Did you ever think the revolution would start in Minnesota? Prince did. So be a good neighbor.
Below is link to a YouTube video uploaded on 21 January 2026 by Frost Simula and followed by a transcript. Simula introduces himself as the First Gentleman of Columbia Heights, MN. His wife Amáda Márquez Simula is the mayor. Here is his description: “Trump’s retaliation against Minnesota is met with neighbors who look out for each other. All of the footage in this video is mine, shot by me. I witnessed all of these events personally.”
In related news: ICE vs. People of Minnesota: Community Resists Trump’s Militarized Crackdown – Special Report (20.1.26).
ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy as he came home, say school officials (22.1.26) 😢 🤬
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
There are people who haven’t left their home since the holidays because of Trump’s retaliation in Minnesota. It doesn’t matter if these people are currently going through the legal immigration process, or if they have completed their U.S. citizenship, or if they’re people who were born here in the United States. Minnesota residents are being terrorized by Trump’s secret police, and he’s focused his assault on our most diverse communities, including our First Nations indigenous people, if you can believe it.
I’m the first gentleman of Columbia Heights. That means I’m married to the mayor. We’re one of the most diverse cities in Minnesota outside of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Fun fact, we have one of the highest populations of Tibetans anywhere in the U.S. This is my neighborhood. I’ve got neighbors from Iraq, Egypt, Poland, Tibet, Ecuador, and Mexico. We have the very first mosque in Minnesota, and we even have police officers from places like Somalia and Bosnia.
Just a block away are a few of our schools where our student body speaks 31 different languages, and we love it. The Trump secret police know it too, and they are here watching, picking up students and parents as they come and go from school. We have a ton of immigrant home businesses in Columbia Heights, and we love them.
Want some amazing desserts and Dubai chocolate? This is your spot. Best samosas money can buy. If you haven’t been to one of their iftars, you’re missing out.
A lot of our favorite businesses are now closed. People are afraid to go to work, go to school, buy groceries, or even step outside to shovel their driveways. This is Minnesota, and we look out for our neighbors, right? We’ve been shoveling each other’s snow and pushing each other’s cars out of snowbanks for a hundred years.
There’s no way that we’re about to let Trump’s goons starve out our neighbors. You know, we’ve always taken care of each other, but during the pandemic we set up mutual aid networks to run errands and help out vulnerable people who were just trying to stay safe in their homes. That never stopped.
Today, we’re still helping each other. You think the weather is gonna stop us? It’s actually too cold to snow today. Did you even know that was a thing? We’ve got Arctic explorer Will Seeger here in Minnesota.
We know how to gear up. You think 31 languages is gonna be a barrier for us? We’ve got tools to overcome that. We show up for each other, and that’s what we’re doing right now.
Like a neighborhood watch times a thousand. We’ve got patrols. We’ve got guards.
We’ve got communication networks and dispatchers and first responders, and we are tracking Trump’s secret police every minute of every day. When they turn up, we step up. We get loud.
We make noise to alert everyone. We surround them with cameras to record their every move, and we report every crime they commit to our Attorney General. At every turn, these agents are escalating and intentionally trying to get us to do something violent, but if they think that we’re gonna give Trump an excuse to use the Insurrection Act, they have seriously underestimated who they are dealing with.
But you know, we’re not soldiers. We don’t have assault weapons. We don’t have a base.
We don’t have titles or ranks or a chain of command. We’re just neighbors, just doing the best we can. And now some heavily armed white supremacists have shown up, staying in the same hotel as Trump’s goons.
They’ve already threatened our volunteers. They’re doing their best to agitate us, but it’s not work. You know, here in Columbia Heights, Trump’s secret police are attacking our residents every single day, sometimes multiple times per hour.
We haven’t seen a single signed judicial warrant yet. They’re intentionally crashing cars and then pulling people out and then abandoning the victim’s car, and just sometimes it’s still running. They’re invading people’s homes, you know, bashing in the doors and windows.
They’re invading businesses, some of them in plain clothes, no badges. They’re even luring people outside with lies like, oh, there’s been a fender bender in the parking lot. Can you come and take a look so we can trade insurance information? And then abducting someone.
