fraud.” But Defendants’ investigations have not been “targeted.” DHS agents have been conducting raids at job sites and businesses, detaining and deporting individuals while they perform essential work that directly benefits Plaintiffs’ communities.
DHS agents also appear to be conducting general sweeps and detaining people within their path based on their race and ethnicity. Defendants’ conduct further undermines the notion that they are focusing efforts on individuals with violent criminal histories or known targets in fraud investigations—particularly where fraud allegations are primarily investigated via reviewing documents, not by roving groups of DHS agents dressed in riot gear and military fatigues.
Multiple federal courts have found Trump’s pretexts for occupying other cities to be wholly without merit, from the claim that violence from protesters was preventing immigration officers from doing their jobs in Los Angeles, to false claims about protest violence at a detention center in Portland, to Trump’s deranged declaration of war on Chicago and claims that the city was fomenting an “insurrection.”
The above passage from colonial Boston also speculates that England may have wanted a violent reaction from the colonists in order to justify more oppressive measures. That’s an authoritarian scheme that’s as old as authoritarianism.
Here too, there are parallels to the occupation of Minneapolis and other cities. Former ICE and DHS officials say the administration is encouraging the sort of tactics and aggression prohibited by most police agencies, in a way that seems designed to provoke violence and backlash. And of course we know that Trump has been itching for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act since the summer of 2020.
Boston:
Several persons have been taken up within these few days by the soldiery, and confined without warrant
Minneapolis:
Boston:
Gentlemen and ladies coming into town in their carriages were threatened by the guards to have their brains blown out unless they stopped.
Minneapolis:
Amid heated protests in Minneapolis following the killing of Renee Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross, federal agents have repeatedly invoked Good’s death to threaten the lives of observers and demonstrators in Minnesota. In multiple confrontations in the Minneapolis area, agents repeatedly referred to civilians learning their lesson—in an apparent nod to the use of deadly force in Ross’s killing.
Two US citizens detained by immigration officers said one agent told them, “You guys have got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” Another woman, a former Marine who says an ICE agent rammed her car, says agents warned, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch.”
We also now know that Alex Pretti was coming to the aid of a woman who had been assaulted by an immigration officer when he was assaulted, tackled, disarmed, and shot. (You can see the video evidence here.) His reported last words: “Are you okay?”
Boston:
At about noon the inhabitants were greatly alarmed with the news that the sheriff, accompanied by the soldiery, had forced an entry sword in hand . . . Mr. Brown one of the inhabitants, in attempting to disarm him, received several thrusts in his cloaths, the sheriff’s deputy entered with him; he then gave possession of the cellar to some of the troops: A large number of soldiers immediately entered the yard, and were placed as centinels and guards at all the doors of the house, and all persons were forbid from going in and out of the same, or even coming into the yard. The plan of operation being as it is said to terrify or starve the occupants out of their dwellings.
The sheriff refused giving Mr. Brown a copy of his warrant or orders for
this doing…
A federal judge in Minnesota on Thursday ordered the release of a Liberian man four days after heavily armed immigration agents broke into his home using a battering ram and arrested him. US District Judge Jeffrey Bryan said in his ruling that the agents violated Garrison Gibson’s Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure. “To arrest him, Respondents forcibly entered Garrison G.’s home without his consent and without a judicial warrant,” he said.
Boston:
This night the sheriff procured guards of soldiers to be placed at his house for his protection, a measure that must render him still more ridiculous in the eyes of the people.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is one of a handful of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members who are hiding out on military bases so they don’t have to be exposed to the public that hates them. The Atlantic reported Thursday that Miller, his wife, and their two children have relocated out of their home north of Arlington, Virginia, to a US military base after local activists embarked on a campaign to shame Miller for his role leading Trump’s fascistic crime and immigration crackdown.
Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio are also reported to now be living on military bases.
Boston:
[T]here was a general appearance of the troops in the Common, who went through their firings, evolutions, etc. in a manner pleasing to the general…The glitter of the arms and bayonets, and this hostile appearance of troops in a time of profound peace, made most of the spectators very serious, and reminded me of what a late traveller relates in his account of Turkey, “That being present on a day when the Grand Signior was passing from his palace to his mosque, and observing that the Janissaries stood without their arms, and with their hands across, only bowed as the Sultan passed; he was led thereby to ask a captain of those guards why they had no arms? Arms said he, thou infidel, they are for our ENEMIES; we govern our subjects with the LAW.
This passage expresses frustration at the British troop’s performative shows of force. We saw that early on in Los Angeles, when Border Patrol conducted a showy, militarized raid on a mostly empty public park to intimidate an immigrant neighborhood.
Minneapolis:
We’ve also seen this in Minneapolis, with the now-recalled Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino strutting through city neighborhoods bedecked in his fashiest trench, baiting local residents into confrontations. Last week he and his entourage showed up at gas stations, always with a garish show of force to draw angry crowds. DHS then put out a indignant statement complaining that the city’s “agitators” won’t even led immigration officers urinate in peace.
Boston:
Lord Bottetourts, ordered [the soldiers] to their several stations in the colonies, in order to exert their whole influence to carry down the late regulations. In pursuance of this ministerial plan of policy, we now behold a standing army and swarms of crown officers, placemen, pensioners and expectants, co-operating in order to subdue Americans to the yoke.
Minneapolis:
Boston:
The inhabitants of this town have been of late greatly insulted and abused by some of the officers and soldiers, several have been assaulted on frivolous pretences, and put under guard without any lawful warrant for so doing. A physician of the town walking the streets the other evening, was jostled by an officer, when a scuffle ensued, he was afterwards met by the same officer in company with another, both as yet unknown, who repeated his blows, and as is supposed gave him a stroke with a pistol, which so wounded him as to endanger his life.
Boston:
Here Americans you may behold some of the first fruits springing up from that root of bitterness a standing army. Troops are quartered upon us in a time of peace, on pretence of preserving order in a town that was as orderly before their arrival as any one large town in the whole extent of his Majesty’s dominions; and a little time will discover whether we are to be governed by the [military] or the common law of the land.
Minneapolis:
Boston:
The unhappy consequences of quartering troops in this town, daily visible in the profaneness, Sabbath breaking, drunkenness, and other debaucheries and immoralities, may lead us to conclude, that our enemies are waging war with the morals as well as the rights and privileges of the poor inhabitants.
Minneapolis:
Boston:
After noting that local grand juries had attempted to indict several soldiers for “detentions, assaults, and robberies” on Boston residents, the paper lamented that servants of the British crown refused to honor the indictments.
Our young King’s Attorney, refused…alleging as it is said, that “If a soldier should with his fixed bayonet at the breast of an inhabitant stop and detain him two hours, it would not in law be adjudged an assault.” It is hoped a court and jury will otherwise determine it, and that it will no longer be a doubt even in the minds of the most sceptical that the law of the land is to yield to the maxims of a meer economy of the military, in civil communities.
Minneapolis:
Here’s Stephen Miller, incorrectly telling ICE soldiers that they have complete immunity from prosecution. He said this in a Fox News appearance last fall.
