How Minneapolis Broke the Most Powerful Government on Earth

How do normal people defeat authoritarian governments?

On Friday, federal officials announced that they were withdrawing the surge of ICE agents from Minneapolis. The Minnesotans who had been protesting against them won. But how?

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Alex Pretti rescued a dog, a Catahoula Leopard, and named him Joule after the unit of energy a defibrillator uses to restart a stopped heart. When Joule got old and couldn’t walk anymore, Pretti carried him outside every day and sat with him in the grass so he could feel the air.

He rode mountain bikes through South Minneapolis, a regular at Angry Catfish bike shop. He left a research job at the VA to go back for nursing school, got his license in 2021, and came straight back to the ICU. Newer nurses gravitated toward him: steady, patient, the kind of person you wanted next to you when things went wrong. His sister said he made people feel safe. A choir director from his high school in Green Bay remembered that whenever volunteers were needed, Alex threw his hand up before the question was finished: I’ll do it.

On January 24th, he saw federal agents shove a woman to the ground in his neighborhood, and he did what everyone who knew him would have predicted.

His father said later: “His last act on this earth, his last thought, was to help this woman. It’s who he was, every day.”

You know what happened next. And you know how it ended: three thousand federal agents packed up and left Minneapolis three weeks later.

Here’s what you probably don’t know: why it worked.

Why Alex Pretti’s death broke something, when thousands of other acts of violence captured on video every year don’t. Why the most powerful government on Earth reversed course in seventy-five days. There’s a specific answer—a formula, the same one behind Birmingham and Selma and Gandhi’s success in India—and Minneapolis executed it more completely than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.

And the answer starts with something most people get wrong: the target audience for those videos was never liberals. It was Republican voters.

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Last November, the Trump Administration launched Operation Metro Surge: over 3,000 immigration agents deployed to Minneapolis. It was supposed to be a demonstration of overwhelming federal force.

But the people of Minneapolis had been organizing.

Within weeks of the announcement, roughly 5,000 volunteers trained as legal observers across the Twin Cities. They set up encrypted Signal networks. They built rapid-response teams that could put forty people with cameras at any ICE encounter within half an hour. They launched a crowd-funded website—iceout.org—staffed by over a hundred volunteers, publishing timestamped reports with photographs around the clock. One day the site logged more than a hundred ICE sightings across the state.

This will sound like background. It’s actually the most important part of the story. I’ll come back to why.

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There’s a pattern that shows up every time ordinary people have successfully challenged overwhelming force—Birmingham in 1963, Selma in 1965, Gandhi in 1930. It’s the same pattern every time, and it has a specific structure:

Someone who is visibly innocent puts themselves voluntarily in harm’s way for the sake of what’s right. Official power overreacts—comes down on them in a way that shocks the conscience. It’s captured on camera. And it spreads.

I call it moral power, and it has six elements:

• A person innocent of wrongdoing

• Voluntarily puts themselves in harms way

• For the sake of the cause they believe in

• Authority responds disproportionately, in a way that shocks the conscience

• It is captured visually, in photos or video

• It spreads widely including to people who had previously consented or were indifferent to what authorities were doing

When those elements align, moral power doesn’t argue or persuade. It just asks a question that lands in your gut: What kind of person am I going to be?

Multiply that across millions of people, and you have the only force that has ever reliably beaten overwhelming authority.

Moral power doesn’t work by converting the people who already agree with you. It works by cracking the foundation of support underneath the people doing the enforcing.

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Think about what enforcement actually requires. Not just agents and guns—those are the visible part. The whole system depends on the public believing it’s legitimate. When people believe the government is acting justly, the whole machine runs: citizens cooperate with the laws and the government primarily out of the belief that they should. You don’t run a red light even if a police officer isn’t there to arrest you, because you believe traffic laws are legitimate.

Legitimacy is a form of consent. And consent, it turns out, is fragile.

Moral power is the thing that breaks it. It makes the enforcers’ own supporters look at what’s being done in their name and recoil.

That’s what happened in Minneapolis. Twice.

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On January 7th, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed a woman named Renée Good.

Her wife Rebecca said later: “Renée sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time.”

Renée Good was thirty-seven. A poet, she won the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020. A mother of three. Her youngest was six; he’d already lost his father when Good’s second husband died in 2023. After the 2024 election, Good and Rebecca broke their lease and drove north, looking for safety. They ended up in Minneapolis. Rebecca described the drive: “We held hands in the car while our son drew all over the windows to pass the time and the miles.”

That January morning, Good had just dropped her son at school. She and Rebecca stopped to support neighbors during an ICE action in the neighborhood.

Rebecca’s words: “We had whistles. They had guns.”

