Minnesota voters left “I Voted” stickers on memorial sites for Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, the two US citizens killed by federal immigration officials earlier this year.
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Good, a writer and mother of three, were killed during a large-scale immigration enforcement operation in the Minneapolis region in January.
Donald Trump’s aggressive and violent mass deportation campaign has been a key issue for voters across the country during this midterm cycle, and has played a large part in Minnesota’s election.
“I knew Alex Pretti,” said a retired physician who worked with Pretti and asked only to use his first name, Arne. “I just knew that he was a competent nurse – a really, really liked guy. And he was assassinated.”
Arne left his “I Voted” sticker at the memorial site and choked up when speaking about his vote, Pretti and when federal immigration officials killed him.
Another voter, Mike F, who withheld his last name for privacy reasons, left his sticker at Good’s memorial site: “I felt like my vote felt a little bit more in touch with some of the things that happened earlier this year in the city,” he said. “So I felt like it was just the right thing to do – to come pay some respects and attach my vote to what happened here.”
At the end of 2025 and early this year, Minnesota became a central target for the Trump administration. Federal immigration officials descended on the areaduring “Operation Metro Surge”. Community groups organized rapid response teams throughout the city to prevent officials from arresting immigrants, and the situation escalated after Good and Pretti were killed.
Many groups involved in the immigration rapid response work have since shifted their attention on to the elections. In Minnesota, voters are choosing a Senate candidate and governor, as well as House candidates.
“The country has humiliated itself by putting in a bad man, a very very bad character,” Arne said of the president. “Today is a chance for America to say whether they support this kind of thing.”
If they don’t oppose it, “then fuck America”, he added.
In a primarily Somali neighborhood elsewhere in Minneapolis, Reverend Shandon Klein, a progressive pastor from the Park Avenue United Methodist church said she was “keeping a watchful eye over the polling place just to make sure I’m a non-anxious presence that’s available here and just ensuring that everybody has access to voting.
“There’s a general, just, feeling of empowerment and really excited to get out there and vote,” Klein said.
So far, no federal law enforcement officials have been spotted, despite threats by the Trump administration of deploying them to voting sites.