They’re breaking every rule of law enforcement and they have taken so many people. Not criminals, not illegals, just ordinary people who have every right to be here. Most of them get released.
So why have there been so many people targeted in the first place? It’s because Trump has set a massive quota for his secret police, and they’re just racially profiling. They’re just taking anyone. So if you’re not as pale as me, chances are high that you’re going to have a very un-Minnesotan day with an agent.
Did you know they even boxed in a Latina on the highway? Turns out she’s a cop. They didn’t care. They didn’t even run her license plates.
They just saw her complexion and got aggressive. Our local police are doing their best to trespass Trump’s goons when they can, but it’s a federal crime for any law enforcement or an elected official to interfere with these operations. And now Trump has more agents in Minnesota than our 10 biggest police departments combined.
Our mutual aid networks are not going to stop. Our volunteers are not giving up. This is Minnesota.
A lot of us are hunters. That doesn’t make us soldiers. We’re overrun. We’re overwhelmed and we need help. We need something like the Minnesota State Guard to be reinstated, reactivated, and deployed to protect our communities. Renee Macklin-Goode was the best of us, and they knew it because since her murder, Trump has been sending more and more secret police into Minnesota.
Instead of deporting hordes of criminals, he’s just galvanizing communities. Did you ever think the revolution would start in Minnesota? Prince did. So be a good neighbor.
Get trained as a constitutional observer. And when you see Trump’s goons, remember, alert, record, share. Keep up the good fight.
An International Educator in Vietnam 
Trump Is About To Find Out What Every Bully in History Has Found Out
Last year, Trump had a lot of people scared. But there are good—and encouraging—reasons to think that this year will be different.
January 20, 2026 Michael Tomasky The New Republic
https://portside.org/2026-01-20/trump-about-find-out-what-every-bully-history-has-found-out
Minnesota’s General Strike, and America’s – It may be a precursor
Robert Reich
Jan 23
Friends,
Today, Minnesota is shutting down in solidarity.
It’s the nation’s first general strike in response to Trump’s thuggery.
Across the state, businesses are closed. People are not shopping. Workers have stayed home or called in sick. Labor unions are encouraging work stoppages. Residents are helping one another. It’s an economic blackout.
Organizers are calling it a “Day of Truth and Freedom.”
It could be a model for what the nation as a whole does in coming months, to repudiate the Trump dictatorship.
Ana Marie Cox writing in yesterday’s TNR, noted that Minnesota is a natural leader for this kind of thing. “It is impossible to get through a Minnesota winter without help, and only sometimes does that assistance come from your neighbors. The stories about people shoveling out or snow blowing an entire block’s driveways without being asked and with no compensation are true, but the real miracles (and just as common) are the times when strangers stop to help someone shovel out a car caught in a snowbank or bring out the kitty litter from their trunk put there just for this kind of emergency.”
Cox goes on to say: “People offer assistance without hesitation and without question; I don’t think I ever even heard someone dismiss thanks with, ‘Just pay it back someday.’ Of course you will—everyone knows it. Some might find it remarkable that the generosity exists right alongside the stubborn interpersonal Midwestern micro-distance that can take years to thaw. But the caution of their relationships speaks to the universality of the principle: You don’t help people out because you like them. You just do.
That’s the predicate for the ground-level resistance, and widespread involvement of newly activated residents, to ICE’s occupation. It offers one reason why the mobilization in Minneapolis has cut across class and racial lines even more deeply than the response to George Floyd’s murder.
As Cox says, “it’s more than eight minutes of murderous cruelty caught on a cell phone, it’s more than the assassination of Renee Nicole Good. ICE is an army of Derek Chauvins and Jonathan Rosses, released to wreak havoc on the city every day. The memory is keen, the trauma is immediate and sustained, and the strength underneath the response is the work of decades.”
The decency of Minnesotans is mirrored in a dozen other Minnesota mutual-aid traditions: Lutheran churches seeded what has become the largest refugee population per capita in the United States. Minnesota has had a labor organizing movement since before it became a state. Minnesota created the first high-risk pool in the country to insure “the uninsurable” in 1976.
Cox urges us to look around our own neck of the woods. Our own communities might need us to help seed a little resilience — now, before a crisis arrives to consume us and even if it’s not in a sub-Arctic clime.