Miller’s admonition was then amplified by the Department of Homeland Security after the killing of Renee Good:
Vice President JD Vance has also wrongly claimed that federal immigration officers have “absolute immunity” from prosecution.
Boston:
Last Wednesday night several officers of the army, sallied out of a house in King Street, and meeting with one of the inhabitants of the town, they beat and wounded him very cruelly
Minneapolis:
Boston:
Abuses are daily offered some one or another of the inhabitants, who are generally for seeking redress in a legal way; and we cannot but hope that those of the military, who oppose themselves to the law of the land, will find the predictions of a great lawyer verified; “that in so doing, they gnaw a file which will break their teeth.”
Minneapolis:
Boston:
[S]ix more regiments may be soon expected from Ireland, and another from Halifax. If pensions of £10,000 sterling per annum had been settled upon the [public], rather than making so unnecessary a military parade, it would have been a vast saving to the nation.
Minneapolis:
Boston:
The old honest music master was roughly handled by one of those sons of Mars; he was actually in danger of being throttled, but timously rescued by one who soon threw the officer on lower ground than he at first stood upon; the inoffensive keeper of the house for the Commissioners, presuming to hint a disapprobation of such proceedings, was, by an officer, with a drawn sword, dragged about the floor, by the hair of his head, and his honest Abigail, who in a fright, made her appearance without a head dress, was very lucky in escaping her poor husband’s fate. Whether our Governor will so resent this behaviour of the military, as to collect affidavits, and make it a subject of representation to the Crown cannot as yet be determined…
Minneapolis:
Boston:
As some sailors were passing near Mr. Justice Ruddock’s house, the other night, with a woman in company, they were met by a number of soldiers…this soon brought on a battle in which the sailors were much bruised, and a young man of the town, who was only a spectator, received a considerable wound on his head; a great cry of murder, brought out the justice, and his son, into the street; when the former who is a gentleman of spirit, immediately laid his hands upon two of the assailants
Minneapolis:
Boston:
[H]e was presently surrounded with thirty or forty soldiers, who had their bayonets in their hands…they then made at him with their fists and bayonets; when he received such blows as obliged him to seek his safety by flight; they struck down a young woman at his door holding out a candle, and followed him and son into the entry-way of his house with their bayonets, uttering the most profane & abusive language, and swearing they would be the death of them both…
Federal immigration agents bashed open a door and detained a US citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, according to his family and videos reviewed by the Associated Press.
ChongLy “Scott” Thao told the AP that his daughter-in-law alerted him on Sunday afternoon that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were banging at the door of his residence in St. Paul. He told her not to open it. Masked agents then forced their way in and pointed guns at the family, yelling at them, Thao recalled. “I was shaking,” he said. “They didn’t show any warrant; they just broke down the door.”
DHS would later claim that Thao was living with two convicted sex offenders. That still would not have justified a warrantless raid on his home. But it was also a lie. Thao lived alone. The man the agents were looking for, it turned out, was already in prison.
Boston:
The other evening a petty officer of one of the ships of war, who had knocked down a married woman of this town as she was quietly passing the streets, was bro’t before him; and being reproved for his indecent speech & behaviour, on trial, he swore that he would run his jack-knife thro’ the magistrates heart, whereupon the justice committed him to goal: soon after as several fishermen were coming out of a tavern in the same part of the town, they were assaulted by a corporal and some soldiers, who wounded one of the fishermen very grievously…
Minneapolis:
Boston:
Here’s some pushback in the form of a sardonic letter to the editor written by a resident of the city.
“I am glad the troops are come and, believe their arrival will be for the health of this country. There is a great deal of oratory in the glitter of arms; and a few ships of war contain all the arts of persuasion. A cannon ball carries with it, solid and weighty arguments; and a thrust in the side with a bayonet, will give conviction in a moment…and as we can’t be persuaded into such a wholsome practice by lenitive and moderate means, we must be brought to the exercise of reason by vigorous measures, and the point of the bayonet becomes necessary to fix the conviction. Preparations of steel and surgical instruments, when lenitives fail, often times produce wonderful effects, and are frequently used in opening the eyes of the blind. If we were not a dull stupid race of mortals, and had seasonably relinquished the trade to Great-Britain, the operation of cutlary ware, and the rhetoric of red coats, would be of no service; but as matters now stand, the eyes of many want couching, and these surgical operations must take off the film, and bring us to our senses, and to measures that are so confessedly for our interest.”
Minneapolis:
Boston:
A young woman lately passing thro’ Long Lane, was stopped and very ill treated by some soldiers, the cry of the person assaulted, brought out another woman into the street, who for daring to expostulate with the ruffians, received a stroke from one of them, and would probably have been further abused, had not her husband, and some other men came up timely to her assistance; the soldiers were then soon beat off and the young woman whom they had seiz’d as their prey, rescued.
Minneapolis:
Boston:
A girl at New-Boston, was lately knock’d down and abused by soldiers for not consenting to their beastly proposal; a gentleman hearing the cry of murder, ran to her assistance, one of the villains, immediately made off, the other the gentleman seiz’d, tho’ upon his stiffly denying the fact, and charging it upon the other soldier, the gentleman suffered him to depart; presently after the same men assaulted a young gentleman of character supposing him to be the person who had rescued the girl from their violence; their oaths, and insults brought several people out of their houses, upon which the soldiers made off, but return’d a few minutes after with a number of others, and a sergeant at their head, calling out a riot! A riot! They then drew their bayonets upon the people, and with many oaths and execrations, threatening to confine them in the barracks if they did not immediately disperse, accordingly, they began to put their threats in execution by seizing one of the company and drag’d him towards the barracks, but the rest being resolute, the soldiers were obliged to quit him; upon which the whole dispersed.
Minneapolis:
Boston:
Last evening after church service, there was a considerable gathering of children and servants, near the Town House, drawn by the music of the fife, &c. which is again heard on the Sabbath, to the great concern of the sober and thoughtful inhabitants; some of those youth’s having behaved so as to displease the officer, orders were given the guard to clear the parade; they marched up with bayonets presented—one of the lads was pursued by a soldier to some distance, who made a thrust with his bayonet, which passed thro’ his coat, and had he not thrown himself on the ground that instant, its thought he would be run thro’ the body…
Minneapolis:
Liam was detained as he returned home from preschool The ICE agent in the photo then used him as bait to lure his father out of their home, after which both were arrested and sent to a detention center in Texas.
Here is a photo of teenage girl confronted and detained by Border Patrol:
The girl and another teenager riding with her were arrested after what was initially described as a “collision” with immigration officials. Here’s what that collision looked like:
A journalist saw the incident, and reported that the immigration agents struck the girl’s vehicle, as the photo suggests, and not the other way around. It isn’t clear why the two were arrested. (Even if the girl caused the accident, a traffic violation is not a federal crime.) The journalist says the girl handed a US passport to federal officials. Details about her passenger are unclear.
What we do know is that there have now been multiple incidents in which ICE, Border Patrol, and DHS have been caught lying after agents rammed into the cars of protesters, observers, and people they suspect of being undocumented, then arrested the occupants of those vehicles on the lie that they intentionally assaulted the officers with their vehicles.
