Month: January 2026

The Trump administration says federal agents have “absolute immunity” from prosecution in Minneapolis. Department of Justice and Homeland Security officials have indicated that criminal investigations into the killings by immigration agents of Minneapolis protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti are inappropriate, declaring that both were domestic terrorists.

The killing of Good and Pretti raises legal, tactical and policy questions regarding law enforcement practices by federal agents.

In December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security launched “Operation Metro Surge” to enforce immigration laws in Minneapolis. The operation is being conducted by federal agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. One of the stated goals of Metro Surge is to arrest the “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”

Metro Surge has also affected the lives of U.S. citizens, including citizens protesting immigration enforcement efforts. On Jan. 7, 2026, Good – a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three – was shot and killed in her vehicle by an ICE agent on a residential street in Minneapolis. On Jan. 24, 2026, CBP agents shot and killed 37-year-old Pretti, a U.S. citizen, on a public street in Minneapolis.

As a policing scholar and former FBI special agent, I believe these cases illustrate how some federal agents are engaging with the public in a way that undermines established principles of policing and constitutional law.

Law of deadly force

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons … against unreasonable … seizures.” A law enforcement officer’s use of force – including deadly force – is considered in law to be a seizure and must be reasonable.

In the 1989 decision Graham v. Connor, the U.S. Supreme Court construed the objective “reasonableness” of force based upon “the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” The court explained “reasonableness” in light of the idea that police officers must sometimes make “split-second” judgments.

In Tennessee v. Garner, the Supreme Court in 1985 established that the use of deadly force to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect is unreasonable unless the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.

These legal principles form the basis of DHS deadly force policy, which is similar to the policy I followed as an FBI agent: Law enforcement officers, or LEOs, “may use deadly force only when the LEO has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the LEO or to another person.”

The legal question raised by the Good and Pretti killings is whether the officers had a reasonable belief that Good and Pretti posed an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the officers.

Moments before the ICE agent killed Good, the agent walked around Good’s parked vehicle filming Good with his phone in one hand. Good, sitting behind the wheel in her car, says “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you.”

As the shooting agent positions himself in front of Good’s vehicle, a second agent walks quickly toward Good’s vehicle and tries to open the door and reach inside. Good turns her steering wheel and tries to drive away – what a law enforcement agent could interpret as potentially an act of fleeing. The agent in front of Good’s vehicle shoots Good three times as she drives by him. He then mutters, “f-cking b-tch,” and walks away from Good’s crashed vehicle. There is dispute about whether Good’s vehicle grazed the agent.

Moments before Pretti was killed by federal agents, he was standing in a public street when agents approached him and sprayed him with a chemical agent. Pretti’s hands are visible and show that he is holding a cellphone.

The agents wrestle Pretti to the ground and repeatedly beat him with an object. Pretti is not seen brandishing a firearm. However, an agent approaches Pretti during the scuffle and appears to remove a firearm from Pretti’s waistband. Shortly thereafter, agents shoot Pretti 10 times. Pretti had kicked the taillight of a law enforcement vehicle – and was then tackled and tear-gassed by agents – 11 days before he was killed.

Some former federal prosecutors argue that these facts in the Good and Pretti cases warrant a thorough criminal investigation regarding whether federal agents illegally used lethal force in the killings. The central legal question is whether the evidence shows that the agents reasonably feared for their lives, or whether they acted unlawfully out of anger, frustration, retaliation or some other unjustified mental state.

Tactics, policy and split-second decisions

Beyond legal questions, Operation Metro Surge raises tactical and policy questions about DHS law enforcement practices.

State, local and federal law enforcement officers are required to follow firearms safety rules. While training at the FBI Academy at Quantico, I was required to learn and follow the cardinal safety rules, which include (1) treating all firearms as loaded, (2) keeping firearms pointed in a safe direction and (3) keeping one’s finger off the trigger until one is ready to press it.

These rules help keep officers and the public safe, including by preventing unintentional discharges of firearms.

There were multiple bystanders and officers in the immediate vicinity of both the Good and the Pretti shootings. That raised risks associated with unintentional discharges and jeopardizing officers’ ability to meet the requirement to respect human life.

DHS officers specifically are also required to “employ tactics and techniques that effectively bring an incident under control while promoting the safety of LEOs and the public,” which includes avoiding “intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.”

