The Longest Month
January 2026 lasted a thousand years. I know because I lived through it.
The protest group on my neighborhood corner has an average age somewhere in the mid-sixties. There are a few of us younger ones, but we’re outnumbered by retirees, grandparents, and a handful of absolutely ferocious eighty-year-old women who show up every single day.
These aren’t radicals. These are people who raised families here. Who shoveled their neighbors’ sidewalks for decades. Who never expected to spend their golden years standing on a street corner with hand-lettered signs, watching for unmarked federal vehicles.
That’s what January did to Minnesota. It moved everyone to action -not just the usual suspects, but librarians and nurses and church ladies and Vietnam vets. People who thought they’d seen everything. People who discovered they hadn’t.
I refuse to let what we lived through fade into the blur of the next outrage.
They Want You to Forget
The strategy is deliberate. Flood the zone. Make it impossible to process. Yesterday’s horror becomes last week’s footnote becomes ancient history by the time you finish your morning coffee.
But January wasn’t normal. January was different.
They sent 2,700 federal agents to our state. They called it “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” They described our Somali neighbors—American citizens, many of them—as “garbage.”
And then they started killing people.
Renée Good
January 7th. A Wednesday.
Renée Nicole Good was 37 years old. A mother. A poet. She’d moved to Minneapolis after the election, trying to build a life in a place that felt safe.
That morning, she was in her car on Portland Avenue. ICE agents were operating nearby, their vehicle had gotten stuck in the snow. Neighbors were watching, the way we’d learned to watch, because parents were dropping kids off at the elementary school around the corner.
The official story changed three times. First she was “stalking” agents. Then she “ran over” the officer. Then she was a threat who needed to be neutralized.
The videos showed something else. They showed her car turning away from Agent Jonathan Ross when he fired three shots through her window.
Her six-year-old is now growing up without a mother.
Alex Pretti
January 24th. A Saturday.
Alex Jeffrey Pretti was also 37. Born in Illinois, raised in Wisconsin, became a Minnesotan by choice. He worked as an ICU nurse at the VA hospital—a federal employee, caring for veterans.
That morning, he was doing what a lot of us had started doing: documenting. Filming with his phone. Standing witness. When agents pushed a woman to the ground, he stepped between them. Put his arm around her.
They pepper-sprayed him. Wrestled him down. Six agents surrounded him.
Then they shot him. Ten times. They kept shooting after he stopped moving.
Alex had a permit to carry. He was holding a cell phone. Every major news outlet that reviewed the footage confirmed it: cell phone, not a gun. But someone yelled “gun” and that was enough.
He was a government employee. A nurse who cared for soldiers. A legal gun owner in a state that respects the Second Amendment. None of it mattered.
I visited the memorial at the spot where he died. Flowers and candles and handwritten notes on a Minneapolis sidewalk. It’s a quiet place now. It shouldn’t have to be a place at all.
What Happened In Between
That’s the thing about January. It wasn’t just two deaths. It was everything in between and around them.
They entered hospitals without warrants and handcuffed patients to beds.
They raided a Target in Richfield and arrested two workers. Both were US citizens.
They detained Native Americans and held them at Fort Snelling—the same site where Dakota prisoners were held during the 1862 war.
They pulled over school vans carrying students and staff.
They arrested a pastor at a protest near his own church.
They dragged a man from his car in Saint Paul and beat him so badly that hospital staff found eight broken bones in his face and brain hemorrhages. ICE claimed he ran into a wall. A wall doesn’t leave those injuries.
They fired flashbangs and tear gas at a family’s car with six children inside. The kids were hospitalized.
They detained a classroom assistant outside the special needs school where she works—after witnesses say ICE rammed her car, then blamed her for the collision.
A federal judge found ICE violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota in January alone.
Ninety-six.
I stood watch one afternoon as the neighborhood high school let out. Just standing there. Making sure every kid made it away safely. That’s where we are now; civilians forming ad-hoc security details so teenagers can walk home from school.
The January Effect
People keep asking why it felt so long. Why January 2026 stretched like taffy into something unrecognizable.
Part of it is simple math. When you’re bracing for impact every single day, days become heavy. They take longer to carry.
But I think it’s something else too.
Fifty thousand people marched through downtown Minneapolis in well-below-zero weather. Fifty thousand. Fingers numb, breath visible, feet aching from the cold, and nobody left. That’s not normal political engagement. That’s something deeper. That’s people who understand that this moment requires everything they have.
January was the month we realized this isn’t going away. This isn’t a phase. This isn’t something we can wait out.
This is what they want.
What We Cannot Accept
I’m writing this because memory is a form of resistance.
The outrages will keep coming. There will be new horrors tomorrow and next week and next month. That’s the design—to exhaust us into acceptance.
But I will not accept a country where a mother is shot through her car window while her daughter waits for her to come home.
I will not accept a country where a nurse who served veterans is executed on a Minneapolis sidewalk for holding up his phone.
I will not accept a country where children run from bus stops and schools close their doors because federal agents are hunting their neighbors.
I will not accept a country where 96 court orders mean nothing.
We must not accept this. We must not forget.
January was long. The months ahead will be longer. But the length of our memory is a choice.
Choose to remember. Keep a list.
Renée Nicole Macklin Good: April 2, 1988 - January 7, 2026
Alex Jeffrey Pretti: 1988 - January 24, 2026
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