Boston:
Here, A Journal of the Times article explains why it decided to publish the names of Boston merchants who were cooperating with the Crown…
Fellow Citizens and Countrymen: Inasmuch, as some persons among us have in a case of the utmost importance, preferr’d their own supposed private advantage to the welfare and freedom of America, it is highly proper you should know who they are, who have at this critical time sordidly detach’d themselves from the public interest. May this disgraceful, but necessary, publication of their names, lead them to reflect on the baseness of their crime; and when they find themselves slighted and shunned by their neighbours and acquaintance; when their shops are deserted, and they feel their fortunes miserably impaired by prosecuting the plan of purblind avarice; when their guilty consciences have rendered this life insupportable; may they seriously attend to the concerns of another: And altho’ they must suffer the punishment due to their parricide in this world, may a humble and sincere repentance open the way to their forgiveness in the next.
The identities of thousands of federal employees working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol have been leaked online, raising safety concerns.
According to a report from The Independent, the leak includes the identities of about 4,500 federal employees working with ICE, including 2,000 agents. They were shared with the website The ICE List, which calls itself a “journalistic project” meant to share information to “hold ICE members legally accountable.”
The site, which accepts user-generated data, includes photos and descriptions, and is indexed by state. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who is included on the site, told NewsNation that the leak “would constitute 4,500 felonies.”
Boston:
[A] tradesman in an alley was without the least provocation knocked down by a grenadier of the 29th Regiment; he soon came to himself, and having recovered his cane, was quietly walking off; but soon perceived was followed by the same soldier, who he called upon to stand back, but this not being regarded he made so good a use of his cane, as to protect himself from any further abuse for that time; [the soldier] dared to assault & wound him with his bayonet, in a most cruel manner, a number of soldiers looking on, and had it not been for the timely assistance of some of the inhabitants passing by at that time, he would probably have been murdered: This person was confined to his house a considerable time, by means of the wounds received.
Minneapolis:
Boston:
The soldier had a bill found against him by the grand jury, but this being suspected before it was given in, the criminal deserted, or rather was concealed for a time, and then, as is supposed, conveyed away, as others had been before him, out of the reach of the law…
Gun-toting Feds swarmed the home of the ICE agent who fatally shot protester Renee Good on Friday morning, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal.
A Special Response Team arrived at the suburban Minneapolis home, where Jon Ross, 43, lives with his wife and children, early this morning.
Daily Mail images captured half a dozen Federal officers wearing masks and balaclavas, one carrying pepper spray and another wielding an assault rifle.
They entered the smart five-bed home before carrying out five large plastic crates, a computer tower and a stack of picture frames.
Also:
After Good’s death on Wednesday, the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension announced that they would be investigating Good’s killing in tandem with the FBI. But on Thursday, Superintendent Drew Evans said he’d been told that the FBI would be the sole investigator and that the state agency had “reluctantly withdrawn” from the investigation.
“The BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation,” Evans said. “Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands.”
We’ve also learned that the FBI agents who initially began investigating Good’s death recommended opening a civil rights investigation. That was then vetoed by the administration, which ordered a criminal investigation of Good’s wife instead. Six federal prosecutors resigned, as did the FBI agent.
I expect we’ll see similar stories about Alex Pretti in the days ahead.
Boston:
A country butcher who frequents the market, having been in discourse with a grenadier of the 14th Regiment, who he said had before abused him, thought proper to offer such verbal resentment as led the soldier to give him a blow, which felled the butcher to the ground, and left other proofs of his violence. The assaulter was had before Mr. Justice Quincy, convicted and fined, and upon refusing to make payment, was ordered to [jail]; but rescued out of the hands of the constable, by a number of armed soldiers, in the sight of the justice, when they carried their rescued comrade, in triumph, thro’ the main street to his barracks, flourishing their naked cutlasses, giving out that they had good support in what they were doing, and that they defied all opposition.
Minneapolis:
After killing Renee Good, DHS and Trump administration officials—including Trump himself—celebrated Jonathan Ross, Good’s killer, as a hero.
Meanwhile, immigration agents teargassed and flash-banged a car with six children inside, sending two to the hospital, including six-month-old who had temporarily stopped breathing. After the incident made national news, DHS posted this:
The family was driving home from a basketball game.
I’ll sum up with this:
The day before the murder of Alex Pretti, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Minnesotans braved below-zero temperatures to protest and demand that Trump end his occupation of Minneapolis. Their resolve, bravery, refusal to abandon their neighbors, and defiance of a tyrannical federal government is the best of us.
Our founding is fraught with moral complexities. But for all its faults if the American experiment survives all of this, it will be because of the valor and courage of the people of Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Memphis, Charlotte, and Portland—and others like them all over the country.
I also can’t help but admire their restraint. This administration has given them every reason to lash out with violence. They haven’t. Not yet. Perhaps that’s in part because, as noted, they know that this is exactly what Trump, Vance, Miller and the other ghouls in charge want.
This administration wants an excuse to declare war on our cities. This administration should probably learn our history.
2026-01-28 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
With community opposition growing, data center backers are going on a full-scale public relations blitz. Around Christmas in Virginia, which boasts the highest concentration of data centers in the country, one advertisement seemed to air nonstop. “Virginia’s data centers are…investing billions in clean energy,” a voiceover intoned over sweeping shots of shiny solar panels. “Creating good-paying jobs”—cue men in yellow safety vests and hard hats—“and building a better energy future.”
The ad was sponsored by Virginia Connects, an industry-affiliated group that spent at least $700,000 on digital marketing in the state in fiscal year 2024. The spot emphasized that data centers are paying their own energy costs—framing this as a buffer that might help lower residential bills—and portrayed the facilities as engines of local job creation.
Meta says it has supported “400+ operational jobs” in Altoona. But the local casino employs nearly 1,000 residents.
The reality is murkier. Although industry groups claim that each new data center creates “dozens to hundreds” of “high-wage, high-skill jobs,” some researchers say data centers generate far fewer jobs than other industries, such as manufacturing and warehousing. Greg LeRoy, the founder of the research and advocacy group Good Jobs First, said that in his first major study of data center jobs nine years ago, he found that developers pocketed well over $1 million in state subsidies for every permanent job they created. With the rise of hyperscalers, LeRoy said, that number is “still very much in the ballpark.”
Other experts reflect that finding. A 2025 brief from University of Michigan researchers put it bluntly: “Data centers do not bring high-paying tech jobs to local communities.” A recent analysis from Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit tracking corporate overreach, found that in Virginia, the investment required to create a permanent data center job was nearly 100 times higher than what was required to create comparable jobs in other industries.
“Data centers are the extreme of hyper-capital intensity in manufacturing,” LeRoy said. “Once they’re built, the number of people monitoring them is really small.” Contractors may be called in if something breaks, and equipment is replaced every few years. “But that’s not permanent labor,” he said.