This is not a bad time to take groceries to a free fridge in your city. Or maybe: Find a chore to do for a neighbor now, before they need it. Or maybe: Get trained on Naloxone administration. Volunteer to walk dogs. Start a tool library. Learn some names.
Most importantly: Sign up for the ICE watch that’s happening near you. Because almost certainly, ICE is already there. What Trump is doing to Minneapolis is the template for what Trump wants to bring to your hometown next. How Minneapolis is responding should be our template too.
The man killed by a US Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says (25.1.26) https://apnews.com/article/immigration-enforcement-minnesota-protester-alex-pretti-15ade7de6e19cb0291734e85dac763dc
Rachel Hurley
Pam Bondi just gave America the clearest window yet into what this is actually about. And it’s not immigration.
Today – the same day federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse in Minneapolis whose only prior offense was a couple traffic tickets – Bondi fired off a letter to Governor Tim Walz with a list of demands. Most of it was the usual: end sanctuary policies, cooperate with ICE, hand over Medicaid data. But buried in the demands was this gem:
“Allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law.”
Read that again.
The Attorney General is demanding access to every Minnesota voter’s personal information – names, addresses, birth dates, driver’s license numbers – in a letter explicitly connected to stopping ICE operations in the state.
This isn’t subtext anymore. This is text.
Bondi’s been suing states for their voter data since last summer. DOJ has already filed lawsuits against 14 states – California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, and more – for refusing to hand over their voter rolls. Every single one is a state that went for Biden. Every single one has refused to comply.
The courts have mostly told DOJ to pound sand. A California judge threw out their lawsuit, warning it would have a “chilling effect on voter registration.” Oregon dismissed theirs too. Georgia’s got tossed for being filed in the wrong district. But Bondi keeps filing.
And now she’s connecting those voter roll demands directly to Minnesota’s “compliance” with immigration enforcement. Give us your voters’ personal data, or the federal occupation continues.
Here’s what you need to understand about what “voter roll access” actually means. It’s not about checking if dead people are registered. It’s not about verifying citizenship. That’s the cover story. The real play is building a federal database of every voter in swing states – addresses, registration dates, party affiliations – that can be cross-referenced with immigration data, benefits data, whatever data they can get their hands on.
Senator Chris Murphy laid it out: “This has never been about safety or immigration. It’s a pretext for Trump to take over elections in swing states.”
Consider the timeline. Trump said on January 9th that Minnesota is “crooked” and “corrupt” because officials there “accurately reported election results and those results did not declare him the winner.” His actual quote: “I won Minnesota three times and I didn’t get credit for it. That’s a crooked state.”
Within weeks, Minnesota had 3,000 federal agents on the ground – more than the sworn police officers in Minneapolis and St. Paul combined. Two people have been shot dead by federal agents in three weeks. Today’s victim was an American citizen, a nurse, legally carrying a firearm with a permit. Bystander video shows agents wrestling him to the ground, removing his gun from his waistband, and then shooting him at least ten times while he lay motionless.
And hours later, Bondi’s letter arrives demanding voter rolls.
The Minneapolis lawsuit against the Trump administration – filed by the city, the state AG, and others – lays it out explicitly: “Immigration enforcement is clearly a pretext for the surge, as the percentage of Minnesota’s population that are noncitizen immigrants without legal status sits at roughly 1.5%, which is less than half of the national average.”
So why Minnesota? Why not Arizona, with its actual border? Why not Texas?
Because Minnesota is a swing state Trump believes he won. Because Tim Walz was Kamala Harris’s running mate. Because Ilhan Omar’s district is there. Because this administration sees a blue state it can’t flip at the ballot box and decided to flip it with federal agents instead.
The quid pro quo is right there in Bondi’s letter. Do what we want on immigration, do what we want on benefits fraud – and give us your voter data while you’re at it. Or the federal occupation continues.
This is what it looks like when immigration enforcement becomes election enforcement. Same agents, same tactics, different target.
They shot an ICU nurse ten times today. And then they asked for the voter rolls.
#ratcclips
Scott Pilutik
There’s a new video of a new ICE shooting in Minneapolis, it’ll be easy enough to find/hard enough to avoid.
