When ICE Opens Fire on Us

A future history of ICE's first mass attack.

Illustration by Riley Levine

There’s a moment in every country’s descent where the brutal men in fearsome uniforms and tall boots stop shoving and start shooting.

We are at that moment.

The body of Alex Pretti is still in a morgue today, still on a cold slab, his remains torn by five rounds fired in his back by an ICE agent drunk on the heady power of brutality and the promise of absolute immunity.

In America, our elite media and political classes have for a decade pretended that moment is always somebody else’s problem, some faraway place with a theocracy, a junta, or a strongman whose portrait hangs in every home and building like a warning label.

But the last few weeks have been a case study in what happens when a government decides the Constitution is an annoying speed bump and the citizenry is a crowd-control problem.

We know the horrors ICE has committed in Minneapolis and beyond. The casual brutality, the arrogant dismissal of rights, the hideous capering and laughter at the suffering they inflict on both immigrants and Americans. They are, in our digital age, recorded for grim posterity.

People of goodwill talk about de-escalation, about easing tensions, about bringing the pot down from an imminent boil to a simmer.

They are fools.

The incentives for the Trump Administration’s armed political force are entirely ratcheting in one direction, and we must consider that direction now. Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, the vast MAGA influencer and propaganda ecosystem, and DHS itself have no incentive to slow down, to turn around, to stop their war on our rights and liberties.

I beg you to understand this: everything happening in Minnesota with ICE delights them. This isn’t a crisis for them; it’s a big shove of the Overton Window toward the fascism they now openly crave.

So let’s talk about the nightmare headline hovering on the horizon: what happens when ICE fires into a crowd of protestors?

I wish I could tell you this is an impossibility, that training, doctrine, discipline, and leadership at every level of government will prevent an escalation where ICE murders Americans wholesale instead of retail, but dear friends, I cannot.

The culture of ICE and the entire MAGA political and media ecosystem is driving them toward it, a confrontation where the Trump Era moves to the next level of oppression and terror.

Here’s how I see the moment playing out, first as narrative, then as prediction.

The Minneapolis Massacre: January 30, 2025

He was there because for weeks, he’d seen the stories building, hearing the abuses growing more lurid and sickening. Well call him Dan, a Marine veteran with two hitches in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. He’d known Alex Pretti a little, at the Minneapolis V.A., a big, kind man. His murder had pissed Dan off, more than he wanted to admit. It was damn cold, but it was his city, his neighborhood, his friends now facing down ICE.

The smoke-hung air, the acrid tang of tear gas, and the rhythmic chant of protestors had filled Nicollet Avenue for hours. The night was frigid, the breath of the crowd visible in the winter air, wreathed around placards and raised fists, each person trying to make sense of what had already happened; two ICE murders in less than three weeks, the second now boiling over into disbelief and outrage.

Then, as the line of ICE agents in dark tactical gear advanced, tension punctured the air like a dropped hammer. People surged forward instinctively, not to attack but to hold ground, to witness, to record, to declare that their city, their neighbors, their lives mattered.

In the blur of camera phones and shouted warnings, something snapped. Dan stood on the line, arm in arm with fellow protestors, facing a masked, heavyset DHS agent with an Arkansas patch on his plate carrier. Dan looked at him and said, “I didn’t wear a mask in Afghanistan because I’m not a fucking pussy, fat boy.”

The Arkansas ICE agent fumbled with his weapon, thinking Dan would shut his fucking mouth staring down his M4. As he did, he slipped on a patch of ice, his body falling to the hard pavement. His lack of training and trigger discipline meant his weapon was off safety, and his gloved finger was inside the trigger guard. As he fell, his M4 fired.

And then the sound that no one expects in their own hometown: shots.

Dan looked down at the ICE agent, his belly hanging under his plate carrier as he slid and fumbled on the ice and reached out a hand to help him up, a reflex action of long standing. “Come on, man, let me help you up.”

His bodycam later would record the interaction and his words, “Fuck you. How y’all like this?” The agent had his M4 in hand now and pumped three rounds into Dan’s chest.

Then, the world let loose.

Not the controlled reports of a target range, but sharp, ringing gunfire cutting through shouts and sirens. In the videos that would later spread across the country, you see bodies flinch, heads turn, and then people crumple to the pavement.