Jon Hukill, a spokesperson for the Data Center Coalition, the industry lobbying group that established Virginia Connects in 2024, said that the industry “is committed to paying its full cost of service for the energy it uses” and is trying to “meet this moment in a way that supports both data center development and an affordable, reliable electricity grid for all customers.” Nationally, Hukill said, the industry “supported 4.7 million jobs and contributed $162 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2023.”
Dozens of community groups across the country have mobilized against data center buildout, citing fears that the facilities will drain water supplies, overwhelm electric grids, and pollute the air around them. According to Data Center Watch, a project run by AI security company 10a Labs, nearly 200 community groups are currently active, and blocked or delayed 20 data center projects representing $98 billion of potential investment between April and June 2025 alone.
The backlash has exposed a growing image problem for the AI industry. “Too often, we’re portrayed as energy-hungry, water-intensive, and environmentally damaging,” data center marketer Steve Lim recently wrote. That narrative, he argued, “misrepresents our role in society and potentially hinders our ability to grow.” In response, the industry is stepping up its messaging.
The data center ads reminded one activist of cigarette ads she saw decades ago touting the health benefits of smoking.
Some developers, like Starwood Digital Ventures in Delaware, are turning to Facebook ads to appeal to residents. Its ads make the case that data center development might help keep property taxes low, bring jobs to Delaware, and protect the integrity of nearby wetlands. According to reporting from Spotlight Delaware, the company has also boasted that it will create three times as many jobs as it initially told local officials.
Nationally, Meta has spent months running TV spots showcasing data center work as a viable replacement for lost industrial and farming jobs. One advertisement spotlights the small city of Altoona, Iowa. “I grew up in Altoona, and I wanted my kids to be able to do the same,” a voice narrates over softly-lit scenes of small-town Americana: a Route 66 diner, a farm, and a water tower. “So, when work started to slow down, we looked for new opportunities…and we welcomed Meta, which opened a data center in our town. Now, we’re bringing jobs here—for us, and for our next generation.”
The advertisement ends with a promise superimposed over images of a football game: “Meta is investing $600 billion in American infrastructure and jobs.”
In reality, Altoona’s data center is a hulking, windowless, warehouse complex that broke ground in 2013, long before the current data center boom. Altoona is not quite the beleaguered farm town Meta’s advertisements portray, but a suburb of 19,000, roughly 16 minutes from downtown Des Moines, the most populous city in Iowa. Meta says it has supported “400+ operational jobs” in Altoona. In comparison, the local casino employs nearly 1,000 residents, according to the local economic development agency.
Ultimately, those details may not matter much to the ad’s intended audience. As Politico reported, the advertisement may have been targeted at policymakers on the coasts more than the residents of towns like Altoona. Meta has spent at least $5 million airing the spot in places like Sacramento and Washington, DC.
The community backlash has also made data centers a political flashpoint. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger won November’s gubernatorial election in part on promises to regulate the industry and make developers pay their “fair share” of the electricity they use. State lawmakers also considered 30 bills attempting to regulate data centers. In response to concerns about rising electricity prices, Virginia regulators approved a new rate structure for AI data centers and other large electricity users. The changes, which will take effect in 2027, are designed to protect household customers from costs associated with data center expansion.
These developments may only encourage companies to spend more on image-building. In Virginia’s Data Center Alley, the ads show no sign of stopping. Elena Schlossberg, an anti-data-center activist based in Prince William County, says her mailbox has been flooded with fliers from Virginia Connects for the past eight months.
The promises of lower electric bills, good jobs, and climate responsibility, she said, remind her of cigarette ads she saw decades ago touting the health benefits of smoking. But Schlossberg isn’t sure the marketing is going to work. One recent poll showed that 73 percent of Virginians blame data centers for their rising electricity costs.
“There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube,” she said. “People already know we’re still covering their costs. People know that.”
2026-01-28 20:30:00
For nearly two months, the Trump administration has unleashed immigration officers on the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul in a siege of increasing cruelty and violence. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers are dragging citizens from their homes, deploying five-year-olds as bait, arresting demonstrators, and using pepper spray on protesters like bug repellent at a barbecue. They have shot three people, including the executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
“The federal government is attempting to bend the state’s will to its own—and that is not allowed under the Constitution.”
The immorality of the moment is clear. But the images of uninhibited brutality visited by federal law enforcement officers onto a metropolis also run counter to our Constitution—both its restrictions on federal power and the freedoms it is meant to protect. Simply put, the violence inflicted by ICE doesn’t just feel wrong: it is a violation of our basic rights, ones that hold the line between democracy on one side and fascism and dictatorship on the other. In Minnesota, we’re plainly seeing why these rights underpin our system of government.
Despite the rampant violations carried out by armed agents of the state, they are unlikely to see much justice in the courts. That’s because in recent decades, the Supreme Court has limited people’s ability to sue individual federal officers who violate their rights. Such suits were accepted and even common in the 19th century. But in sad irony, the same Supreme Court justices who say it’s important to continue the country’s earliest legal traditions have made them all but impossible. “They’ve made it incredibly difficult to sue federal officers for abuse of power, no matter how egregious,” says David Gans, a scholar at the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive nonprofit law firm.
But some avenues remain to stopping the violence and obtaining legal relief. Namely, a federal judge can order the government to stop illegal behavior, and there are multiple lawsuits mounting constitutional challenges to both ICE’s tactics and the entire invasion, dubbed Operation Metro Surge, more broadly. As those suits move forward, here is a list of the five amendments the Trump administration has effectively suspended in Minnesota.
The First Amendment
The First Amendment protects the rights to speak freely, to assemble, and to protest. This includes the right to observe federal government action and to protest against it. Crucially for Minnesota, this includes a right that CPB and ICE really don’t like: the right to record their actions. The First Amendment also protects against government retaliation for these acts—these rights would be meaningless if the government could chill them through retaliation. The government cannot target and punish you because of your views or other First Amendment-protected actions.
But under Trump, it’s impossible to count the ways in which all these rights have been violated every day in Minnesota, not to mention around the country. Obstructing law enforcement is not a protected act, but every video of an ICE officer arresting or pepper spraying an observer who is not obstructing them serves as documented evidence of unconstitutional retaliation for a protected act. Every time an officer physically assaults or detains someone who is simply observing or protesting, that’s a violation of the First Amendment.
This isn’t just theoretical. In a case filed by a group of Twin Cities observers demanding relief from ICE’s tactics, federal Judge Kate Menendez found this month that ICE likely violated the First Amendment rights of two plaintiffs when agents arrested them in what appeared to be retaliation for watching them. Menendez likewise found that a third plaintiff likely suffered unconstitutional retaliation for protected activity when an ICE officer pepper sprayed him as he stood aside a road. Menendez’s opinion provides a glimpse of how ICE is using chemical agents to chill Minnesotans’ free speech: “In one instance, agents drove slowly past, opened the car door, and ‘sprayed [a bystander] directly’ as the bystander ‘held their arms out’ and ‘was standing on the edge of the road.’ As the bystander moved away from the car, ‘another agent on foot came behind them and sprayed them directly in the face again,’ before spraying ‘into the small crowd.’” Menendez issued an injunction against against arrests and pepper spraying for people peacefully observing, but, in a move that shows the limits of local judges’ ability to intervene, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals soon blocked the order.