In both the Good and the Pretti cases, federal agents placed themselves in poor tactical positions that increased the likelihood of using deadly force.

When feasible, DHS agents are required to issue a verbal warning to comply with the agent’s instructions. Agents rushed to physically remove Good from her vehicle and similarly rushed to push Pretti off the street and then spray him with a chemical agent. There is reason to think the agents could have taken a more measured, composed and communicative approach to de-escalate the situation.

These tactical and policy principles reveal that the legal analysis of an agent’s “split-second” decision to use deadly force is not the only issue raised by these cases. Analysis of the seconds and minutes leading to the use of force is also crucial.

Warriors in the community

ICE and CBP federal agents are not police officers. However, they are law enforcement officers engaged in policing. Operation Metro Surge has made these agents highly visible.

Instead of the more traditional, methodical and long-term investigations they normally conduct, federal agents are now routinely taking on more of a traditional police role in the public eye. This role ranges from managing traffic violations to maintaining order during chaotic public protests.

Although the surge has brought these agents closer to a traditional police role, they are pursuing a militarized warrior model of policing.

Masked federal agents in tactical gear roaming the streets of Minneapolis blur the line between civilian and military policing. Coupled with events such as the killings of Good and Pretti, it is unsurprising that public trust is eroding not only in federal law enforcement agencies such as ICE but also in police departments generally.

Policing is difficult work under any circumstance. If federal agents continue to increase their interactions with the public, I believe they will need to embrace tactics from community policing and what is called procedurally just models of policing. These models emphasize building popular legitimacy by reinforcing relationships – through honest cooperation and partnership between law enforcement officers and the public.

The rule of law

Publicly available facts and evidence raise significant questions about whether federal agents acted contrary to established principles of policing and constitutional law in the deaths of Good and Pretti.

The rule of law is a cornerstone of liberal democracies that limits the exercise of discretionary or arbitrary power by government officials. This idea includes holding officials accountable when there is evidence of unauthorized uses of power. A thorough investigation into DHS tactics, I believe, is necessary to preserve the rule of law.

Luke William Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Tens of millions of Americans have now seen video of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. The activities organized in response have not been initiated by outside agitators or left-wing zealots, but, rather, by everyday Americans protesting the tactics of federal agents in that city.

These community members are communicating over encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and using their cellphones to record Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers. Some have been using apps such as ICEBlock to help monitor ICE activities. They are using 3D printers to mass-produce whistles for community members to blow to alert each other when federal agents are in the area.

While the technology in some of these instances is new, this pattern – grassroots activists using the latest technology literally at their fingertips – is older than the republic itself. As a legal scholar who has studied American social movements and their relationship to technology, I see that what regular Americans in Minneapolis are doing is part of a very American tradition: building on trusted interpersonal relationships by harnessing the most recent technology to supercharge their organizing.

From Colonial era to the Civil Rights Movement

As the first stirrings of the American revolutionary spirit emerged in the 1770s, leaders formed the committees of correspondence to coordinate among the Colonies and in 1774 formed the Continental Congress. They harnessed the power of the printing press to promote tracts such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. One of the first acts of the new Congress was to create what it called the Constitutional Post, a mail system from the Maine territories to Georgia that enabled the colonists to communicate safely, out of reach of loyalist postmasters.

And the date Americans will be celebrating in 2026 as the 250th anniversary of the United States, July 4, commemorates when the drafters of the Declaration of Independence sent the final document to John Dunlap, rebel printer. In other words, what we celebrate as the birth of our nation is when the founders pressed “send.”

In the 1830s, as the battle over slavery in the new nation began to emerge, a new type of printing press, one powered by steam, helped supercharge the abolitionist movement. It could print antislavery broadsides much more rapidly and cheaply than manual presses.

The introduction of the telegraph in 1848 helped launch the women’s rights movement, spreading word of its convention in Seneca Falls, New York, while similar meetings had not quite caught the public’s imagination.

