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.
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. 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.
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. So far, no federal law enforcement officials have been spotted, despite threats by the Trump administration of deploying them to voting sites.
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