It doesn’t end there. If it had, if the ICE agents had any meaningful training or discipline, it may have. But it doesn’t stop there.

An ICE agent screams, “MAN DOWN! CONTACT FRONT!”

Like one organism, dozens of weapons are raised, and unlike the agent from Arkansas, these men are steady on their feet and flick off their safeties before beginning long, cyclic bursts into the crowd.

They’re excited, off the leash, finally showing these domestic terrorists who’s boss. It happens so fast, even their leadership has no idea of what’s happening. Video will capture ICE commander Greg Bovino firing his sidearm into the crowd.

Seconds after the gunfire, the crowd’s disbelief rippled outward like a shockwave.

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Of the thousands of marchers that night, 158 lay dead or dying. People who had come to protest with signs now cried out in horror; others fell to their knees beside the wounded. ICE waded into the crowd, kicking and beating the survivors back from the still bodies in pools of blood freezing in the night air.

The crowd surged back, some in terror, others in shock, but almost all of them holding up their phones to film the horrors. The ICE agent in command started screaming over the din with a bullhorn, “CEASE FIRE CEASE FIRE! NO FILMING. THIS IS A NATIONAL SECURITY EMERGENCY. NO FILMING. ANYONE FILMING WILL BE ARRESTED.”

But the crowd kept filming. Kept recording the moment when America died.

It was live-streamed to the world, a digital indictment of the evil Donald Trump and Stephen Miller brought to our country. As ICE kept coming, trying to snatch phones from protestors, some agents caught up in the bloodlust of the moment took out their sidearms and went to work. Seven more Americans were killed for “resisting.”

An AP photojournalist captures two ICE agents fistbumping after one shoots a wounded protester in the head. It becomes an iconic image of the night. Greg Bovino is shown on video, his face drawn and frightened, yelling into his cell phone.

Even the Fox News audience is forced to witness the terror. They’d been hoping for another “good vs liberal” storyline to feed their media machine, another moment for a giggly Jesse Watters to caper about liberal wine moms. The live feed shows their audience the three brutal moments of the killing before a chipper host cuts and says, “Well, it looks like our brave ICE agents are under attack. We’ll be right back!”

It wasn’t a distant battlefield or a repressive regime on another continent; it was Nicolett Avenue, it was Minneapolis, it was America.

The MAGA reaction: The Ritual Absolution

The right-wing media industrial complex, shocked for a moment, goes into its familiar choreography; the one it learned on January 6, perfected in every police shooting it didn’t like to think too hard about, and now performs with the precision of a Cirque Du Soleil gymnast.

They will say the protestors made them do it. They will insist the crowd was “violent,” “out of control,” “rioting,” and, inevitably, “domestic terrorists.” They will describe Dan as a deranged Afghanistan vet, a terrorist cell leader. In reality, Dan was a brewer for a local beer company and a Little League coach.

They will find a single shaky clip, someone throwing a bottle, someone yelling too close, someone pushing back, and they will inflate it into a casus belli for war against the American people.

They will turn ICE agents, armed and armored, masked and malicious, into their own Horst Wessels. They’ll say the agents “feared for their lives,” because in MAGA-land, heavily armed men backed by the most puissant military and intelligence systems in the world, are afraid of snowballs, phone cameras, and harsh words yelled at them across the picket line. These weak and morally vacant goons treat the word “fear” like a magic wand: wave it, and you can erase the Bill of Rights.

Then comes the victim-blaming; old, nasty, and dependable. The dead will be posthumously indicted on Fox and Twitter. Dan and other victims’ old tweets and high school yearbook photos will be dragged out like exhibits in a show trial. If a victim owned and carried a firearm legally, it will be used as proof they “deserved it.” If the victim didn’t, they’ll invent something else.

And hovering over all of it will be the ugliest claim of all: that ICE agents enjoy “absolute immunity”: that they can shoot, beat, raid, and terrorize, and the law can do nothing but nod solemnly and change the subject. They will pretend that the ocean of blood spilled that night is a legal nothing, a trifle, all in a day’s work. Legal experts have already pointed out that this “absolute immunity” claim is false as a matter of law, but that won’t matter to the people selling the lie, particularly J.D. Vance, its most ambitious promoter.

