When the State Kills: Why Minnesota’s Terror Is Everyone’s Fight
- Abolish Slavery VA
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
A Public Statement and a Call to Action.
There comes a moment when silence becomes complicity. When looking away becomes participation. When the machinery of state violence operates so openly, so brutally, that every person must choose a side.
We are in that moment now.
The Deaths They Want You to Forget
Renee Good was a mother. Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse who saved lives. Both were killed by federal ICE agents in Minneapolis. Their names join at least six others killed by ICE in the last month alone—part of at least 32 deaths in ICE custody in 2025.
Read those numbers again. Eight people killed by federal agents in one month. Thirty-two deaths in custody this year. These are not statistics. They are human beings. They are someone’s child, parent, sibling, friend, neighbor.
And they are dead because a federal enforcement apparatus has been empowered, militarized, and given political permission to act with absolute impunity.
This Is Not New—It’s American
If this feels shocking, it’s only because we’ve been taught to forget. The violence we’re witnessing in Minnesota is not an aberration. It is the continuation of a 400-year-old project: the use of law and force to maintain racial hierarchy.
Slavery used badges and laws. So did Jim Crow. So does mass incarceration. So does the 13th Amendment’s punishment clause, which still permits slavery as punishment for crime—a loophole that has been weaponized against Black, Brown, poor, and immigrant communities for over a century.
ICE is not protecting anyone. ICE is doing what it was designed to do: terrorize communities, separate families, fill cages, and eliminate those deemed undesirable by the state. This is the same logic, the same violence, the same machinery—just with different uniforms.
Fascism Doesn’t Announce Itself—It Just Acts
We are watching federal agents operate as an occupying force in American cities. They raid neighborhoods far from any border. They stalk communities. They suppress protest. They kill civilians. Then they lie, delay, and hide behind secrecy.
This is not law enforcement. This is state-sanctioned terror. And when an unaccountable enforcement apparatus kills with impunity while politicians cheer them on, there is a word for what that is: fascism.
Not as hyperbole. Not as rhetoric. As description.
What Abolition Demands
We are not interested in making this system kinder. We are not calling for better training, more oversight, or softer cages. The system is working exactly as designed—and the design is violence.
Our demands are abolitionist because anything less is a lie:
End ICE and DHS operations that terrorize communities.Withdraw federal agents acting as occupying forces.Hold every agent and official accountable for every death.Dismantle the systems that make this violence legal—including the carceral state and the 13th Amendment’s punishment clause.
We do not want reform. We want abolition.
Resistance Is Not Optional
Oppressive systems do not collapse because someone wrote a good report about them. They do not end because the right people got elected. They collapse because people make them impossible to operate.
That means showing up. That means organizing. That means refusing cooperation with ICE and DHS at every level—individual, institutional, communal. That means building rapid-response networks to protect our neighbors. That means documenting every abuse. That means making enforcement so difficult, so costly, so politically unbearable that the machinery grinds to a halt.
Every institution that refuses to cooperate weakens them. Every neighbor who shows up strengthens us. Every act of solidarity is a brick removed from the wall of oppression.
Minnesota Is Everywhere
What is happening in Minneapolis is not a Minnesota problem. It is a national crisis and a test.
Federal agents are operating in communities across the country. The violence in Minnesota is a warning about what unchecked enforcement looks like when the federal government decides certain lives don’t matter.
If we do not resist now—loudly, collectively, relentlessly—this will be normalized. The deaths will continue. The terror will spread. And one day, we will wake up in a country where state violence against targeted populations is simply how things work.
We refuse that future.
The Line We Draw
History will ask what you did in this moment. Not what you believed. Not what you posted. What you did.
Did you look away, or did you see?Did you comply, or did you resist?Did you choose comfort, or did you choose solidarity?
Abolish Slavery Virginia stands with Minnesota. We stand with every community under siege. We stand with everyone refusing to accept federal terror as normal governance.
Read our full statement here.
And we will continue fighting—openly, collectively, and without apology—until
fascism, racial terror, and state-sanctioned violence are dismantled everywhere they exist.
No more deaths. No more cages. No more occupation.
Abolition is the line. Resistance is the path. Liberation is the goal.
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