Reports from the Twin Cities show that the reprisals can sometimes be petty, but no less unconstitutional. One woman who followed a CBP vehicle in her car was stopped by an officer who warned that he was using facial recognition software and knew who she was. Three days later, the Department of Homeland Security revoked the woman’s Global Entry and TSA PreCheck. The government cannot revoke a privilege as punishment for exercising First Amendment rights. A local toy store says DHS initiated an audit of employment and payroll records mere hours after the owner’s daughter criticized ICE to the media. (DHS denies that the investigation of a store with just five part-time employees is tied to her critical comments.)
More broadly, every resident of the Twin Cities has had their First Amendment rights violated. That’s because this entire operation appears to be reprisal against Democratic cities in a Democrat-led state for its collective choice not to vote for Donald Trump in the last three elections. “I won Minnesota three times and I didn’t get credit for it,” Trump said this month when asked about his federal occupation. “That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. We have many crooked states.”
“The government doesn’t have a right to go into your house without your consent unless they have a warrant.”
A lawsuit seeking the end of ICE’s operation brought by the state of Minnesota and the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis references these comments: “President Trump did not win the majority of votes cast in Minnesota in 2016, 2020, or 2024. His claims to the contrary, in the context of being asked to explain actions his administration is taking in Minnesota, suggests a desire to punish the State for voting for his opponents.” It further points out that in his first year back in office, Trump has only targeted Democratic cities with surges of federal officers and National Guard troops, and that he is attempting to withhold billions in federal dollars from Democratic states as well. Moreover, Minnesota is not a logical site of the nation’s largest immigration enforcement operation: a mere 1.5 percent of its population is undocumented, many of whom are already known to DHS. An ulterior motive is obvious.
On Sunday, Minnesota and the Twin Cities bolstered their lawsuit’s argument by adding a Saturday letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to the case’s record, which offered to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota” if the state hands over to the feds, among other databases, its voter rolls. There’s no rational way to make sense of violence and havoc the Trump administration is inflicting on the Twin Cities as normal immigration enforcement; it only makes sense as punishment upon the entire population for its political preferences. And that’s unconstitutional First Amendment retaliation.
The Fourth Amendment
The Fourth Amendment protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures. It would be impossible to list every way federal officials have violated this in Minnesota.
ChongLy Thao, a US citizen, was arrested when ICE broke down his door and entered his home with guns drawn. They refused to look at his identification and dragged him out of his house in underwear, through the snow, and whisked him away. When they realized he was a citizen an hour or two later, they returned him. This is a textbook example of unconstitutional behavior. If you want to breakdown a door, you need a warrant signed by a judge.
“The government doesn’t have a right to go into your house without your consent unless they have a warrant from a judge,” says Jill Hasday, a constitutional law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.
And yet, DHS has been instructing ICE officers that they can invade people’s homes without a judicial warrant. Last week, the AP reported on a secret DHS memo, closely held and only shown to a small number of high-ranking officials, justifying that new policy. This violates the Fourth Amendment and Supreme Court precedent—which is probably why it took a whistleblower for the public to find out about it.
Unreasonable traffic stops are also banned by the Fourth Amendment. In the case brought by the ICE observers, Judge Menendez found ICE likely violated the Fourth Amendment rights of three plaintiffs when officers stopped their cars after they followed ICE vehicles.
Then there are the Kavanaugh Stops, stops based on a person’s race or ethnicity and named for Justice Brett Kavanaugh because he defended the use of race in ICE stops in a September opinion. There are innumerable accounts of people being detained by ICE for no apparent reason but the color of their skin, including in Minnesota. In a press conference, a local police chief shared that nonwhite off-duty officers were being pulled over by ICE. The result is that nonwhite citizens and legal residents are afraid to leave their homes.
The ceaseless violence ICE uses on both immigrants and protesters also violates the Fourth Amendment.
ICE and CBP are also testing the boundaries of the Fourth Amendment with their use of facial recognition software and data to track people’s locations, learn their identities, addresses, and other key information about them. According to 404 Media, ICE contends that they can circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement if they buy such data from third party companies rather than request it from, for example, AT&T or Verizon. Unless the courts or Congress address this issue, the government will find ever more dystopian ways to use for-profit surveillance tools to circumvent people’s constitutional rights.
The ceaseless violence ICE uses in its encounters with both immigrants and protesters also violates the Fourth Amendment. ICE is smashing windows to pull people out of cars and kneeling on their necks and backs when they detain them, among other violent tactics. “From the Supreme Court’s view, when the police seize you or your property and do so violently, that’s a Fourth Amendment problem where it’s excessive and disproportionate to law enforcement need,” says Gans. “What all the videos circulating show is just a shocking level of violence being meted out that far exceeds any law enforcement interest.”
This would include the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The officers who pulled the triggers could be charged as murderers under state or federal criminal law, though the Trump administration certainly won’t do that. But constitutionally, explains Gans, these killing of US citizens who did not agree with ICE’s mission would be treated as “an unreasonable use of deadly force” under the Fourth Amendment.
The Fifth Amendment
The Fifth Amendment protects against deprivation of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has held that this includes an equal protection guarantee as well. The result is that the Fifth Amendment would also be implicated in Kavanaugh Stops, which are both unreasonable searches and seizures and an equal protection violation.
The Tenth Amendment
The final amendment in the original Bill of Rights stipulates that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” It is, essentially, a guarantee of state sovereignty in areas not given to the federal government. Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul argue in their suit fighting ICE’s deployment that Operation Metro Surge violates the 10th Amendment, as the federal government has effectively invaded the Twin Cities in order to coerce the state to turn over voter data and to force cooperation with immigration enforcement that the state is not required to give. “They’re trying to hijack the state’s legislative process,” a lawyer with the Minnesota Attorney General’s office told Menendez during a Monday hearing. “They’re trying to get us to turn over voter rolls. What does that have to do [with immigration?] The federal government is attempting to bend the state’s will to its own—and that is not allowed under the Constitution.”
Menendez hasn’t issued a ruling, and it’s unclear if she will accept 10th Amendment arguments. But the federal government does seem to be signaling it is willing to exit Minneapolis in exchange for the surrender ofkey aspects of the state’s sovereignty.
The Fourteenth Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment, enacted in 1868, guarantees that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” As the text says, this was aimed at the states in the aftermath of the Civil War, but the Supreme Court has applied much of its protections to the federal government. The drafters of the 14th Amendment were trying to eradicate state-sponsored violence against Black people—police invading their homes, stealing their property, and hunting them down for violent treatment and even massacre—that have shocking parallels to what is happening to people of color in Minnesota today.
“One of the lessons that you draw from the 14th Amendment is, if you can’t be physically secure in your community, you can’t really enjoy liberty and freedom and all the promises the Constitution provides,” explains Gans. “As we see ICE terrorizing these communities, that lesson is brought home in a really strong way.”