Authoritarians always want immunity. It’s the point.

Trump and Miller will call this the first battle in the war to liberate Americans from domestic terrorism and declare the Insurrection Act in effect nationwide. MAGA media and influencers will copy-paste this call into a billion posts on Twitter and clips on YouTube.

And thus, the next American Civil War would have begun.

I can’t tell you how it ends.

But this is how it starts.

We’ve Seen this Movie Before

When government forces fire on civilians, the excuses are always the same, and the outcomes are always worse than the apologists can imagine.

It’s part of our origin story.

The Boston Massacre, 1770. British soldiers, a crowd, rising tensions, a flashpoint, and then gunfire. Snowballs and oyster shells were thrown at men armed with 75-caliber British Short Land Pattern rifles with bayonets. The results were bloody and transformative.

It was not the body count that turned it into history; it was the symbolism: the state, armed and unaccountable until that moment, firing into the public square. Americans didn’t become revolutionaries because they hated Britain.

They became revolutionaries because they understood what it means when power shoots first and has all the weapons.

Kent State, 1970. National Guard troops fired into a crowd of students protesting the Vietnam War. The official language at the time was saturated with the same tone we hear today: disorder, radicals, threats, provocations.

And then the searing, iconic photographs arrived. The sound of “law and order” turned, in the minds of millions, into the sound of rifle reports on an Ohio campus. Kent State didn’t just scar a generation; it permanently changed what Americans believed their government was capable of doing to them.

We can add other grim footnotes: labor conflicts where armed forces confronted strikers, civil rights protests met with state violence, demonstrations turned bloody because somebody in authority decided intimidation wasn’t enough. The pattern is constant: once the state learns it can shoot a crowd and survive the political consequences, it learns the next lesson quickly: it can shoot more crowds.

Iran: A Warning Written in Gunfire

If you want to see where the road leads when a regime labels dissent as treason and treats protestors as enemies, you don’t have to imagine it; you can read it ripped from today’s headlines.

In Iran this month, reports describe security forces firing directly at civilians amid protests and crackdowns, mass deaths, terrified families, bodies hidden from authorities, and a state that responds to public anger with bullets and blackouts. The estimates are staggering; up to 35,000 Iranians have been killed by their government in the past two weeks.

Until now, it was hard to compare even an imperfect America to Iran. We are two fundamentally different systems, different structures, different histories.

But the logic of repression is universal: define dissent as terror, grant the enforcers impunity, and call the shooting “self-defense.” Protect the regime, and all is forgiven. The vocabulary of death in Farsi or English varies; the method doesn’t.

The Images: The Moment the Country Wakes Up

Here is what MAGA never fully understands: they can launder language all day, but they can’t launder video. This is why the Renee Good murder and the Alex Pretti murder are different; with Good, there was an ambiguity in the video, a blurry moment where Jonathan Ross and his MAGA cheerleaders could claim he was “run over” by a “domestic terrorist” who “weaponized her vehicle.” It was a lie, but a lie that MAGA exploited to craft its own reality bubble.

Not so with Alex Pretti. The multiple angles of video are crisp, close, and damning.

When ICE fires into a crowd of protestors in the scenario I outlined above, the country will not experience it as a policy dispute. A hundred cameras will see it, capture it, and load it to the cloud as an eternal damnation of our fallen nation.

It will shatter this country.

Because the footage won’t look like a debate about immigration. It will look like what it is: armed agents of the state shooting Americans in the street.

And Americans, ordinary, busy, distracted Americans, will see themselves in that crowd.

They’ll see the parents. The students. The retirees. The guy who showed up with a sign because he gave a damn. They’ll see ICE firing and firing, winnowing down the crowd, and hear the screams and see the blood and know the stories of the victims of Donald Trump’s murderous domestic army.

And they’ll ask a question that cuts through propaganda like a blade: If they can do that to them, what stops them from doing it to me?

We’ve already watched the public reaction to ICE violence intensify in Minneapolis after repeated incidents and contested official narratives, precisely because videos and eyewitness accounts collide with the government’s storyline.

That collision, between the state’s account and the truth we all witness, is where our legitimacy as a free people goes to die.