Fast-forward over 100 years in U.S. history to the Civil Rights Movement. Leaders of that movement embraced and harnessed the power of a new technology – television – and worked to create opportunities for broadcast media to beam images of authorities attacking young people in Birmingham, Alabama, and marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama, into living rooms across the United States. The images galvanized support for legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Social movements today

Today, new technologies and capabilities such as the smartphone and social media are making it easier for activists – and even those who have never seen themselves as activists – to get involved and help their neighbors. But it’s important not to mistake the method of communication for a movement. Indeed, without people behind the smartphones or as members of a group chat, there is no movement.

And what is happening in Minneapolis and in places across the country is still people organizing. Mutual aid networks are sprouting up nearly everywhere that immigration enforcement agents are amassed to carry out the Trump administration’s deportation policies, helped but not supplanted by technology. These technologies are important tools to support and catalyze the on-the-ground work.

It’s also important for advocates and would-be advocates to know the limits of such technologies and the risks that they can pose. These tools can sap a movement of energy, such as when someone posts a meme or “likes” a message on a social media platform and thinks they have done their part to support a grassroots effort.

There are also risks with any of these digital technologies, something the founders realized when they created their independent postal system. That is, use of these tools can also facilitate surveillance, expose networks to disruption and make people vulnerable to doxing or worse: charges that they are aiding and abetting criminal behavior.

Technology and trust

Most importantly, while technological tools might facilitate communication, they are no substitute for trust, the type of trust that can be forged only in face-to-face encounters. And that’s another thing that activists across American history have known since before the nation’s founding.

Until the late 1960s, groups participating in the work of democracy have often formed themselves into what political scientist Theda Skocpol calls “translocal networks”: collectives organized into local chapters connected to state, regional and even national networks.

It was in those local chapters where Americans practiced what French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville described in his visit to the United States in the 1830s as uniquely American: the “infinite art” of association and organizing. Americans used this practice to solve all manner of local problems. The local manifestations of those groups would often then engage in larger campaigns, whether to promote women’s rights in the 19th century or civil rights in the 20th.

Today’s technologies are reigniting the kind of grassroots activism that is deeply rooted in trust and solidarity, one block, one text message, one video at a time. It is also a profoundly American method of protest, infused with and catalyzed – but not replaced – by the technology such movements embrace.

Ray Brescia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Minneapolis residents say they feel besieged under what some are calling a fascist occupation. Thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been swarming a city whose vast majority in 2024 did not vote for Donald Trump – or for a paramilitary roundup of its diverse population.

Tragically, two residents have been killed by federal agents. Consequently, social media is aflame with comparisons of Trump’s immigration enforcers to Hitler’s Gestapo.

While comparisons to Hitler’s fascist regime are becoming common, I’d argue that it may be even more fitting to compare the present moment to a less-remembered but longer-lasting fascist regime: that of Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975.

In 2016, critics warned that Trump’s campaign rhetoric was grounded in textbook fascism, exhibiting signs such as racism, sexism and misogyny, nationalism, propaganda and more. In return, critics were met with intense backlash, accused of being hysterical or overly dramatic.

Now, even normally sober voices are sounding the alarm that America may be falling to fascist rule.

As a scholar of Spanish culture, I, too, see troubling parallels between Franco’s Spain and Trump’s America.

Putting them side by side, I believe, provides insightful tools that are needed to understand the magnitude of what’s at risk today.

Franco’s rise and reign

The Falange party started off as a a small extremist party on the margins of Spanish society, a society deeply troubled with political and economic instability. The party primarily preached a radical nationalism, a highly exclusive way to be and act Spanish. Traditional gender roles, monolingualism and Catholicism rallied people by offering absolutist comfort during uncertain times. Quickly, the Falange grew in power and prevalence until, ultimately, it moved mainstream.

By 1936, the party had garnered enough support from the Catholic Church, the military, and wealthy landowners and businessmen that a sizable amount of the population accepted Gen. Francisco Franco’s coup d’etat: a military crusade of sorts that sought to stop the perceived anarchy of liberals living in godless cities. His slogan, “¡Una, Grande, Libre!,” or “one, great, free,” mobilized people who shared the Falange’s anxieties.

Like the Falange, MAGA, the wing of the U.S. Republican Party named after Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again,” repeatedly vilifies the left, who mostly live in cities, as godless anarchists who live like vermin.

Once in power, the Francoist regime commissioned a secret police force, the Political-Social Brigade – known as the BPS – to “clean up house.” The BPS was charged with suppressing or killing any political, social, cultural or linguistic dissidents.

