“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. … Everyone is scared.” — Anne Frank
At the end of January, we gathered in shul for Shabbat Shira, the Sabbath of Singing, which celebrates Moses and Miriam leading the Israelites across the Sea of Reeds (the Red Sea) and out of slavery in Egypt.
As it happens, we’re joining Shir Tikvah Congregation, so my wife and I drove south to the synagogue by Minnehaha Creek.
Editorial
The Kabbalat Shabbat service was a unique experience. In addition to musicians and the Shabbat Shira Choir, members of San Pablo/St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, with their pastor, Hierald Osorto, joined the congregation. It was a trilingual service: English, Spanish and Hebrew. (I wasn’t able to attend the “Candelaria x Tu B’Shevat” service at San Pablo church — another unique religious service for our community.)
The Friday night service was emotionally fraught, as congregants and our Latino neighbors were mindful of the reign of terror outside of the building’s walls — U.S. immigration agents were on the hunt, beating and sequestering folks.
In the way of a thumbnail history, Pres. Trump called the Somalis “garbage”; he blamed the entire Somali American community in Minnesota for the fraud scandals in pandemic social welfare programs, and then launched Operation Metro Surge, the largest immigration enforcement initiative in U.S. history.
Some 3,000 federal agents have poured into Minnesota, and a series of physical assaults have ensued, victimizing U.S. citizens and legal residents. The federal officers come from a variety of agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI. Generally, the public regards them all as “ICE,” as in the hashtag #ICEOUT.
On Jan. 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renée Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three children. After pumping three bullets into Good, as she attempted to drive away from a chaotic scene on Portland Avenue and 34th Street, Ross spat out: “F–king bitch!” He walked back to his car and left the area.
The U.S. Department of Justice quickly announced that there would be no civil rights investigation into Good’s killing. And Ross was spirited out of town by his colleagues.
Then on Jan. 24, the day after a massive anti-ICE march in downtown Minneapolis, an immigration action in south Minneapolis devolved into the brutal murder of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Veterans Administration hospital in Minneapolis. Amid a chaotic scene on Nicollet Avenue, the dining hub known as “Eat Street,” Pretti came to the aid of a woman who had been shoved to the ground by an immigration agent. In bystander videos, a U.S. government immigration agent can be seen removing a pistol from Pretti’s waist — he had a permit to legally carry a weapon — and then he was shot in the back. A Border Patrol agent then fired numerous rounds at his prone body.
Pretti’s killers were identified by ProPublica. The shooters are Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. “Both men were assigned to Operation Metro Surge, an immigration enforcement dragnet launched in December that sent scores of armed and masked agents across the city,” according to ProPublica. In the aftermath of both killings, neighbors gathered in the streets to express their grief and anger. They were met by ICE agents firing flash-bang grenades, throwing smoke and teargas cannisters. The agents also deployed pepper spray on unarmed civilians at close range.
The level of depraved violence displayed by the U.S. government thugs has shocked the conscience of our community. This is dirty and criminal repression.
Also shocking is the cascade of lies from U.S. government officials. Both Good and Pretti were denounced as “domestic terrorists” by Vice President J.D. Vance and Kristi Noem, who heads the Department of Homeland Security. Noem spun up a fable about Pretti intending to perpetrate a mass shooting; he was unarmed when he was shot to death in the street. The parents of Alex Pretti issued the following statement:
We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately he will not be with us to see his impact.
I do not throw around the hero term lightly. However his last thought and act was to protect a woman.
The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed.
Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.
I have been warning about the rise of fascism in the United States in the pages of the Jewish World for the past year or so. I didn’t imagine that we would be invaded by ICE, Border Patrol and their allied thugs. When the political winds shift, there should be prosecutions of these perpetrators and the higher-ups responsible for these crimes.
In the way of the proverbial silver lining, folks in Minnesota have risen to the crisis and have become an inspiration to people across the country and around the world. We will continue to stay unified and drive the fascists out of our city and our state.
And the Jewish community also has been a light in the darkness. I will not quote from statements issued by Minnesota’s Jewish clergy members and organizations. Rather, I will mention that Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman, the Jewish and interfaith chaplain at Macalester College, was briefly detained by police alongside leaders of other faiths while staging a protest at the airport on Jan. 23.
“Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Monday, Kippley-Ogman said she had been held for two hours and charged with trespassing, alongside nearly 100 other members of the clergy also arrested. Some of the others arrested were also Jewish, she said,” as per our Jewish news syndicate.
“It was really an honor to participate,” Kippley-Ogman said. “I am emotionally impacted by my neighbors hiding in their houses. That cracks my heart open because of my history as a Jew.”
Rabbi Aaron Weininger, senior rabbi of Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, also participated in the demonstration at the airport and witnessed Kippley-Ogman’s arrest. He said the rabbi “was in the lineup of clergy being prepared to get arrested.”
“The goal was to disrupt operations because [the airport] is being used to deport folks, like three flights a day,” Weininger told JTA. He described the mood of the protest as “very peaceful.” In photos from the event, he is wearing a tallit and holding a sign reading “ICE Out of Minneapolis.”
Not all of our Jewish World readers are inclined to march in the streets, risk arrest in a civil disobedience action or follow ICE agents as “constitutional observers.” However, most of our readers have a credit card in their purse or wallet and can support the vast need in the community during this crisis.
Many immigrant families in the Twin Cities are hiding in their homes for fear of the ICE agents, as Rabbi Kippley-Ogman told JTA. Of course, families in hiding lose their paychecks, face hunger and deal with household bills going unpaid. The ICE invasion of Minnesota has created economic hardship for numerous families.
I encourage Jewish World readers, a notably philanthropic segment of the greater community, to donate to the Yesod (Mutual Aid) Fund established by Shir Tikvah. According to the website: “The Yesod Fund is our collective commitment to caring for our neighbors in moments of acute vulnerability. When systems fail, when fear and disruption make daily life precarious, we believe it is our responsibility to become a foundation for one another. The Yesod Fund provides flexible, direct support to individuals and families navigating instability and harm, particularly those most impacted by ICE and the occupation of the Twin Cities. Direct aid to individuals and families reflects our belief that those closest to harm best understand what support is needed, and that safety and stability are sacred.”
Also, I was going to write more about the minor controversy occasioned by Gov. Tim Walz invoking the name of our holy martyr Anne Frank. There was pushback in some Jewish quarters. I commend the excellent analysis by Alex Margolis that appears on Page 4 of this issue. Unfortunately, the words of Anne Frank in the epigraph to this editorial describe the situation in which we are mired.
And on this topic, I recently had the opportunity to talk via Zoom to a group of MA students at the University of Rostock in Germany. I was invited to speak to the German students by my old friend Prof. Dr. Gesa Mackenthun, an Americanist scholar.
The students were very attentive as Gesa guided the discussion. I filled them in on current events in Minneapolis, in the context of our local history of resistance to government lawlessness, including the formation of the American Indian Movement in 1968 and the events that unfolded in 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd. I noted that the public has taken a dim view of the ICE invasion, and that Operation Metro Surge has backfired politically to the dismay of Republicans.
I recall telling the students, in a paraphrase of poet Dylan Thomas, “We will not go gentle into that good night.”
You should know that the German students see what is transpiring here through the lens of their 20th-century history, the rise of Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s, which ended with Europe in flames and six million murdered Jews. Now our government has decided that we are the “enemy within” and has inflicted wound after wound on our communities across Minnesota. We have no choice but to stand up and fight back.
Mordecai Specktor / editor [at] ajwnews.com
(American Jewish World, February 2026)
