The American Civil War redux now is looming as borderline inevitable
And Minneapolis has become the test bed for more than hypothetical horrors to come
By Alan Adler (Guest Columnist)
On the morning of Saturday, January 24, in ten-degree-below-zero cold, federal agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital.
Video shows federal officers wrestling Pretti to the ground before multiple shots ring out. The Department of Homeland Security claims he approached agents with a 9mm handgun and violently resisted as they tried to disarm him.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed Pretti was a U.S. citizen, a legal gun owner with a permit to carry, and had no criminal record beyond traffic tickets.
His father told the Associated Press that he cared about people deeply and was upset about ICE operations in Minneapolis. His ex-wife said he was a Democratic voter who had protested after the George Floyd killing in 2020 – almost six years ago.
President Trump posted a photo of what DHS claims was Pretti’s gun, loaded with two additional full magazines and ready to fire. He asked, “What is that all about?”
This is the third shooting involving federal agents in Minneapolis this month. Four years ago Minneapolis gave America George Floyd. What is happening in Minneapolis today appears to be the runup to something far more dangerous.
Yesterday, in the sub-zero cold of January 23rd, as wind chill temperatures plunged to minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, upwards of 50,000 people flooded the streets in what organizers called an “economic blackout” - a day of no work, no school, no shopping - to demand the removal of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from their city. Less than 24 hours later, another person lay dead.
Operation Metro Surge, as it is officially known, has transformed Minneapolis into a laboratory for the collision between federal authority and local resistance. Since December, more than 3,000 federal immigration personnel have descended on the Twin Cities in what the Department of Homeland Security calls “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.”
The results: two civilian deaths by ICE agents in less than three weeks, mass arrests exceeding 2,400 people, schools transitioning to remote learning, and a burgeoning confrontation that bears all the hallmarks of genuine insurrection.
What’s happening in Minneapolis is not protest. It is a dress rehearsal for civil war.
Three weeks earlier, on January 7th, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. The administration claims Good attempted to weaponize her vehicle against federal agents, arguing that she was, in the words of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, “a leftist insurrectionist.” DHS characterized her actions as “domestic terrorism.”
Democrats and protesters paint an entirely different picture of both shootings: unarmed or legally armed civilian observers murdered in cold blood. Hillary Clinton posted that “an ICE agent murdered Renee Good.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the f--- out of Minneapolis.”
These are competing narratives. These are mutual accusations of terrorism and murder. There is no shared reality. This is the combustible material from which civil wars are built. But these deaths may be spontaneous flashpoints -- the broader confrontation is anything but spontaneous.
Kyle Shideler, director at the Center for Security Policy, cut through the fog in a recent interview. For months campus radicals and pro-Hamas activists had focused obsessively on Palestine, directing fury at the Democratic establishment. Now, Shideler notes, “we’re seeing the onus of street action shifting from the Palestinian angle to the ICE/immigration/Trump angle, which is where the establishment left would much rather have the conversation... an attempt for the traditional American establishment left to reclaim control of the street radicals.”
Investigative journalist Asra Nomani has documented the infrastructure behind what media present as organic outrage. Her research reveals 198 groups coordinating demonstrations, all aligned with the Democratic Party, many claiming tax-exempt status. She’s tracking what she calls a “$2.1 billion machine” weaponizing identity activism to undermine civil society.
In her 2023 book Woke Army, Nomani describes “an unholy alliance of Muslim radicals with mostly radicalized elites from the professoriate and professional classes, indoctrinated college kids, anarchy-inclined Antifa thugs, and perpetual race-baiters.” Their business, she warns, “is a radical transformation of America in which noble-sounding ideas like ‘social justice’ and ‘equity’ are code for upending the very pillars of American democracy.”
The Minneapolis protests fit this pattern with disturbing precision. News spreads through rapid response networks on Signal. The Target Center rally filled a 20,000-seat arena to more than half-full in weather that should have kept anyone rational indoors. Organizations with enormous funding are orchestrating confrontation as strategy. This is not grassroots protest.. This is AstroTurf warfare.
If the left is coordinating escalation, the Trump administration seems determined to meet them where they are.. An internal ICE memo from May 2025 asserts ICE officers have authority to forcibly enter homes with administrative warrants - search and seizure without judicial approval (although such warrants are constitutional if the target is not an American citizen). Federal agents have used tear gas and stun grenades against protesters.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem defended the operation: “These sanctuary cities such as Minneapolis are extremely dangerous for American citizens. Since we’ve been there we’ve arrested dozens and dozens of murderers and rapists.” By January, ICE claimed 2,000 arrests, though only about 5 percent - 103 people - had records of violent crimes.
Vice President J.D. Vance visited Minneapolis on January 22nd to tell the city to “stop fighting” ICE, declaring he’d come to “turn down the temperature.” The temperature did not turn down. The very next day, 50,000 people marched in sub-zero cold. The day after that, Alex Pretti was shot dead.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department sent subpoenas to Governor Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey, and other state leaders, investigating whether they conspired to impede immigration operations. The State of Minnesota and City of Minneapolis filed federal lawsuits arguing the operation violates the Tenth Amendment.
We are watching two sovereign authorities - federal and state - claim exclusive jurisdiction over the same territory. History has a name for what we are witnessing, that is, a constitutional crisis.
What makes the situation in Minneapolis so volatile – and menacing - is the complete absence of any shared narrative, shared facts, or shared moral framework. To one side ICE agents are heroes protecting Americans from rapists and murderers. To the other they are a paramilitary and “fascist” occupation force oppressing and murdering civilians.
For one, protesters are domestic terrorists. For the other, they are freedom fighters defending their neighbors.