It’s disturbing on multiple levels, the first being merely for what it shows–multiple ICE “officers” surrounding a man who had been recording them on his phone (I included his photo from one of the videos), dragging him toward the ground, and pummeling him. One “officer” grabs what appears to be possibly a gun from the man’s belt and runs toward the camera. A moment later, multiple shots are fired (it’s difficult from the video to make out exactly who shot him first, but there appears to be at least two shooters), and the man is dead on the sidewalk.
At no point in the video is there any indication that the man posed a threat to the “officers,” especially given that multiple “officers” were enaging with the man.
I think they’re going to make a lot of the “fact” that the man was supposedly armed (a fact I’m hardly conceding b/c the DHS has been thoroughly dishonest and unaccountable), but concealed and even open carry isn’t illegal in MN. Regardless, the man does not appear to have posed any danger. And again, to the extent a gun was removed from the man (which the video suggests may be the case), the shots were fired *after* he was disarmed.
Every element here adds up to murder, and I can only hope that these thugs, who reportedly tried to intimidate witnesses immediately after, will be held accountable.
ICE needs to be dissolved completely, it’s basically a terrorist organization acting under color of law. They don’t need “better training,” either, they need to find jobs where they can’t kill people through their malevolence.
Michael Gibson
Another ICE Murder in Minnesota
I watched the videos myself. Not clips, not headlines, not White House talking points. The actual footage.
The White House is lying. Trump is lying. Again.
This man was protecting a woman that has just been body slammed by ICE agents. As he remained with a camera in between the lady and the ice officers, protecting her, they pepper sprayed Pretti who was already on the ground.
Seven or eight armed ICE officers were on top of him. His entire body and hands were restrained. He was not advancing. He was not reaching. He was not resisting in any meaningful way.
Then someone coward yelled “gun.”
Not because he was firing it. Not because he was pointing it. But because officers felt a legally carried weapon on a man who was already immobilized.
That shout became the justification.
They shot Alex Jeffrey Pretti ten times while he lay on the ground under their control.
Ten times.
That is not self-defense. That is not a split-second decision. That is not policing under pressure.
That is an execution.
The White House is now doing what it always does after a killing: racing ahead of the facts to manufacture a false media narrative that makes the violence sound inevitable. If a man had a gun, they argue, then killing him becomes acceptable by default.
Pretti was legally licensed in a conceal carry state to have a firearm.
It is a weak narrative. It is a dishonest narrative. More importantly, they know it.
What makes this moment different is that their own coalition is fracturing.
There is a real rift inside the Republican Party right now. Pro Second Amendment conservatives are saying what should be obvious: carrying a firearm is not a death sentence. Legal gun ownership does not grant federal agents permission to kill a person who is already restrained.
That position directly collides with the Trump White House narrative, which depends on redefining “armed” to mean “killable.”
You cannot claim to defend the Second Amendment while justifying the execution of a man for possessing a firearm.
Both things cannot be true.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, put out a communication that the Democrats will not pass any bills in the Senate that includes ICE funding and this type of lawlessness.
This is unfolding as a government shutdown looms next week. Democrats should not cave. Not again. The last time they did, it only emboldened this administration to push harder, lie faster, and normalize more violence under the color of law.
This is not about politics.
It is about reality versus propaganda.
Anyone with functioning eyes can see what happened on that ground. Anyone with a conscience knows what it was.
Ten shots into a restrained man is not law enforcement.
It is murder.
When the Masked Men Came for America
Mitch Jackson
Jan 25
This is not security. This is not law enforcement. This is what happens when power abandons restraint and calls it order. Masked agents with guns in American streets, issuing commands without accountability, is not normal and it is not acceptable. It is a warning sign. And now the responsibility is no longer abstract. It sits with you.
We are being fed a simple lie over and over again that undocumented immigrants are the problem. That they are the threat. That if only we empower harsher enforcement and look the other way while men with guns roam our streets, everything will be fine.
That lie collapsed on January 7th with the murder of Renee Good and again this past Saturday with the execution of Alex Pretti. That lie fell apart when we watch ICE agents hitting, beating, kicking and spraying protestors almost like sport. Their disgusting commands and language coming from unidentified masked faces violates everything we know about serving and protecting.