Ross circled Good’s car on foot and opened fire. She was sitting in the driver’s seat.

Fifty-seven percent of voters told Quinnipiac they disapproved of how ICE was handling enforcement. More than a dozen federal prosecutors resigned. Minnesota’s attorney general sued DHS.

The ground under the operation was starting to move. But it hadn’t given way.

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On January 24th, it gave way.

The volunteer networks were running. Cameras were everywhere. And near 26th and Nicollet, from multiple angles, they captured what you’ve already seen: Pretti stepping between the agents and the woman on the ground. The pepper spray. Six agents on one man. The gunfire.

Everything about it was visible: his innocence, the choice he was making. The kid from Green Bay who always threw his hand up first, doing it one last time. The principle he was standing for is one every American holds regardless of politics: you don’t kill a man for trying to help someone who’s been knocked down. And the response was so grotesquely out of proportion—pepper spray, six agents, gunfire, against a person holding a phone—that no political framing on earth could make it look right.

And it was all on film. From multiple angles. Because Minneapolis had spent two months making sure it would be.

Most of the time, this pattern fails at one specific point: nobody films it. Terrible things happen all the time and nothing changes because there’s no camera. Minneapolis made it structurally impossible for overreach to go unrecorded. Five thousand observers. Encrypted rapid-response networks. Forty cameras to any incident within thirty minutes. When the critical moment came, the cameras were already there, and a woman wearing a pink jacket kept recording through her horror and didn’t let the ICE agents take her phone.

The videos went everywhere, tens of millions of views at minimum, one of the most-watched pieces of footage in the country this year. And once you saw Alex Pretti standing between a federal agent and a woman on the ground, holding nothing but his phone, and then watched what six agents did to him, you couldn’t put it out of your head.

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So why did the government actually pull out?

The Pretti video didn’t need to convince liberals. Liberals already opposed the raids. The video’s real audience was Republican voters.

Before the shootings, while the overwhelming majority of liberals and independents opposed what ICE was doing, Quinnipiac polling showed that 84% of Republicans approved of ICE enforcement.

After the videos spread, Ipsos found that the share of Republicans saying ICE efforts “go too far” jumped to 30%, a huge shift among the administration’s own base.

A February Quinnipiac poll found 61% of all voters didn’t believe the administration had told the truth about Pretti’s death. Fifty-eight percent wanted Noem removed from DHS. TIME reported that support for abolishing ICE was surging among Republican voters.

That shift is what it looks like when consent collapses, when millions of people who supported the operation watched the video and thought:whatever I thought I was supporting, it wasn’t this.

And without that consent, the whole operation became politically unsustainable. Enforcement can’t function when its own base is flinching.

On February 4th, Tom Homan pulled 700 agents. On February 12th, Operation Metro Surge officially ended.

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Three things worth understanding about what Minneapolis did, because none of them are specific to Minneapolis.

First: they solved the camera problem. Moral power has always depended on the luck of a photographer being in the right place at the right time. Jeff Widener happened to be at the Beijing Hotel with a telephoto lens when Tank Man stepped in front of the tanks. Bill Hudson happened to be on the street in Birmingham when the police dog lunged at Walter Gadsden. Minneapolis didn’t leave it to chance. They organized so that every neighborhood had observers, every encounter had cameras, and every act of overreach would be on film within minutes. Any community in America can do this.

Second: nobody had to argue Republicans out of supporting ICE. The images did it. They bypassed argument entirely and went straight to conscience. That shift didn’t come from a debate; it came from people seeing something they couldn’t square with their own sense of right and wrong.

Third: enforcement looks invincible, and it isn’t. Three thousand agents, armored vehicles, the full apparatus of federal force—and it all became untenable in seventy-five days once the images eroded the belief that what was happening was just. Prosecutors resigned. Lawsuits piled up. Politicians started backing away. The machine didn’t break because anyone overpowered it. It broke because the people it depended on for political cover could no longer provide it.

The formula works. Minneapolis just proved it.

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A choir director in Green Bay once asked for volunteers and Alex Pretti threw his hand up before the question was finished. I’ll do it. He spent his career taking care of people who’d served. He carried his old dog outside so he could feel the air. And on January 24th, he saw a woman get shoved to the ground, and he stepped between her and the people who’d hurt her, and he held up his phone so everyone could see.

That’s what moral power looks like: someone choosing to stand in the gap between power and the person it’s crushing. And it always asks the same question:

What kind of people are we going to be?

Nearly a thousand of Pretti’s coworkers packed a chapel at the VA to say goodbye. Two hundred memorial bike rides were organized across forty-two states and twelve countries. And three thousand federal agents left Minneapolis.