Enough is enough.
I keep staring at my screen in Tirana, thousands of miles from Minneapolis, and I feel the weight of what I'm seeing. Federal agents in camouflage fatigues, gas masks, tactical vests—one of them caught on a TV mic saying "It's like Call of Duty. So cool, huh?" A video game reference. While aiming at human beings.
This is not a war zone in some distant land. This is Minnesota. The same state where George Floyd took his last breath in 2020, sparking a global reckoning with police violence. Now, less than two miles from that spot, two more people have been killed by federal officers in January 2026 alone.
The Death of Alex Pretti
On Saturday, 24 January, ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti. He was 37 years old. He worked as an ICU nurse—someone who spent his days saving lives.
The Department of Homeland Security claims officers fired "defensive shots" after a man with a handgun approached them. But video evidence contradicts the official story. Governor Tim Walz called the shooting "sickening" and accused authorities of a "rush to judgment".
Three weeks earlier, Renee Good was fatally shot by a federal immigration officer in the same city. When former ICE officials reviewed that footage, they were baffled. One officer runs up to her car, uses expletives, starts forcing the door open. No calm request. No "Ma'am, can you please open the door?" Just immediate aggression.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable result of a system designed to produce exactly this outcome.
What 3,000 Armed Agents Look Like
Let me put a number in perspective for you. The Trump administration has deployed 3,000 ICE officers and Customs and Border Protection agents to Minnesota. That's more than the ten largest local and state police agencies in the state combined.
Many of these agents wear masks. They refuse to identify themselves. They operate with what journalist Garrett Graff called "swaggering impunity".
Since Trump took office, ICE has hired 12,000 new personnel. Many have no prior law enforcement experience. They're learning how to carry weapons and interact with the public from scratch—while being told, in Stephen Miller's words, that they have "federal immunity in the conduct of your duties".
Translation: Do what you want. No consequences.
The Targets
Local politicians have been roughed up. Legal observers hauled off without charge. Schoolchildren teargassed. Motorists were dragged from their cars.
Native Americans—whose ancestors lived on this land long before the United States existed—have been stopped and questioned. Simply filming these agents is enough to be branded a domestic terrorist.
A family of eight, driving home from a basketball game, was tear-gassed. Their six-month-old baby needed CPR.
I need to pause here because I want you to understand what I just wrote. A baby. Six months old. Needed resuscitation. Because federal agents deployed chemical weapons against a family returning from watching basketball.
Why Minneapolis?
Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024. He recently claimed—falsely—that he won all three times . No Republican has carried Minnesota since Nixon in 1972. Not even Reagan.
The state is home to the largest Somali community in America. This week, Trump described Somalis as "low-IQ people" . He wasn't even trying to hide the racism anymore.
Minnesota is also home to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who gets under Trump's skin. Its governor, Tim Walz, was Kamala Harris's running mate in 2024 .
The official justification for this occupation? Fraud. Specifically, allegations about Covid-19 relief fund fraud at day care centres . But here's what I need you to understand about fraud investigations: you catch fraud by reviewing financial records on computers. You do not catch fraud by stopping people at random in the street based on the colour of their skin .
The Spectacle Is the Point
I've spent years studying how authoritarian systems communicate. (When you're a young man in a wheelchair in Albania, you develop a particular sensitivity to how power operates.) And what I see in Minneapolis is textbook.
The violence is not a bug. It's a feature.
ICE is now going against all of its former training to make arrests as dramatic as possible. They film violent clashes. They prioritise spectacle over safety. Former ICE officials are "bewildered" because the agency is actively inviting the chaos it once tried to prevent .
Stephen Miller's message to agents under fire for brutality? You have immunity. Anyone who tries to stop you is committing a felony.
The recruitment videos reference Manifest Destiny and use phrases that members of the Proud Boys and QAnon followers recognise as calls to action.
The Infrastructure Being Built
I'm going to simplify something complicated here, so bear with me.
The "big, beautiful" act passed by Congress gave immigration enforcement $170 billion . That's larger than the military budget of any country on Earth except the United States and China.
This money is building detention centres across the country. The detained immigrant population has grown from 39,000 to 70,000 since Biden left office . Private prison companies are making enormous profits.
It's funding facial recognition technology, data collection systems, and surveillance networks that create dossiers on people—their education records, financial records, social media accounts, utility bills .
And here's what keeps me up at night: once you build this infrastructure, it gets used. Not just against immigrants. Against anyone the government decides is a problem. The administration's own documents define "domestic terrorists" as people who hold anti-capitalist views, oppose the traditional American family, or have "extremism on migration" —which is how they describe anyone protesting what's happening in Minneapolis.
What Fascism Looks Like
Garrett Graff, a journalist and historian, wrote this week: "This is what fascism looks like—there is no bright line between democracy and autocracy, it's a spectrum, and not all of the country will experience that switch at the same moment in the same way. But let's be clear: there is a US city living under occupation by fascist presidential secret police right now" .
I know that word—fascism—makes people uncomfortable. We want to believe there will be some obvious moment when everything changes, when the line is crossed, when we can point and say: there, that's when democracy ended.
But it doesn't work that way. The authoritarianism is here. It's just unevenly distributed .
The Human Cost
A reader wrote to The Guardian this week about the photos of five-year-old Liam Ramos being detained. They said: "I had hoped that the distressing photos of the lifeless body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying face down in the surf might concentrate minds, and humanity could agree to tackle the refugee crisis. Nothing changed. We need to rediscover our humanity".
I think about that a lot. The images that should shock us into action. The bodies that should make us say: no more.
Alex Pretti saved lives for a living. Now he's dead.
Renee Good was driving to a doctor's appointment. Now she's dead.
A six-month-old baby needed CPR after being tear-gassed on the way home from a basketball game.
How many more?
What Now?
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted: "Americans are being killed in the street by their government. Our Constitution is being shredded and our rights are dissolving. Resist" .
Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois warned: "We're in a precarious moment and I just think that, if we do not stop this now, if we don't abolish Trump's ICE and make sure that we have a trained force that is following the law, this is going to erupt into something really terrible. It already is, but it could get vastly worse" .
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis asked the question that demands an answer: "How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?" .
A Note from Tirana
I write this from my wheelchair in Albania, a country that knows something about authoritarianism. My grandfather lived under one of the most isolated dictatorships in history. The stories he told me about informants, about fear, about neighbours turning on neighbours—I never thought I'd see echoes of them in America.
At Free AstroScience, we usually talk about galaxies and black holes and the elegant mathematics of the cosmos. But science has always been political. Galileo knew that. Einstein knew that. The pursuit of truth requires the freedom to pursue it.
What's happening in Minneapolis is not about immigration policy. It's about whether a government can occupy its own cities, kill its own citizens, and call it law enforcement.
The answer to that question will determine what kind of country America becomes. And because America's choices ripple across the world, it will shape what kind of world the rest of us live in too.
Enough is enough.
I don't know what you can do from where you're sitting. Call your representatives if you're American. Donate to legal defence funds. Share the truth. Refuse to look away.
But please—don't let this become normal. Don't let the images of masked agents and tear-gassed babies and dead nurses fade into the background noise of another news cycle.
We need to rediscover our humanity.
Before it's too late.
Gerd Dani is the President of Free AstroScience, a science and cultural group. He writes about the universe and, sometimes, about the world we've made on this small planet.
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