Both sides invoke the language of self-defense and existential catastrophe. Each shooting is simultaneously an act of homicide and justified self-defense, depending entirely on which narrative ecosystem you inhabit.
It is no longer a policy disagreement, even an intense one, that can be resolved through argument and difficult negotiation. It is an all-out war between incompatible realities.
The corporate silence is deafening. Minnesota is home to Target, UnitedHealth, 3M, General Mills, Best Buy, and numerous Fortune 500 companies. Not one has issued a public statement about the immigration raids tearing apart their city.
The business elite have calculated there is no safe position because there is no middle ground. You’re either with the federal crackdown or against it. The center has collapsed into a bleating rubble of
We are hemmed in by historical echoes we refuse to hear. Americans love to believe we’re exceptional, that internal collapse could never happen here. But Minneapolis is showing us what happens when institutions no longer command universal legitimacy, when the Constitution is invoked by both sides to justify opposing actions, when the very concept of lawful authority is contested.
The Civil War began not with Fort Sumter but with years of escalating confrontation over slavery and the scope of federal authority. Bleeding Kansas. John Brown’s raid. The caning of Charles Sumner. Each incident hardened positions, radicalized constituencies, and made compromise unthinkable.
We are recreating that pattern. For the left in America, open borders now functions as the analogue for the abolition of slavery. Minneapolis ha become their Bleeding Kansas. Renee Good and Alex Pretti have become their martyrs., their deaths interpreted through a diametrically opposite lens from those who voted for President Trump in 2024.
Federal and state authorities assert mutually exclusive claims to sovereignty. Organized networks on both sides mobilize for confrontation rather than reconciliation.
The Trump administration sees no need “right now” to invoke the Insurrection Act. That qualifier is perhaps the most ominous two words in this entire crisis. It acknowledges the invocation of the act is under serious consideration. It telegraphs that continued resistance will be met with military force. It sets the predicate for calling out federal troops against American civilians.
Most Americans are still incapable of imagining a real civil war. The phrase “civil war” itself sounds hyperbolic. We think of the 1860s - uniformed armies on battlefields, clear front lines. That is not all what modern civil conflict would like, as the 2024 movie Civil War suggests.
As the film underscores – and the character of 21st century foreign adventures should remind us, present day civil conflict is para-militarized law enforcement facing organized civilian resistance in urban areas. Sound familiar?
It is state and federal governments asserting competing constitutional authority. It is schools closing, businesses shutting down, normal civic life becoming impossible.
It is funded networks on both sides coordinating action. It is the utter disintegration of shared truth and shared legitimacy.
Minneapolis is the poster child for this looming debacle.
The polling data should chill us. In spring 2024, Republicans were most fixated on the possibility of civil conflict. Now that Trump is president, Democrats hold the same fears in equal measure. The expectation of violence has become bipartisan. What has changed is that only which side expects to be the aggressor.
Both sides are preparing for war because both sides genuinely believe the other represents an existential threat. When that belief becomes ubiquitous, existential proves becomes inevitable.
If Minneapolis is the laboratory, what experiment are we running? We are testing whether a determined federal administration can impose its will on a recalcitrant major city through force, and whether organized networks can make that imposition operationally impossible.
Every escalation prompts greater escalation. If ICE succeeds through overwhelming force, it establishes a template for other cities -- guaranteeing resistance will be even more organized and violent from the start. If ICE fails or withdraws, it emboldens resistance movements nationwide and humiliates an administration that cannot afford to appear weak.
The third option – mediated or negotiated settlement -- appears impossible because both sides have burned all the bridges that might lead to compromise. The administration has labeled protesters as “terrorists”. The protesters have labeled federal agents as assassins. Neither party can back down without admitting fundamental error or miscalculation.
Meanwhile, calls for general strikes are spreading. UPS workers in Minneapolis have expressed support for citywide work stoppages. If immigration enforcement can be shut down through coordinated economic resistance, we enter entirely new territory -- not protest or civil disobedience, but organized sabotage of federal operations through mass non-cooperation.
This is how civil wars begin in the 21st century. Not with declarations and manifestos, but with the gradual realization that normal politics has failed, that institutions no longer resolve conflict, that force is the only currency that matters.
The greatest danger is not that one side will win. The greatest danger is that both sides are correct concerning the ultimate stakes.
If you believe immigration enforcement is protecting Americans from violent criminals, then resistance genuinely threatens public safety and constitutional order. If you believe ICE is conducting an unconstitutional occupation and murdering civilians, then cooperation makes you complicit in tyranny.
Within their own moral frameworks, both sides are acting rationally. The administration cannot back down because doing so would abandon core supporters and invalidate the mandate from its base. The resistance cannot stand down because doing so would abandon vulnerable communities to what they perceive as state violence.
We are currently face to face with a set of historical circumstances that satisfies precisely the very definition of irreconcilable conflict.
It is no longer a disagreement about tactics or policy, but has morphed into a profound split vision – a “schizoid” national perception about what is happening, what it all means, and what is to be done.
Not too long ago events in Minneapolis ignited nationwide protests that integrally reshaped American politics and culture. Today’s events have been more organized and histrionically framed from the stat. All players are now more ideologically hardened, more explicitly defiant, and less amenable to any outcome that does not allow for total victory for one faction or the other.
If Minneapolis in 2020 gave us the racial reckoning that followed, what is history about to spew forth in early 2026?
We are watching the proof of concept for sustained confrontation that can only give us civil war.
The question is no longer whether this can happen in America.
It is happening.
It comes down to whether anyone with the proper power or authority is prepared to step back from the precipice before the overture lapses into the main act.
Alan Adler is a researcher and investigative journalist from Oklahoma City. He can be reached at alan.adler@globintel.net.