Beyond explicit constitutional violations, the suit brought by Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul alleges a final breach of our founding document. “There is also a ‘fundamental principle of equal sovereignty’ among States,’” the plaintiffs state. “The Supreme Court has long recognized that our nation ‘was and is a nation of States, equal in power, dignity, and authority,’ and that this ‘constitutional equality of the States is essential to the harmonious operation of the scheme upon which the Republic was organized.’”
There’s a deep irony in this allegation. It quotes from Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 decision in which Chief Justice John Roberts rehabilitated the “principle of equal sovereignty” to strike down the 1965 Voting Rights Act requirement that states and other jurisdictions with a history of suppression have changes to voting laws cleared by the Department of Justice. Congress violated this principle because, according to Roberts, the selection of states was no longer tethered to conditions on the ground. Roberts, who has a long history of attacking the VRA, was incorrect about the existing conditions, but held that Congress needed a significant and current justification in order to treat states differently.
Roberts created the equal sovereignty principle for modern times, but its origins actually lie in the court’s infamous Dred Scott decision finding that Black people could never be citizens. In that case, Chief Justice Roger Taney found that empowering Black people as citizens in free states would overrule the equal sovereignty of slave states that denied Black people political power.
Today, Minnesota invokes the idea for opposite purposes: Rather than to stymie the freedom of one race, they seek to wield it to protect nonwhite people. Roberts’ rehabilitation of the equal sovereignty principle remains an untested weapon against Trump’s war on Democratic states. Its success may turn on whether courts will question Trump’s allegations of corruption against Democratic states. It’s certainly not the use Taney or even Roberts envisioned for a principle that many legal scholars see as both bogus and tainted with racial animus. But Roberts breathed fresh life into it nearly 13 years ago, and now the courts—and possibly Roberts himself—are being asked if they really mean it.
2026-01-28 19:00:00
On January 24, a US Border Patrol agent shot and killed 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis after he was held down by multiple federal agents. The Trump administration alleged that Pretti threatened agents with a gun. But videos appear to show Pretti, who was carrying a licensed handgun, holding only his phone in his hand when he was tackled and agents disarming Pretti before he was shot and killed.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.The Trump administration has since signaled that it’s scaling back the federal immigration operation in the city. Multiple news outlets are reporting that Gregory Bovino, the top US Border Patrol official, has been demoted and will leave. Tom Homan, the White House border czar, is now expected to manage immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, according to multiple reports.
Following Pretti’s death, thousands of protesters once again flooded the streets of Minneapolis. One of them was Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who once routinely lobbied legislators to adopt a Christian conservative agenda and worked to persuade Supreme Court justices to rule in favor of the religious right. But Schenck began doubting the movement and his own role in it—especially once President Donald Trump came to power. Since then, he’s made a moral and political 180 and is now working to undo his decades of activism that he believes helped lead to this moment.
On this week’s More To The Story, Schenck sits down with host Al Letson to talk about what led him to the streets of Minneapolis, his emotional visit to Renée Good’s memorial, and why he’s become “guardedly optimistic” about the ultimate direction of this current political moment in America.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
2026-01-28 06:15:25
Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol “commander-at-large” who terrorized people across America in his Nazi-like trench coat, is being put out to pasture by President Donald Trump. The cause was Bovino’s stupidity, not his cruelty.
After his Border Patrol agents disarmed and killed Alex Pretti in broad daylight on Saturday, Bovino shamelessly slandered the 37-year-old nurse only to have his lies immediately and irrefutably exposed by numerous videos of the killing.
Instead of leading his band of masked agents from city to city, Bovino is now returning to his original role as the head of California’s not particularly busy El Centro border sector. The Atlantic reports that the 55-year-old is expected to soon retire. In place of Bovino, Trump has sent his border “czar” and first-term Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan to Minneapolis. Unlike Bovino, who had an unusual arrangement in which he reported to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem instead of his immediate supervisors, Trump has said that Homan will answer directly to him.
It is worth stressing what Bovino got away with before Trump shoved him aside. In Los Angeles, Bovino and his gang occupied the city like an invading army, marching through MacArthur Park as a public relations stunt and pulling people off the street in obvious spasms of racial profiling that led to Trump’s Supreme Court explicitly legitimizing stops based on skin color.
In Chicago, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez multiple times while she was in her car. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes,” Exum later bragged in a text message. “Put that in your book, boys.” (Martinez survived the shooting and is now asking a judge to release evidence from a now abandoned federal case against her.)
In November, Sara Ellis, a federal judge for the Northern District of Illinois, made clear that Bovino lied repeatedly to defend his and Border Patrol’s conduct in Chicago. As Ellis wrote about Bovino in a 233-page decision, “the Court specifically finds his testimony not credible. Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.” That included, she added, lying multiple times about the events that led to him throwing tear gas at protesters.
He did this all with gleeful menace. His signature look was an authoritarian haircut paired with a winter trench coat reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany. As a writer for the German publication Der Spiegel put it, Bovino “stands out from this thuggish mob, just as an elegant SS officer stands out from the rowdy SA mob. The dashing undercut is also spot on; all that’s missing for the perfect cosplay is a monocle.” As noted by the Guardian, a second German outlet wrote that Bovino looked like “he had taken a photo of [assassinated Nazi paramilitary leader] Ernst Röhm to the barber.”
None of this stopped Noem and Miller from sending Bovino to Minneapolis, where he and his men predictably continued their anonymous thuggery. That culminated on Saturday with the killing of Pretti. From there, Bovino did himself in through sheer idiocy. Unlike the shooting of Martinez, for example, Pretti’s death was captured from numerous angles. The footage made clear that he was peacefully observing and recording Border Patrol agents before they tackled him, removed the handgun he was legally carrying, then shot him to death.
But Bovino had apparently become so accustomed to lying that he went ahead and pushed the DHS falsehood that Pretti appeared to have “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Pretti, a former Boy Scout and VA ICU nurse, was too sympathetic to be smeared so brazenly. Trump recognized that and sent Bovino packing. But there should be no doubt that Bovino would still be in his job if his agents had done the same thing off-camera, or perhaps even on camera to a more easily maligned victim. His removal was also likely hastened by the lingering outrage from ICE agent Jonathan Ross brazenly killing Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier this month.
At least for the time being, Trump is taking a less confrontational approach in public by touting a “very good telephone conversation” on Monday with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, as well as another one with Gov. Tim Walz, who he now says he appears to be on a “similar wavelength” with. He has also avoided repeating the obvious lies about Pretti spread this weekend by Bovino, Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Vice President JD Vance.
Sources apparently loyal to Noem are now leaking to Axios to pin the blame on Miller for the false statement that was released by DHS on Saturday and repeated by Noem and Bovino. If true, it makes Bovino something of a fall guy for Miller, whose longtime role alongside Trump does not appear to be in jeopardy. (Miller was notably absent from a two-hour meeting between Noem and Trump on Monday, the New York Times reports.)
Homan is a hardliner who has been described by The Atlantic as the “intellectual ‘father’” of the first Trump administration’s family separation policy. Unlike Bovino, however, his most recent experience is with ICE rather than Border Patrol. Along with acting ICE director Todd Lyons, he is reported to favor a somewhat more targeted approach to mass deportation that prioritizes people with actual deportation orders or criminal histories. Whether that changes DHS’ behavior on the ground—especially with Miller still in the picture—remains to be seen.
Trump’s pullback on Monday is reminiscent of his abandonment of the family separation policy in the face of widespread outrage in 2018. The images and sounds of separated families came to define Trump’s first term on immigration—even though the policy ended well before the midpoint of the administration. It would not be surprising if the images of Pretti being shot in the back, then again and again as he lay motionless on the street, go on to occupy the same position.
In that sense, what followed family separation may be instructive. Trump and Miller’s hardline measures to seal the US-Mexico border continued through policies like Remain in Mexico, multiple asylum bans, and expanding detention of asylum seekers who’d recently crossed the border. But the outrage over family separation also helped to wipe away the political advantage on immigration that helped Trump win for the first time in 2016.
The killings of Pretti and Good, along with countless videos of immigrants and citizens being abused by masked federal agents, have similarly degraded the support for Trump on immigration generated by the chaos at the border during Joe Biden’s presidency. On Monday, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted before and after Pretti’s death showed that 53 percent of respondents disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration, compared to 39 percent who approve. That is a 23-point swing from February 2025 when voters approved of Trump on immigration by a nine-point margin.
Six in ten independents now say that ICE has gone too far, along with more than 90 percent of Democrats. Perhaps more surprisingly, Republicans are now nearly as likely to say ICE has gone too far as they are to say that ICE has not gone far enough, according to the Reuters poll.
After years of trying to avoid talking about immigration on the campaign trail, Democrats are recognizing that times have changed. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling on social media for fellow Democrats to reject an upcoming DHS spending bill. Democratic House leaders have joined efforts to impeach Noem.
It is now Bovino who is silent on X, and not by choice. In the Trump administration’s equivalent of Siberian banishment, he has reportedly been blocked from posting by his superiors.
2026-01-28 05:05:24
A few weeks before Christmas, six siblings huddled around a phone in their mom’s bedroom to talk with their dad and grandpa, who’d just been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Memphis.
Camila, 16, the oldest girl, seemed tense as she sat next to Saraya, 13. Their grandpa tried to lighten the mood, at one point singing to them, but Camila was unusually quiet. “I could barely speak to him, because I would burst out in tears,” she told me later.
Camila (like Saraya, a pseudonym) is tall and athletic, with long brown hair. She’s the fiery one of the bunch, the protector, always ready with a quip. “I wish I could go to the White House and smack Donald Trump,” she said, a little more like herself.
She’d been sleeping almost all day of late, yet still she was exhausted. Camila worried about everything, everyone: Her mom, who came home sobbing after her dad was detained and was now struggling to pay the rent. Saraya, who has darker skin and was constantly getting harassed by cops. Their 12-year-old brother, who’d been withdrawn ever since ICE officers busted into their house, guns drawn, sans warrant. Their grandpa, 75 years old, who said the detention facility where they took him wasn’t providing the blood pressure and diabetes medications he needs. And, of course, her dad, who always used to cook Camila the most delicious frijoles and pinole, and warm arroz con leche at bedtime to help her sleep—but can no longer do so.
With their breadwinner gone, the family has been eating lots of spaghetti. “We’re out of money, and I’m trying to help my mom, but I can’t because I’m a minor,” Camila told me over the phone. “I’m trying to look for a job.”
“If I could get therapy, something,” she added, “because I’m tired. I’m on my last string.”
The family’s troubles began on November 24. It was a Monday night, and father Cesar Alexander Antunes-Maradiaga had been home getting ready for dinner when he realized they were out of cream, which the recipe called for. The store was a short drive away, and he hopped into their 2013 Honda Civic with his father-in-law and uncle-in-law, who lived with them.
It should have been an easy errand, but one of his headlights was out. On his way home, at the corner of Jackson and Gragg, lights flashed behind him: Tennessee Highway Patrol. The cops, as I witnessed myself, had been everywhere lately. On September 29, the Trump administration launched the Memphis Safe Task Force, consisting of around 1,700 officers from a mix of local, state, and federal agencies—including ICE—supposedly to crack down on crime.
Antunes-Maradiaga is an asylum seeker from Honduras. His father-in-law, also Honduran, is undocumented. Terrified, he FaceTimed his wife, Nicole Amaya, who watched events unfold on her phone’s tiny screen: An officer approached the car, and Antunes-Maradiaga held a piece of paper up to the window, a Know Your Rights flier saying he didn’t have to open the door. Unimpressed, the officer smashed the car window and pulled him out, putting a gun to his head.
The officer demanded identification, but Antunes-Maradiaga didn’t have a driver’s license, so Amaya provided his passport number and Alien Registration Number to the troopers via FaceTime. By the time she got to the scene in person, she told me, more than two dozen officers from different agencies were there. Antunes-Maradiaga and her dad, Jorge Fidel Mejia, were in the back of one of their vehicles. Heart racing, Amaya approached an officer from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE. “Y’all told me y’all wasn’t gonna detain nobody!” she yelled, citing an officer’s assurances during the FaceTime call.
“Maybe the trooper told you that,” she recalls the ICE agent saying. “I didn’t.”
Since the task force launched, local critics have called it an “occupation,” and accused the Trump administration of using the city’s crime problem as a Trojan horse, an excuse to boost its deportation count. In its first six weeks alone, the task force conducted nearly 30,000 traffic stops—and nearly 70,000 by mid-January. The federal officers ask drivers and passengers for proof of citizenship, leading to hundreds of arrests of noncriminal immigrants. “Show me his criminal record—you ain’t got it! So what are you taking him for?” Amaya says she yelled at the agent from the roadside, shivering because she’d forgotten a coat in her rush. “My dad can’t go back to his country,” she told me later. A Honduran gang “killed my brother in pieces with a machete when he was 17.”
“We might let your daddy go because you said he’s been here for 25 years,” the agent said, in her recollection.
“Y’all don’t let nobody go; let’s get real,” she responded, before the officers took her husband and father away.
The agents handed her a piece of paper explaining the headlight issue, in case another cop pulled her over. “Good luck getting home,” they said.
When Amaya got back to the family’s small, one-story house, she walked down the hall to her bedroom, then collapsed on the floor and began to cry. Camila consoled her, listening as Amaya tried to explain what had happened. “I’m the one who understands her more than the rest,” the daughter told me.
Suddenly, they heard a boom. “Oh my god, what was that?” Amaya said.
Then came stomping in the hallway, and the bedroom door flung open. The officers were holding guns and screaming. Some had vests labeled ICE or HSI, she says, and one was labeled US marshals, though that officer said he was from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The officers hauled her 12-year-old son, who’d also come in to sit with her, out of the room before pulling his hair and slamming him to the floor, the family told me. They accused Amaya of “aiding and abetting,” implying she was hiding other undocumented immigrants. “What am I aiding and abetting? My own children?” she yelled. Amaya and her children are US citizens.
Camila felt helpless, she told me later: “I just panicked because what am I gonna do with 20 men?” She cursed out the agents and demanded, to no avail, that they let her mom and brother go.
“He doesn’t give no reason,” for stopping me, said Saraya, who is in eighth grade. “He was like, ‘Where’s your mama? I wanna see your mama,” Amaya chimed in.
The family said the officers didn’t have a warrant, an allegation that seems credible given recent developments. Namely, a bombshell report by the Associated Press revealed that ICE told its officers that they may forcibly enter homes without a judicial warrant—which, according to a whistleblower, is contrary to their own training manual, to say nothing of longstanding legal precedent. The US Marshals Service, which handles press inquiries for the task force, ignored my questions about the raid and declined to weigh in on the warrant issue, but confirmed that Autunes-Maradiaga and his father-in-law were detained by ICE during a traffic stop.
The officers searched the house. Not finding anyone else undocumented, they left the same way they came in: through the front door, which they’d damaged upon entry—it would no longer lock and had a huge hole at its base. “I was like, whose gonna fix my door? They just walked off, and they were laughing,” Amaya recalls.
She and the kids inspected the additional damage: a punch mark on a bedroom door the officers had been unable to open, and someone had ripped the wifi router right out of the wall. “I just sat down and cried, because I couldn’t do anything,” Camila told me.
Camila is an 11th grader at Kingsbury High, located in a neighborhood with many immigrant families. Her favorite academic subject is history; for fun she enjoys volleyball and soccer. She hadn’t been able to play lately, though, due to injuries and stress—a month before her dad was arrested, she was hurt while fleeing a terrifying situation.
According to a press release from the Marshals Service, the Memphis Safe Task Force responded to a shooting at around 1:30 a.m. on October 22 at a house in the Nutbush neighborhood, not far from Camila’s school. After officers arrived, they found a corpse with a gunshot wound in the head, and later they found another that was partially dismembered. The 36-year-old suspect, Arsenio Davis, was accused of killing his mother and teenage nephew.
The press release didn’t name Camila, but earlier that same night, she, her cousin, and some friends were hanging out near the house when Davis came out. They didn’t know him, and there appeared to be something very wrong with him; according to Camila, he started yelling at her, demanding she come inside and pay him. Instead, she ran.
Afterward, she filed a police report alleging Davis had pursued her; she had to leap multiple fences to escape, leaving her cut up—scars on her stomach, arms, and legs, a busted knee, and nerve damage in one leg. “I almost got murdered,” she told me. The Memphis Police Department did not respond to my questions about the incident, but the family says an officer found her hiding in an abandoned house nearby, her pants ripped from traversing the fences. “The system still has failed to call to get her any kind of victim [support],” he mother told me.
“I’m just sick of being paranoid. I need a counselor or something to talk to.”
The trauma kept compounding. In mid-December, Camila says officers went to Kingsbury High and arrested her boyfriend, whose parents brought him to the United States from Honduras at age 2.
The Tennessee Highway Patrol, meanwhile, kept stopping Saraya around the neighborhood; one trooper shined a light in her face. “He doesn’t give no reason,” for stopping me, said Saraya, who is in eighth grade. “He was like, ‘Where’s your mama? I wanna see your mama,” Amaya chimed in.
And then there was the silver car with tinted windows that kept driving past the house multiple times a day—almost every day. Sometimes it would stop out front. They figured it was undercover law enforcement. “I’m not scared of them,” said Saraya, strong-willed like her sister. “They ain’t got no reason taking hardworking people that build their house and help their community,” Camila added. “Why can’t they just take the bad people?”
“That’s what they were supposed to be doing,” Amaya replied. “That was the statement”—the task force’s stated reason for being in Memphis.
“I don’t know how to feel, actually,” Camila said. “Today there was National Guard at the Walmart—they kept on staring me and my two sisters up and down. I told them they’re not supposed to be here. I said, ‘When are they leaving?’ They said, ‘We’re never leaving.'”
In December, Amaya attempted to file a report with the Memphis Police Department claiming the Tennessee Highway Patrol was harassing her family, but an officer told her she’d have to file a complaint with the THP. “I’m scared to call them because they’re already stalking me. I feel like I’m trapped,” she said.
“I’m just sick of being paranoid. I need a counselor or something to talk to,” Camila told me. Amaya had looked into getting trauma therapy for her daughter, but “every single [provider] didn’t take her insurance.”
The MPD and Highway Patrol ignored my requests for comment, and the US Marshals would not directly address the family’s allegations. I received a statement saying the task force “does not tolerate excessive force or harassment,” and that “all enforcement actions are expected to be conducted lawfully and professionally. Allegations of misconduct are taken seriously and should be directed to the appropriate oversight channels for review.”
In the days after the raid at Amaya’s house, Maria Oceja, who co-leads the neighborhood group Vecindarios 901, which documents ICE arrests, drove over to comfort her. She recalled Amaya as shaky and distressed, speaking quickly and peering outside frequently, on the lookout for law enforcement. “She’s very traumatized, very overwhelmed, and just trying to process everything,” Oceja said. And Camila seemed “in shock.” Of the thousands of cases Oceja’s group has witnessed since the task force launched, this one stands out, though there was a similar incident back in October, when officers followed an immigrant family home from a laundromat and then broke into their home.
“They should see how my mom gets on her knees, starts crying; she don’t know what to do.”
While Camila slept around the clock after her dad’s arrest, Amaya has struggled to get more than two hours of shuteye at a stretch—anxiety keeps her awake. How will she pay rent? Her husband worked in concrete and her dad would chip in money from odd construction jobs. She worries that the men might never return from ICE custody. Antunes-Maradiaga had an asylum case, Amaya says—he fled MS-13 gang members 12 years ago—but it was dismissed in 2023 without a final decision. Her father, Fidel Mejia, is undocumented. Both are being held at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, where they have reported that they lack mattresses and the guards call them wetbacks. Officials at the facility haven’t allowed him his medications, Fidel Mejia said, although they did at one point shoot him up with a tranquilizer, against his will, when he couldn’t sleep. Also: The tap water is yellow.
Amaya hasn’t been able to get a job because she’s needs to stay home for her kids, especially her 1-year-old. She’s had bad experiences with day cares, which are also expensive. Without a paycheck, she can’t even fix the front door. Cold air blows in through the hole at its base, which the family tried to stuff with towels. They eventually put a couch against it. The last time I spoke with her, their heat and electricity were shut off, and she was facing eviction during a winter storm.
Then, just this week, with the door still unrepaired, someone broke in and ransacked the house. Amaya sent some video footage. I could hear her cry as she walked through the hallway and into her bedroom, now strewn with the family’s possessions—drawers removed from a dresser, clothes everywhere. Their immigration papers were stolen. “I can’t anymore,” she texted me. “I don’t know what to do, and it’s freezing.”
We have “nothing,” Camila had told me earlier. “It’s like this whole world went to shit.”
“I just hope one day these [law enforcement] people understand other people’s pains,” she’d added. “They should see how my mom gets on her knees, starts crying; she don’t know what to do. One day they’re gonna understand” that immigrants “got kids, they got family.”
In the meantime, “I hope they all go to hell and burn.”
