After Border Patrol agents murdered our brother Alex Pretti on January 24, the tear gas had not yet cleared from Nicollet Ave when Governor Tim Walz called President Donald Trump to make a deal. The details of that phone call are unknowable to working class people like us. However, we can make some educated guesses. We know how the State behaved before and we can see how its behavior has changed since. We believe any concessions or cosmetic changes they are offering come not because they killed someone, but because the people fought back.
The day after the killing and the subsequent clashes with federal agents and Minnesota state troopers, former CBP Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino got on TV and lied to us. Despite Pretti being disarmed when agents shot him ten times in the back, Bovino claimed that our fallen comrade had intended to "massacre law enforcement," called him a "suspect" rather than a victim, and effectively issued a death threat to every protester in the Twin Cities by saying "[Protesting] is a choice and there are consequences and actions there also. I think we saw that yesterday". The day after that, Bovino was demoted and his position abolished. Trump sent an unspecified number of Border Patrol agents packing along with him.
Since Bovino was relieved of command, Trump's border czar Tom Homan has arrived in Twin Cities to take control of the federal occupation of our streets. Tim Walz went to great lengths to paint Homan as a moderate alternative to the hardline Bovino, saying "Well, Tom Homan’s a professional, which is a lot more than Bovino and Kristi Noem" and "Right now what we need is we need a return to normalcy". Ever the politician, Walz is making a bid to pacify an unruly city by putting lipstick on this fascist pig. Honest observers will note that he remains a pig nonetheless.
Since their arrival to Minnesota on January 5, BorTac's role was to brutalize protesters and carry out acts of ostentatious and theatrical violence, while ICE agents stuck to the prosaic job of disappearing our immigrant neighbors and assaulting our community with small scale snatch-and-grab raids. Bovino traveled as conspicuously as possible with a convoy of stormtroopers who sucker punched observers, pepper sprayed anyone who looked at them funny, shot tear gas and smoke grenades near schoolchildren, and beat 27-year-old Orbin Hernandez Serrano within an inch of his life at a Speedway gas station, before dragging away his unconscious body and flying him to a detention center in El Paso without even receiving medical attention. Their role was not primarily to detain people but to terrorize them. If ICE are the regime's Gestapo, BorTac are their Einsatzgruppen.
We can infer the nature of the deal Walz made with Trump from the things we have seen over the last six days. Border Patrol have abandoned their previous function as crowd control at ICE's local headquarters, the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building. Now they have ceded that role to Hennepin County Sheriffs. In the past, we've seen these sheriffs wearing standard blue police uniforms. This morning, when they beat and arrested at least five protesters outside Whipple, they were dressed up in tactical gear, green uniforms, and masks. They looked almost indistinguishable from the BorTac officers they are replacing. It seems clear that Walz offered up his own stormtroopers to replace Trump's, so that Operation Metro Surge can continue unabated, and he can save face by pretending that the worst of the federal invaders have gone home.
There is a rhythm and a heartbeat to revolt that long-time revolutionaries learn to recognize. From Argentina in 2001 to Minneapolis in 2026, the spectre of "Que se vayan todos" has haunted the ruling class, appearing in corporeal form whenever the veil between this world and the next wears thin. Tim Walz and his state thugs should have no more legitimacy in the eyes of the working class than ICE and CBP. They chose to be collaborators with the regime, and when our revolution triumphs that is how the people will judge them. To capitulate to fascism is a choice, and there are consequences and actions that follow from that choice.
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