United States | News & Politics

The only appropriate answer to this murderous violence is to expand the general strike.

The day after a historic general strike by the people of Minnesota, federal agents involved in Trump’s mass deportation campaign have committed yet another shocking act of deadly violence. Video footage from this morning shows federal agents in south Minneapolis wrestling a man to the ground, pinning him on the sidewalk, and shooting him multiple times while he was restrained and fully surrounded by officers who were striking him. Authorities confirmed shortly after that the victim had been killed.

The only appropriate answer to this murderous violence is to expand the general strike. The entire country was electrified at the moving images of massive unity and resistance from the Twin Cities yesterday. Federal agents have answered this mobilization with yet another murder. Now, the struggle must widen and grow stronger than ever.

Trump has unleashed a wave of terror nationwide. ICE and Border Patrol are the frontline enforcers of his racist campaign to expel huge numbers of people from the country that this white supremacist administration considers “incompatible with western civilization”. In the pursuit of this horrifying mission, federal cops have been given a license to kill with impunity.

Trump plans to continue his ICE invasions city by city, sending in thousands of agents to rip families apart and murder anyone who stands in their way. Just yesterday, the people of the Twin Cities showed the way. The people need to use our power to shut down business as usual and make it impossible for this reign of terror to continue.

Residents near the scene of a shooting by a federal law enforcement agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, 2026. Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Border Patrol agents on Saturday shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen. Pretti was an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital and legally carrying a Sig Sauer pistol. Bystander video shows him filming agents with a phone before being tackled and pinned facedown on the pavement as more than six officers swarm him. According to video of the shooting, at least one officer can be heard shouting “he’s got a gun,” and an agent appears to take Pretti’s weapon and begin to walk away before at least 10 shots ring out. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in a press conference that Pretti was “a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry.” Federal officials initially defended the shooting as self-defense, insisting Pretti had resisted disarmament and threatened agents. But open-source analysis by Bellingcat concluded the gun had already been taken from Pretti by the time the shots were fired.

Already, much has been made by the administration over the fact that Pretti was armed, a startling legal shift for officials who publicly espouse their love of the Second Amendment.

The Trump Justice Department has now formally embraced the idea that a citizen carrying a legal firearm who approaches federal officers can be shot on sight. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — a Trump appointee — put this new doctrine bluntly: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.” In effect, the president who demanded absolute loyalty from gun rights voters is sanctioning deadly force against those voters whenever they come near a line of federal officers. This pronouncement came just hours after Pretti’s killing, turning a local tragedy into a national declaration of policy. The gap between Second Amendment rhetoric and the on-the-ground reality of federal law enforcement has never been more obvious.

Have a Gun? Expect a Bullet.

Essayli’s declaration sent shockwaves through America’s gun community, and leaders of pro-gun groups immediately distanced themselves from the White House line. (On Truth Social, Trump posted a photo of the gun, writing, “This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go – What is that all about?” Less than 24 hours later, Trump had seemingly moved on, posting about construction on the White House ballroom.) Dana Loesch, a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association and a conservative radio host, questioned the administration’s contention that Pretti had two loaded magazines as evidence he intended to harm immigration agents: “What he has or didn’t have isn’t the issue. What he was doing, with or without it, is the issue.”

By the end of the day, the NRA — historically among Trump’s biggest backers — had finally issued a lukewarm call for calm and due process and called Essayli’s remarks “dangerous and wrong,” but only after its social media followers lambasted the group for inexplicably staying silent at first. Remember: the NRA funneled some $25 million into Trump’s campaigns. For gun owners who gave Trump everything, the silence was deafening.

For gun owners who gave Trump everything, the silence was deafening.

The conservative advocacy group Gun Owners of America called for a “complete, transparent, and prompt investigation” and flatly rejected the idea that federal agents can justifiably shoot and kill legal gun owners. In a statement responding to Essayli, GOA warned “agents are not ‘highly likely’ to be ‘legally justified’ in ‘shooting’ concealed carry licensees who approach while lawfully carrying a firearm.”

