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ICE is disappearing people.

This is a grim and difficult piece, but it is heartening to read it one particular way: the broader national and global conversation is finally, finally starting to pick up on what so many of us have been yelling for weeks and months: the Department of Homeland Security is acting as Trump’s secret police, a group of Brownshirts with a military-sized budget whose horrors extend far beyond two murders.

https://emptywheel.net/2026/01/29/the-disappearances-in-minnesota/

emptywheel

The Disappearances in Minnesota - emptywheel

Right now, all the focus is on competing videos of conflicts involving Alex Pretti and his murderers. But the bulk of kidnapping that proves this is a paramilitary occupation remains disappeared.

Paul Cantrell

@inthehands@hachyderm.io replied · 15 hours ago

It was the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti that punctured the bubble of the comfortable and launched Minneapolis to the top of international news. I understand why that is: the whiteness of the victims combined with unbelievable damning, stomach-churning video were something that a whole lot of people who’d been tuned out simply could not ignore. And those murders alone are so horrific that either one •should• be sufficient to pop the bubble of comfort — but they’re just the tip of an iceberg here.

Paul Cantrell

@inthehands@hachyderm.io replied · 15 hours ago

For many people who’d been inside that bubble of comfort, particularly at national news orgs, the story •started• with those two murders. They now seem to have a half-formed mental narrative that runs something like this:

❝
1. First the Trump administration started deporting a lot more people.
2. Then ICE murdered Good and Pretti.
3. Those two escalations caused widespread unrest in Minneapolis.
❞

That narrative is wrong.

Paul Cantrell

@inthehands@hachyderm.io replied · 15 hours ago

White people did not start protesting because ICE murdered Good and Pretti.

ICE murdered Good and Pretti •because• white people were protesting — and fighting back.

Paul Cantrell

@inthehands@hachyderm.io replied · 15 hours ago

People were jumping into action here in Minneapolis — droves of people, comfortable people, white people — not in mid-January, but in •early December•.

Community meetings overflowing. Signal groups exploding. Observer trainings filling day after day after day. Mutual aid networks popping up like mushrooms. On and on.

Why? Because we saw brown and Black neighbors being dragged from their cars, dragged from their homes, stalked, terrorized, •kidnapped• with barely the slimmest shadow of due process or legal oversight.

Paul Cantrell

@inthehands@hachyderm.io replied · 15 hours ago

Increased deportations would be bad enough. An increase in the kind of immigration nightmares you see in, say, “Mo” on Netflix would be awful already. But that’s not what we were seeing.

We were seeing anonymous masked thugs abducting people and disappearing them. We were seeing a secret police with blanket immunity. We were seeing a complete breakdown of the rule of law. We were seeing an authoritarian police state forming.

And we were expected not to care, because it was targeting dark-skinned people.

Paul Cantrell

@inthehands@hachyderm.io replied · 15 hours ago

That is the horror that spurred Minneapolis-St. Paul into action. That is the horror we’ve been fighting. That is the horror that Renee Good and Alex Pretti died fighting.

And it is the horror that is destroying countless lives of people whose names you do not know.

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