Saturday morning, a Reddit user who has posted about living in Minneapolis for years shared a video on the city’s subreddit, r/Minneapolis, titled “Another ICE killing in front of Glam Doll Donuts.”
The 40-second clip showed a group of agents attacking Alex Pretti, 37, and beating him. About 20 seconds later, one of them starts shooting at Pretti. At least 10 shots are fired, from multiple agents, and someone can be heard yelling “Did they kill that guy? Are you kidding me dude? Not again.” (The agents who shot Pretti have not been charged, as has ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7. They have been moved “to other locations,” according to CBP officer Greg Bovino.)
The video has been upvoted more than 60,000 times, reaching the top of Reddit’s homepage.
Over the past month, as the Department of Homeland Security deployed thousands of armed, masked and Cultural Enforcement agents to Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the ir/Minneapolis subreddit has become a hub for news and information important to residents and outsiders.
Earlier, the user who shared the photo of the shooting wrote about a poster of a missing dog and trees being cut down near a local lake. “I just wanted a local subreddit to know what’s going on in my city, and now all of a sudden, we’ve become this information site about how to fight fascism,” said one r/Minneapolis moderator, who has been a volunteer for nearly a decade and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
For many longtime users of r/Minneapolis, ICE agents have entered their homes. But even outside of Minnesota’s local subreddits, ICE’s anger has reached a boiling point. Most of the posts on r/all, where the top posts across all subreddits are averaged, were devoted Saturday and Sunday to mocking and criticizing ICE for killing Pretti.
In the Reddit threading community, the top post this weekend was the “Fuck Ice” thread, and there were many variations of the same slogan on the stained glass subreddit, too. “FUCK ICE” was painted on an acrylic set on the nail polish subreddit, where some users gave a look at the bright pink nails of a woman in a photo where her hand was pressed against the face of a right-wing activist during the Minneapolis city riots.
When the moderator of the camera subreddit r/Leica banned “group comments” on photos of ICE officers in Minneapolis, a user wrote “HATE the censorship of this site.” (Photographer John Abernathy—who went viral after throwing his camera at another photographer while being manhandled by ICE agents.) Even users on r/massivecock, where most of the posts are pictures of erect pee, insult ICE in their captions.
“I think it’s like this awareness of the level of injustice that’s going on,” said the r/Minneapolis moderator, adding that people outside the state are more concerned about being targeted by ICE. “They’re checking things out here. They’ll follow you next.”
Americans have become more vocal about ending ICE since Donald Trump’s second administration launched an unprecedented crackdown on blue-chip cities.
Before the 2024 election, polls showed only 1 in 4 respondents supported ending ICE—now, the same polls show 43 percent support. Anger has run high over ICE’s brutal crackdown in Minneapolis, especially after Officer Ross killed 37-year-old Good. After agents killed Pretti, even people who don’t usually share positive feelings about Minneapolis, like fans of rival football teams in Minnesota, Chicago, Detroit, and Green Bay, increasingly protested ICE on their shared subreddit. “The verdict on the field is that this is a meme football sub,” said one of the top posts this weekend on r/NFCNorthMemeWar. “However… FUCK ICE and fuck any bootlicker who supports it.”