Weakening resistance

Franco not only weaponized the military but also proverbially enlisted the Catholic Church. He colluded with the clergy to convince parishioners, especially women, of their divine duty to multiply, instill nationalist Catholic values in their children, and thus reproduce ideological replicas of both the state and the church. From the pulpit, homemakers were extolled as “ángeles del hogar” and “heroínas de la patria,” or “angels of the home” and “heroines of the homeland.”

Together, Franco and the church constructed consent for social restrictions, including outlawing or criminalizing abortion, contraception, divorce, work by women and other women’s rights, along with even tolerating uxoricide, or the killing of wives, for their perceived sexual transgressions.

Some scholars contend that the repealing of women’s reproductive rights is the first step away from a fully democratic society. For this reason and more, many are concerned about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The #tradwife social media trend involves far-right platforms echoing Francoist-style ideologies of submission, restriction, dependence and white male dominance. One of TikTok’s most popular tradwife influencers, for instance, posted that “there is no higher calling than being a wife and a mother for a woman.” She also questioned young women attending college and rebuked, on air, wives who deny their husbands sexual intimacy.

Weakening the economy

Economically, Franco implemented autarkic policies, a system of limited trade designed to isolate Spain and protect it from anti-Spanish influences. He utilized high tariffs, strict quotas, border controls and currency manipulation, effectively impoverishing the nation and vastly enriching himself and his cronies.

These policies flew under the motto “¡Arriba España!,” or “Up Spain.” They nearly immediately triggered more than a decade of suffering known as the “hunger years.” An estimated 200,000 Spaniards died from famine and disease.

Under the slogan “America First” – Trump’s mutable but aggressive tariff regime – the $1 billion or more in personal wealth he’s accumulated while in office, along with his repeated attempts to cut nutrition benefits in blue states and his administration’s anti-vaccine policies may appear to be disconnected. But together, they galvanize an autarkic strategy that threatens to debilitate the country’s health.

Weakening the mind

Franco’s dictatorship systematically purged, exiled and repressed the country’s intellectual class. Many were forced to emigrate. Those who stayed in the country, such as the artist Joan Miró, were forced to bury their messages deeply within symbols and metaphor to evade censorship.

Currently in the U.S., banned books, banned words and phrases, and the slashing of academic and research funding across disciplines are causing the U.S. to experience “brain drain,” an exodus of members of the nation’s highly educated and skilled classes.

Furthermore, Franco conjoined the church, the state and education into one. I am tracking analogous moves in the U.S. The conservative group Turning Point USA has an educational division whose goal is to ‘reclaim” K-12 curriculum with white Christian nationalism.

Ongoing legislation that mandates public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments similarly violates religious freedom guarantees ratified in the constitution.

Drawing comparisons

Trump has frequently expressed admiration for contemporary dictators and last week stated that “sometimes you need a dictator.”

It is true that his tactics do not perfectly mirror Francoism or any other past fascist regime. But the work of civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander reminds us that systems of control do not disappear. They morph, evolve and adapt to sneak into modern contexts in less detectable ways. I see fascism like this.

Consider some of the recent activities in Minneapolis, and ask how they would be described if they were taking place in any other country.

Unidentified masked individuals in unmarked cars are forcibly entering homes without judicial warrants. These agents are killing, shooting and roughing up people, sometimes while handcuffed. They are tear-gassing peaceful protesters, assaulting and killing legal observers, and throwing flash grenades at bystanders. They are disappearing people of color, including four Native Americans and a toddler as young as 2, shipping them off to detention centers where allegations of abuse, neglect, sexual assault and even homicide are now frequent.

Government officials have spun deceptive narratives, or worse, lied about the administration’s actions.

In the wake of the public and political backlash following the killing of Alex Pretti, Trump signaled he would reduce immigration enforcement operations] in Minneapolis, only to turn around and have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorize the use of an old military base near St. Paul, suggesting potential escalation, not de-escalation. Saying one thing while doing the opposite is a classic fascist trick warned about in history and literature alike.

The world has seen these tactics before. History shows the precedent and then supplies the bad ending. Comparing past Francoism to present Trumpism connects the past to the present and warns us about what could come.

Rachelle Wilson Tollemar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation