The Free Press

It’s Thursday, January 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why fear is now just part of the job for politicians. Patrick McGee on Elon Musk’s broken robotaxi promise. Colin Quinn on the funniest novel of all time. And more.

But first: Has Alex Pretti’s killing changed the politics of immigration?

Despite earlier signs of de-escalation, the standoff between Minneapolis officials and the White House continues today with no end in sight.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump warned that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey is “playing with fire” if he continues to refuse to use local police to enforce immigration laws. That followed a meeting between Frey and border czar Tom Homan, Trump’s new point man in Minneapolis, who was sent there after the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti enraged a city already on the brink of full-fledged civil unrest.

Today, we zoom out to bring you four stories about how the turmoil in Minneapolis has shifted the politics of immigration—and what comes next.

We begin with a piece from Ruy Teixeira on how Trump overplayed his hand on immigration. The president has staged a masterclass in how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, argues Ruy. And now, the Democrats are poised to win a shutdown fight in Washington over ICE funding. Read Ruy on the fast-moving changes to the immigration landscape:

Up next: Mike Pence. Writing in The Free Press today, Trump’s estranged former vice president decries both the Democratic leaders of Minnesota and Trump’s own cabinet for creating such a combustible situation: “The situation in Minnesota is a warning,” he writes. “The American people are watching, and they are right to expect better.” Read his full op-ed:

Third: Madeleine Rowley looks at the numbers behind the noise to determine whether “Operation Metro Surge”—the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis launched by the administration last month—is actually achieving Trump’s goals.

And finally, we return to a report from on the ground in Minneapolis. Olivia Reingold and Austyn Jeffs talk to gun owners in Minneapolis about a question that has dominated the conversation in the wake of the killing of Alex Pretti: Should he have been carrying a gun to the protest that day? From gun ranges in the Twin Cities, they report on how Pretti’s death has scrambled views on the Second Amendment.

—The Editors

• The border patrol agents who arrested and allegedly shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this weekend have been placed on administrative leave, the Department of Homeland Security told Fox News yesterday. A preliminary DHS report contradicted claims from federal officials that Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon before he was shot.

• New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani said the city needs to “tax the richest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations” to close an unexpected $12 billion budget deficit, amid what he’s called a fiscal crisis “at the scale that’s actually greater than what we saw. . . during the Great Recession.” Mamdani blamed former mayor Eric Adams for leaving the deficit, accusing the previous administration of “gross fiscal mismanagement.”

• Amazon said it plans to lay off around 16,000 white-collar workers in the second round of cuts intended to hit a 30,000 layoff target. The cuts, which amount to about 10 percent of the company’s corporate workforce, are aimed at “removing bureaucracy,” according to a blog post shared on Wednesday by senior executive Beth Galetti.

• Southwest Airlines has officially retired its open seating boarding protocol, ending a nearly 50-year policy that set the airline apart from its competitors. The move is part of a broader effort to boost revenue.

• President Trump said a “massive Armada” is headed toward Iran, warning Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that “time is running out” to make a deal on nuclear disarmament. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said the regime’s military forces will respond “immediately and powerfully” to any aggression from the U.S.

• Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad faced one of her would-be assassins in a New York court yesterday, as the trial over the Iranian government’s plot to kill her on U.S. soil continues. (Read her essay about how she survived the plot, “How the Country I Was Taught to Hate Saved My Life.”)

• Gold prices hit a record high yesterday, triggering fears over inflation and the health of the dollar. “We are headed for [an] economic crisis. . . that will make the 2008 financial crisis look like a Sunday school picnic,” economist Peter Schiff told Fox Business on Tuesday afternoon.

• The FBI searched an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, over accusations of alleged voter fraud during the 2020 election. The county’s voter base is largely non-white and backed Joe Biden that year. Trump’s claims of fraud are buoying the investigation, one source familiar with the matter told CNN.

In case you missed it, catch a Tuesday morning CBS News segment with the Trump-voting pastor who helped reunite a deported mother with her young children. And read the full story, reported exclusively by Carrie McKean in The Free Press, “The Mother Deported Without Her Kids.”

In this episode, legendary comic Colin Quinn dives into a cult classic that still makes him cry with laughter: John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

The novel follows the misadventures of an overweight, pretentious misanthrope still living with his mother in 1960s New Orleans. It’s a book that turns fart jokes into high art. It’s also, somehow, a…

In the same VFW dining hall just north of Minneapolis, two gun owners are worlds apart on the topic of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse shot to death in a scuffle with border patrol agents on Saturday.

“I don’t understand why he had to have a weapon there that day,” said David Manley, an 85-year-old retired pipefitter and lifelong Republican, who said he owns five firearms.

Everything he knows about guns, Manley said, he learned from his father. Going to a protest with a loaded gun is not something his father ever would have advised.

Across the room, another gun owner named Jim Nordlocken, a 73-year-old former Teamster, told us he was so incensed at the killing of Pretti that he considered going downtown to protest for the first time.

“My wife would kill me,” he said, “but I thought about it—to stand up for freedom.”

It used to be a given that Republicans want to expand the right to bear arms while Democrats aspire to curtail it. The killing of Pretti, who had a concealed carry permit, has changed that calculus. In the aftermath of his killing, some of the strongest defenders of Pretti’s Second Amendment rights have been progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called out Republicans like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for their “cognitive dissonance” on CNN. Even the National Rifle Association, which usually finds itself siding with Republican administrations, cautioned leaders to wait for a full investigation instead of “making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.” Trump, meanwhile, said Tuesday, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns,” when asked about Pretti’s decision to carry a firearm to a protest.

So what do gun-owning Minnesotans think? Everyone we spoke to was a staunch advocate of the Second Amendment, but that’s about where their agreement stopped. Watch a recap of our day in and out of Minnesota gun ranges, pawn shops, and dining halls.

As Rep. Ilhan Omar shifted her gaze from a cheering crowd at a Tuesday night town hall in her district, a man burst from his seat in the front row, charged at Omar, and sprayed her with an unknown substance from a syringe.

While it was initially unclear what substance was sprayed on Omar, reports now indicate it was apple cider vinegar. What initially looked shocking luckily turned out to be harmless.

Omar is not alone in being targeted. The annual Capitol Police threat assessment report, coincidentally released just hours before the Minnesota representative’s town hall, stated that Capitol Police investigated nearly 15,000 threats to members of Congress, their families, staff, and the Capitol complex in 2025—a 57 percent increase from 2024. In 2017, that number was under 4,000.

About one arrest per officer.

That is one way to calculate the results of Operation Metro Surge, the immigration crackdown launched in the Minneapolis area in December. According to the Trump administration, about 3,000 agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) were “conducting immigration enforcement actions” there as of Monday. Those agents have made over 3,500 arrests, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a statement to The Free Press.

The fatal shootings of Alex Pretti last Saturday and Renee Good three weeks ago by CBP and ICE agents who were part of Operation Metro Surge have unleashed perhaps the biggest public-relations crisis of Trump’s presidency and condemnation from Republicans and Democrats alike. On Wednesday, Trump said: “We’re going to de-escalate a little bit.”

Alex Pretti’s death was a tragedy. It demands our sympathy—as well as the type of full investigation that should follow any officer-involved shooting.

It also demands clarity about how Minneapolis arrived at such a moment.

The city was in turmoil long before any lives were lost. Activist groups were provoking law enforcement, challenging public order, and testing whether elected officials would stand for the rule of law or bow to political pressure. In moments like these, the tone of leadership matters. The words leaders choose and the posture they adopt can either steady a community or invite disorder.

In Minneapolis, they have done the latter. The deterioration in Minnesota was neither sudden nor inevitable. It came after a series of choices that eroded public confidence and undermined lawful authority.

I’m writing this column in the back of a robotaxi. In San Francisco, this is pretty normal. Last year I clocked up 35 hours in a Waymo, covering 447 autonomous miles over 89 trips. No doubt I’ll surpass those numbers this year, as the service’s coverage just expanded to freeways and I can now hail a 90-minute ride all the way south to San Jose’s airport.

Meanwhile, over in Austin, Texas, Tesla’s nascent robotaxi service just gave its first fully autonomous rides to ordinary passengers. Tesla bros went wild. “Pretty tough day for the so-called experts and Tesla skeptics!” boasted an excited YouTuber. When one passenger uploaded a film of his ride to X, it garnered 1.7 million views.

The juxtaposition is curious. Waymo already operates in six American cities and last spring hit a milestone of a million fully autonomous rides every month. A woman even gave birth in one last month. Yet a handful of autonomous Teslas, in a single city, is being heralded—very prematurely—as a defining moment for autonomous cars.

Groundhog Day must have come a week early in Washington, since Democrats are preparing to shut down the government—again. Last time around in October, they said the shutdown was over the price of healthcare, one of their best-polling issues with voters. That fight fired up their base and helped them win big in elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

This time they may shut down the government over immigration enforcement, one of their worst-polling issues in recent years. A funding bill recently passed by the House includes $10 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Senate Democrats want to condition that funding on reforms such as creating an independent investigator to oversee the agency.

The shots from the Basij came as the crowd was already scattering. As he ran, Ali thought, Why are you shooting at us as we are running away? But there was no time to think about it then; he just needed to escape home.

The man who told me this has just left Iran. I have known him for two years, but for his own and his family’s safety he can’t be identified, so I am calling him Ali. He and his wife are in a neighboring country for now, where they fled last week, after the protests in Iran were crushed by Ali Khameini’s regime in a violent crackdown that has taken at least 6,000 lives—a number that after all the injured and missing are accounted for could climb to over 20,000. Both are young professionals who intend to return home to Iran, but they need the internet, still cut off in Iran, to do their jobs. And they need to breathe.

Ali first joined the protests on January 8. By then, they had grown to a million people. He and his wife, whom I’ll call Roya, live in one of Iran’s bigger cities, and were not activists or dissidents. “I had never been to a protest before,” Ali told me. But he felt a responsibility to take a stand. And, for the first time in Ali’s life, the prospects for a change in the regime appeared hopeful.

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at George Washington’s controversial decision to send troops to New York City. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

The message showed up on the streets in late January amid fears that the bonds of society were breaking and that neighborhoods would soon be in flames. “Your city, my friends, has been brought into a state truly degrading to the name of Americans,” the anonymous author wrote. Some called on the commander in chief to send troops. If he delayed, the city might become the gateway for a full-fledged invasion of America. “You have it in your power at present to prevent this dreadful event,” read one letter. “Congress have given you authority to take any step in that place.”

Although the quoted passages may sound timely, both come from 250-year-old documents—one an anonymous broadside and the other a letter to General George Washington—about unrest in New York City. Like the situation in Minneapolis today, the one back then led to a debate over whether forces raised outside a state, or rather a colony, should operate inside its borders. This week in January 1776, a delegation from the Continental Congress arrived in New York on a mission to negotiate the unthinkable: the city’s occupation by troops from Connecticut.