Those deaths and these actions are not happening in a vacuum. They are the predictable result of corrupt leadership, reckless rhetoric, and the normalization of state violence by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Pam Bondi, ICE leadership, and a MAGA Republican political movement that has abandoned the Constitution in favor of raw power.
Trump, Vance and Bondi are always quick to deflect without knowing the facts or conducting an investigation. They did what they always do. They blamed. They smeared. They labeled. They described Pretti and Good as domestic terrorists and suggested responsibility lay anywhere except with the policies and people they put in place. Both Trump and Vance once again leaned into the language of dehumanization, casting fellow human beings as enemies of the state. Bondi echoed that posture, treating tragedy as a talking point rather than a moment of accountability. The goal was not truth. The goal was cover.
Alex Pretti and Renee Good were not terrorists. They were human beings. They were members of communities. They were people with families, histories, and lives that mattered. Reducing them to slogans after their deaths is not leadership. It is cowardice. It is an attempt to launder violence through language so no one at the top ever has to answer for what happened on the ground.
What should terrify every American is not immigration. It is the sight of armed officers and ICE agents patrolling city streets in full body armor, faces covered, weapons visible, no clear identification, issuing commands to citizens as if constitutional rights are optional. This is not normal. This is not lawful. This is not American. When men with guns and masks demand obedience without accountability, you are no longer talking about public safety. You are talking about intimidation.
The Constitution does not evaporate because someone claims authority. The Fourth Amendment still exists. Due process still exists. The right to know who is exercising power over you still exists. Yet we are being conditioned to accept the opposite. We are being told this is what security looks like. We are being told to get used to it.
I am here to tell you this is not security. This is not normal. This is the opposite of what this country stands for, and it is now on you to decide whether you will accept it or stop it.
The silence from elected officials is just as damning as the actions themselves. Every mayor, governor, member of Congress, and cabinet official who is not loudly demanding this stop is complicit. This is not a moment for careful statements or political triangulation. This is a moment for resignations, impeachments, and prosecutions where the facts warrant them. Leadership means drawing lines and enforcing them, not waiting to see how the polls move.
The misconduct of ICE is being normalized. Raids that look like military operations. Detentions without transparency. Escalations without oversight. When misconduct becomes routine, accountability disappears. The same is true for the misconduct of our elected leaders and their appointees. Each time Trump and Vance excuse violence. Each time Bondi defends the indefensible. Each time MAGA Republicans fall in line. The bar drops lower.
This country was not built on fear. It was built on the radical idea that power must answer to the people. That no one is above the law. That uniforms do not replace warrants. That loyalty to the Constitution matters more than loyalty to a man. We are watching those principles be treated as inconveniences.
A real president would act differently. A real president would go on television and tell the country the truth. He would announce that ICE is being pulled from city streets immediately. He would place the entire agency on hold pending a full review of hiring, training, and procedures. He would fire leadership that failed in its duty. He would appoint special counsel where there is credible evidence of criminal conduct. He would stand in front of the nation and say that no American should fear masked agents with guns in their own neighborhoods.
A real president would remember his oath. He would understand that unity does not come from force. It comes from trust. Safety does not come from terror. It comes from legitimacy. None of that is possible with a convicted felon, a demagogue, and a grievance machine at the wheel.
So here we are. America is in trouble. Not because of immigrants seeking a better life, but because too many people in power have decided the rules no longer apply to them. They blame the victims who are everyday people like you and me. This week during Jack Smith’s testimony they blamed Capital police for the January 6th riots. They constantly tell you not to believe what you see and hear.
This is the moment that will be studied later. The moment people will ask what Americans did when the line was crossed.
Every single one of us has to decide what we are willing to tolerate next. Whether we will accept intimidation as governance. Whether we will accept lies as leadership. Whether we will look away while the country we claim to love is hollowed out from the inside.
History does not turn on speeches alone. It turns on choices. This is one of those moments.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
Morale is plummeting among ICE agents over long hours, quotas and public hatred: reports (26.1.26) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-agents-morale-reports-minneapolis-shooting-b2907742.html