Two Deaths, One Surge: ICE Enforcement and Violence in Minnesota

Unchecked Power Does Not Demand just Universal Cruelty. It Requires Only Enough Participation — and Enough Indifference.

Minnesota reels in the wake of another horrific federal-agent shooting, one that has shaken families and communities as they try to make sense of what just happened. This latest fatal encounter — the killing of 37-year-old Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti by federal agents during an immigration enforcement operation — follows a string of similar incidents in the Twin Cities, including the earlier shooting of Renee Good and other violent confrontations that have sparked widespread protests and demands that federal operations end.

And this moment touches on one of history’s most uncomfortable truths: atrocities are rarely built by crowds of sadists. They are built by systems that recruit a minority to act, a larger group to comply, and a majority to look away. Power does not need everyone to agree. It needs only that too few resist.

Photo by Gregory Fullard on Unsplash “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others” .Nelson Mendala

The Comfort of Not Knowing

Recently, someone close to us said, “We didn’t know.” They didn’t know what was happening in Minnesota. They didn’t know why we felt threatened. They hadn’t seen the news.

Meanwhile, family across oceans had heard. Friends in other countries had reached out. People who do not share our zip code, our skin tone, or our daily routines were asking if we were safe.

This is not said to shame anyone. It is said to name something deeper and more dangerous than ignorance.

We live in an age where not knowing is no longer neutral. Information is filtered, curated, personalized. News finds us based on what we already believe, what we engage with, what we prefer not to see. It is now entirely possible to live inside a calm, orderly version of the world while someone else lives inside a state of constant vigilance — both believing they are seeing reality.

That divide is not accidental. And it is not harmless.

Right now in Minnesota, this divide is playing out in real time. A federal immigration enforcement surge — part of a national operation — has brought thousands of agents into the state, and with it a spate of violent encounters that have shaken the community. On January 24, 2026, federal agents fatally shot 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and ICU nurse Alex Pretti during an enforcement action — the second fatal shooting of a Minnesotan by federal agents this month and one that has ignited protests, public outcry, and calls for accountability.

The scene on the ground — protests, calls for investigations, and tension between local officials and federal authorities — isn’t abstract. It is the lived reality of a community experiencing what many believed could not happen here.

And it’s here — in this collision between lived experience and distant understanding — that we see how the quiet comfort of not knowing can be mistaken for stability.

When “Safety” Becomes Conditional

For some families, danger is theoretical. For others, it is logistical.

When federal agents operate in your community, when eyewitnesses report ICE activity nearby, when people are stopped, questioned, detained, or killed, safety stops being an abstract idea. It becomes something you plan for.

It looks like carrying passports when you leave the house. It looks like telling your children not to answer the door. It looks like deciding whether it is safe to go to work that day. It looks like scanning every interaction through the lens of “What if?”

This is not paranoia. This is not fear-mongering. This is what it feels like when the margin for error disappears.

And it is exhausting.

History’s Repeating Pattern

We often tell history as a story of necessary monsters — people so uniquely evil that ordinary citizens could never relate to them. This framing comforts us. If evil requires villains, then goodness requires only that we not be one.

But history repeatedly disproves this.

In Nazi Germany, genocide did not require every citizen to hate Jews. It required administrators to process paperwork, rail workers to run trains, doctors and lawyers to follow policy, and millions of others to adjust, comply, or remain silent.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, terror was not chaotic rage. It was bureaucratic. Arrest quotas were filled. Neighbors informed on neighbors — not always out of ideology, but fear or opportunity. Most people were not executioners. They were survivors navigating a system where silence felt safer than dissent.

In Jim Crow America, violence did not require every white citizen to lynch or intimidate. It required courts to look away, businesses to comply, churches and schools to normalize segregation, and millions to live “ordinary” lives inside an extraordinary injustice.

In Rwanda, genocide did not require universal hatred. It required that enough people stop intervening.

Unchecked power did not require universal cruelty. It required participation by some — and indifference by many.

The Quiet Threshold

The most dangerous threshold is not crossed when violence erupts. It is crossed when people decide their discomfort is not worth engagement.

When “I don’t know enough” becomes an excuse. When “I don’t watch the news anymore” becomes insulation. When “this doesn’t affect me” becomes moral permission.

Unchecked power does not need your hatred. It needs your adaptation.

It needs you to say, “This isn’t my fight.” It needs you to believe that neutrality is safety.

But neutrality, in moments like this, is not neutral.

Why This Matters Now

What is happening in Minnesota is not a future warning. It is present reality.

A man was shot and killed by federal agents. Conflicting narratives followed. State investigators were blocked. Protests erupted. The National Guard was deployed.

And still, many people did not know.

Not because the information was unavailable — but because the system did not require them to see it.

This is how power reshapes responsibility. It fragments accountability until no one feels fully responsible.

“I just follow policy.” “I don’t make the rules.” “I’m staying out of it.”

By the time harm is undeniable, it is also normalized.

What Remains

The lesson is not that every person must be heroic. It is that silence is never harmless when power is unrestrained.

Unchecked power survives on gradients:

• a few who act, many who comply, and most who disengage.*

The moment we believe our indifference has no consequence is the moment power stops being afraid of us.

And that — not rage, not ideology, not even cruelty — is what history warns us against most.

Not because everyone became evil. But because too many people decided not to know.

And I write this now not as a historian or an observer, but as a husband and a father, as a son who knows what it means to carry responsibility forward.

I write this while calculating routes, while deciding what documents leave the house with us, while wondering which ordinary moments — school drop-offs, grocery runs, walks outside — now require contingency plans. I write this while trying to keep my children’s world soft, even as the edges harden around us.

No parent should have to explain to their child why safety feels conditional. No family should have to wonder whether visibility itself carries risk. And no one should have to choose between staying informed and staying sane.

This is not fear speaking. It is vigilance learned the hard way. It is the weight of history pressing into the present, reminding us that danger does not always announce itself with cruelty. Sometimes it arrives through normalization, through silence, through the quiet decision to look away.

Unchecked power does not need everyone’s hatred. It needs only enough people to believe that what is happening does not concern them.

But it does. It always does.

Because when power goes unchallenged, it never confines its reach to one community, one family, or one moment. And by the time its consequences are undeniable, the cost has already been paid by those who were seen too late.

History does not ask whether we were comfortable. It asks whether we were awake.