On the ground in Minnesota, gun rights advocates were outraged. The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus demanded evidence that Pretti posed any real threat, and insisted that every lawful citizen has the right to carry arms — even in a protest. Its general counsel, Rob Doar, told local news station KSTP that officers “have to have been in reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm” to use deadly force and his read based on the video is “that at the time that the shots were fired he had been disarmed seconds before.” Rick Hodsdon, an expert on permit to carry laws in the state, put an even finer point on the issue: The idea that any citizen approaching armed agents with a legal gun should be shot is “absurd.”

Other vocal critics rebuked Border Patrol statements implying that Pretti was armed to the teeth, and aiming, as official Greg Bovino claimed, to do “maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Veteran gun rights commentator Stephen Gutowski reminded followers that carrying extra magazines is common for permit holders. Others pointed out that this new paradigm risks transforming routine encounters with public safety officials into moments of terror for lawful gun owners. Kostas Moros, director of legal research and education for the Second Amendment Foundation, told The Reload, “People should not fear interacting with police officers simply because they are lawfully carrying a firearm.”

For many Second Amendment stalwarts, the Trump administration’s new stance is the ultimate betrayal. The man who vowed never to infringe on gun rights is now sanctioning lethal force against his own voters.

Thou Shalt Infringe

The Pretti killing and its official defense expose a wider hypocrisy in Trump’s approach to gun rights, despite his rhetoric. While Trump once praised Kyle Rittenhouse — the armed teenager who killed two people at a protest in Wisconsin — as “really a nice young man” who never deserved to go to trial, he has, throughout his career, quietly supported more gun safety measures than he admits.

During his first term, he casually let it slip that he was fine with taking guns without due process before backtracking. During his first administration, he also famously signed a rule banning bump-fire stocks (devices that simulated fully automatic fire) after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, a rule that was later struck down by the Supreme Court. Just last year, that same court — which is dominated by Trump appointees — upheld a sweeping new Joe Biden-era rule restricting untraceable “ghost guns,” rejecting challenges by gun rights groups.

Meanwhile, Trump has increasingly deployed federal forces into jurisdictions with some of the strictest gun-control laws in the country, using federal authority to lean into those regulations — despite promising to protect gun owners from government overreach. In August 2025, federal agents embedded with local police in Washington, D.C., and seized 111 firearms as part of Trump’s federal surge in the district to combat “crime.” For gun rights advocates, the operation exposed the quiet inversion underway: Federal agents can now treat gun ownership as a novel way to target, harass, and enforce their authority in ways that have little to do with any actual crime. Luis Valdes, a spokesperson for Gun Owners of America, said at the time that these seizures amounted to low-hanging fruit. “Charging [citizens] only for possession of a firearm means they couldn’t even establish reasonable suspicion or probable cause for any other crime,” he said. “We’re not against law enforcement going out there and going after real criminals. We’re just against law enforcement resources being mis-utilized, and having those resources used to violate people’s due process and Second Amendment rights.”

From Chicago to Los Angeles, these federal “surges” have meant heavily armed federal agents roaming neighborhoods looking to scoop up American firearms along the way — hardly a symbol of Second Amendment liberation. At the same time, the Justice Department has quietly pursued policies that make life harder for gun owners, not easier. While Trump’s February 2025 executive order on firearms directed the DOJ to review Biden-era regulations, many of his more expansive campaign promises remain outstanding, leaving little evidence that his administration has meaningfully expanded ordinary Americans’ access to firearms.

Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” for instance, made it cheaper to purchase suppressors and short-barreled weapons but not easier — keeping buyers locked behind the same federal regulatory regime his campaign promised to dismantle. In response, major gun rights groups have moved to mount new legal challenges against Trump’s ATF to eliminate outstanding red tape. And despite early promises to enact national concealed-carry reciprocity — a policy that would require every state to recognize gun permits issued by other states, much like driver’s licenses — that reform has yet to materialize.

Under Trump, gun rights have increasingly been filtered through federal power, not individual freedom.

It is also worth noting who Trump is in this equation: a gun-violence survivor, raised in one of the most restrictive gun safety environments in the country, who publicly champions the gun industry but now governs a far more heavily armed nation from behind layers of federal security. In Trump’s America, the question is no longer whether guns should exist, but whether the government still views the people who legally carry them as legitimate.

The bottom line is harder to ignore: Under Trump, gun rights have increasingly been filtered through federal power, not individual freedom. Now, after a second fatal shooting by federal immigration authorities in Minneapolis in as many weeks, his administration is crystallizing this shift as de facto policy: If an American simply owns a gun in front of feds, the use of “deadly force” is not just permitted but justified. And now that the feds are everywhere, the implications for an armed citizenry are chilling.

All of this flies in the face of Trump’s campaign promises of a Second Amendment utopia. The millions the NRA and pro-gun political action committees funneled into electing him have bought little more than cold comfort. Gun rights groups can protest and litigate but the precedent is now set: Under this administration, trained federal officers can, on executive authority alone, treat legally armed citizens — protesters or otherwise — as legitimate targets. The president who promised not to take away Americans’ guns has effectively signed off on taking away any safety those guns once provided. If this shift endures, it points toward a country with more federal deployments, more armed encounters, and a Second Amendment that exists in theory but not in practice

Portland, OR – A January 21 protest at Portland City Hall to demand the revocation of the permit for the Portland ICE facility erupted as protesters shut down the city council meeting and were violently ejected from the building by Portland police.

Portland Contra Las Deportaciones called for the event after the Minneapolis murder of Renee Good and the Portland shooting by Border Patrol of Nino-Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras. Given the escalation in violence by ICE, the group urged city council and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson to take immediate action to shut down the ICE facility.

After a rally outside city hall with 60 in attendance, the group entered city hall for public comment. Members spoke to the urgency of the moment. A land use violation notice was issued to the Portland ICE facility in September 2025, and the city has yet to collect fines, or begin the revocation process.

“Portland City Council, this legislative body, needs to be treating this like the emergency situation it is.” said organizer Kacey Desantis in a public comment, “We have killer ICE in our streets and members of Portland’s own police force that agree with their actions. This is a public safety emergency.”

Mayor Keith Wilson put out a statement regarding the permit while the protest was underway stating, “Regarding the notice of violation issued to the ICE facility, we must follow the process. We cannot allow hasty action to prevent us from taking meaningful action.”

Given the slow pace at which the city is handling the process, some public commenters wonder if the mayor has his priorities straight.

“Mayor Wilson, it must be really hard to properly respond to this emergency situation when you are also busy being the CEO of a company. Your position aligns more with ICE landlord Stuart Lindquist than working Portlanders affected by your inaction. Mayor, do your job and protect the safety of all Portlanders by revoking the ICE permit now,” stated Desantis.

After public comment, the city council meeting began, and members of the audience began disrupting the meeting, demanding the council take immediate action to shut down the ICE facility, and letting them know there would be no business as usual while ICE terrorizes Portland.

The council left the room for a recess and activists refused to leave the chambers, chanting slogans such as “City council, do your job! Keith Wilson, do your job!”

The council meeting resumed, with all the councilors showing up on a screen, as they left the chambers to join the meeting virtually from their offices, behind locked doors.

The crowd decided to bring the protest to their offices and left the chambers to march to each of the offices in city hall.

Protesters stood outside their offices chanting “Face the people!” and knocking on the doors. Several councilors came out of their offices to take pictures of the protesters from behind glass doors and then rejoined the virtual meeting, refusing to speak with protesters.

After 30 minutes of occupying city hall, a group of Portland police officers approached the protest and informed the group that if they did not leave they would be arrested.

Activists linked arms and refused to move. Officers came behind them and violently pushed the group out of city hall, with activists resisting the entire way. The group was pushed backwards on a flight of stairs by police, and only through holding on to each other avoided serious injury. Protesters still refused to fully leave city hall and police then pepper-sprayed the group.

When outside, the group resolved to not let this stop them and to continue to come back and demand action from Portland officials to revoke the ICE permit.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7463074

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/22864

An uprising broke out at an immigrant jail in southern Texas on Saturday, with around 1,000 immigrants detained in the facility — many of them children — chanting “Libertad” and “Let us go,” according to an attorney who witnessed the event. The protest took place at South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, which closed in 2024 but was reopened by the Trump administration this year to detain immigrant families.

On Saturday, facility personnel abruptly ordered immigration attorneys who were present to leave, saying “an incident” had taken place. Michigan-based immigration attorney Eric Lee, who was among those forced to leave, said he could hear shouting that sounded “high-pitched” and “urgent,” indicating that he believed there were “hundreds of children” taking part in the uprising.

Lee later said his clients told him the protest began in response to the treatment of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old from Minnesota who was abducted, along with his father, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last week. The two were transferred to the jail, more than 1,300 miles from home, shortly after being detained.

School officials familiar with the incident say that an adult living in Liam’s home had begged for ICE agents to let Liam stay after his father was taken into custody.

School officials also said that Liam was used as “bait” by agents, in an attempt to get other people inside the house to exit willingly.

Aerial photos of the Texas facility during the protest, taken by The Associated Press, show parents and children holding signs that read, “Libertad para los niños,” or “Freedom for the kids.” Participants in the uprising also reportedly chanted “Libertad,” and “Let us go.”

“The message we want to send is for them to treat us with dignity and according to the law,” said Maria Alejandra Montoya Sanchez, a 31-year-old who is being detained in the jail, speaking to The AP after the protest. “We’re immigrants, with children, not criminals.”

Montoya Sanchez has been imprisoned at the facility with her 9-year-old daughter since October.

Source

From Truthout via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7455392

The U.S. Department of the Interior has said it will revoke the grazing permits that have allowed American Prairie to run bison on roughly 63,000 acres of federal public land in Montana. This decision would affect seven parcels managed by the Bureau of Land Management in Phillips County, and it would hinder the organization’s larger goals of conserving large swaths of intact grasslands while restoring the native grazers to those landscapes.

The Interior’s rationale for yanking the permits, according to its Jan. 16 proposed decision, is that under the Taylor Grazing Act, the BLM can only issue grazing permits for livestock managed for “production-oriented” purposes. It claims that American Prairie’s emphasis on conservation runs counter to those purposes.

American Prairie CEO Alison Fox criticized this reasoning as both unfair and inconsistent with long-standing public-lands grazing practices in Montana. She said in a response to the decision that it creates uncertainty, not just for American Prairie — which has been grazing bison using federal leases since 2005 — but for all other livestock owners in the West. She added that American Prairie plans to protest the decision and will take further legal action, if necessary.

“This is a slippery slope,” Fox said in a statement shared with Outdoor Life. “When federal agencies begin changing how the rules are applied after the process is complete, it undermines confidence in the system for everyone who relies on public lands. Montana livestock owners deserve clarity, fairness, and decisions they can count on.”

The grazing permits now in limbo were approved by the BLM in 2022 after years of analysis and public comment. The agency noted in its record of decision that the feeding habits of bison could lead to habitat improvements there, and that it had granted similar bison grazing permits on BLM lands in Colorado, North Dakota, Wyoming, and other Western states.

This approval, however, drew intense pushback from industry livestock groups and politicians in Montana, who considered it a radical proposal and an attack on the state’s ranchers. Those same groups challenged the BLM’s approval in court, and they are now celebrating the Interior’s more recent decision — one that was signaled in December, when Interior secretary Doug Burgum used his authority to assume jurisdiction over the long-running legal battle.

This just means they're going to bring their war against America to other cities. Prepare by organizing your neighborhood. That means a local signal chat, explanations of how to respond to short and long whistle blasts, and preparation to get people to respond on a moment's notice

Gift link, shortened so lemmy doesn't remove the gift marker

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42210043

In case you somehow need more proof I.C.E. agents are nazis that are fucked in the head.

Archived copies of the article

• web.archive.org
• archive.today

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats alike are vowing to tank a Homeland Security funding bill ahead of the Friday deadline — which would trigger a partial government shutdown after border patrol shot an armed ICU nurse in Minneapolis Saturday.

The $64.4 billion funding bill had only just squeaked by the House last week in a 220-207 vote, barely overcoming controversy over the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, but now the Saturday shooting of Alex Pretti has seemingly emboldened Senate Democrats to kill it.

“The Trump Administration and Kristi Noem are putting undertrained, combative federal agents on the streets with no accountability,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said in a statement Saturday. “They are oppressing Americans and are at odds with local law enforcement. This is clearly not about keeping Americans safe, it’s brutalizing U.S. citizens and law-abiding immigrants.”

“I will not support the current Homeland Security funding bill. We have bipartisan agreement on 96% of the budget,” she added.

A 28-year-old Utah man is in custody after allegedly assaulting a Democratic congressman at a Sundance Film Festival event, telling him, “We are going to deport you and your kind,” police said.

Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted on Saturday night that he had been attacked by a man “who told me that Trump was going to deport me before he punched me in the face. He was heard screaming racist remarks as he drunkenly ran off.”

Frost went on to thank the Park City police for arresting suspect Christian Joel Young.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42194883

Officers said he ‘got his shit rocked’ but have largely refused to explain how he fractured his skull while in custody, judge says

A federal judge has ordered the immediate release of a Mexican man from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Minnesota after he suffered “life-threatening” head injuries after his arrest.

A man identified in court documents as Alberto C.M., who entered the country legally on a temporary worker visa in 2022, was hospitalized with skull fractures and brain hemorrhages shortly after his arrest in St. Paul during Donald Trump’s surge of immigration enforcement officers in the state.

The cause of his injuries is still unknown. ICE has “largely refused to provide information” about what happened, except to say that he “he got his s*** rocked,” according to the judge.

The group behind Project 2025 is pushing potential "marriage bootcamps" run by the government in an effort to boost the U.S. population, without immigration. NBC News’ Jonathan Allen explains Democrats' reaction.

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/160352

From Common Dreams via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42167647

News of Tracee Mergen’s decision came before agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, another US citizen in Minneapolis

A supervisor in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office who unsuccessfully attempted to investigate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in the city on 7 January has resigned, according to multiple reports.

News of agent Tracee Mergen’s resignation surfaced shortly before federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday. Pretti and Good were both 37-year-old US citizens.

Mergen resigned following pressure from the bureau in Washington DC to discontinue an inquiry into ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who shot Good to death as videos showed her trying to drive away from a confrontation, according to the New York Times and NBC News.

Image text:

They said they targeted Alex Pretti for being a terrorist, while he worked as a medical professional.

It's too late to save him now.

They said they targeted Abu Safiya for being a terrorist, while he worked as a medical professional.

Is it too late to save him now?

#FreeAbuSafiya

nostr:npub1wamvxt2tr50ghu4fdw47ksadnt0p277nv0vfhplmv0n0z3243zyq26u3l2

whoever loves Digit

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42161026

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42161854

These CEOs are largrly the same ones who lobbied to create the ICE we have now in exchange for tax breaks.

• 3M
• Land O'Lakes CEO Beth Ford is on the board of the Business Roundtable
• Hormel CEO Jeff Ettinger is on the executive board of the Meat Institute.
• Target belongs to the RATE coalition
• Allianz CEO Jasmine Jirele is on the board of the US Chamber of Commerce.

Over Trump’s past year, what originally looked like an effort to make the government his personal plaything has drifted distinctly toward doctrinal and operational fascism. Trump’s appetite for lebensraum, his claim of unlimited power, his support for the global far right, his politicization of the justice system, his deployment of performative brutality, his ostentatious violation of rights, his creation of a national paramilitary police—all of those developments bespeak something more purposeful and sinister than run-of-the-mill greed or gangsterism.

Colleagues remembered Alex Pretti as a kind and dedicated ICU nurse at the VA.