The Freeze: ICE, StatePower, and The Cost of Treating People As Problems

The shoes were placed carefully on the frozen sidewalk outside a downtown Minneapolis hotel. Hospital clogs. The kind worn by nurses who work long, unglamorous shifts keeping strangers alive. A handwritten sign leaned against them: Alex was here. Alex mattered.

Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and Minneapolis resident, was shot and killed by federal immigration agents during what authorities described as a lawful enforcement action. Witnesses and video footage tell a more disturbing story, one of confusion, escalation, and lethal force used against a civilian attempting to intervene. Days earlier, Renée Nicole Good, also a U.S. citizen, was killed in another ICE-related encounter. In both cases, official narratives arrived quickly. In both cases, many residents rejected them just as quickly.

This is the human terrain of Operation Metro Surge, a sweeping federal immigration crackdown that has turned Minneapolis into a national flashpoint. Thousands of ICE, Border Patrol, and Customs and Border Protection agents have flooded the city. Streets have been blocked. Chemical irritants deployed. Protesters arrested. Local officials have condemned the operation, and lawsuits now allege unconstitutional overreach and retaliation against a city long at odds with federal immigration enforcement.

But beneath the legal battles and political theater, a deeper crisis is unfolding, one that is moral and relational.

I recently spoke with artist and conflict mediator Dorit Cypis, who lived in Minneapolis for years. She pointed out something deceptively simple: the irony embedded in the word ICE itself. Agents move through the city armored and masked, faces covered, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, appearing almost entirely without emotion. To many residents, they look less like people than mechanisms, interchangeable parts in a vast state apparatus.

What struck me is that this appearance is not incidental. It is functional.

For agents, anonymity is not only physical protection. It is emotional insulation. Uniforms, badges, facemasks, armored vehicles—these are not just defenses against bodily harm. They shield against moral exposure. If you do not see faces, you do not have to meet eyes. If you are not in relationship, you do not have to confront the humanity of the people in front of you, or the weight of what you are doing to them.

Ice in the veins. Ice-cold blood. A posture of emotional suspension.

Hannah Arendt warned that some of the most devastating forms of violence arise not from cruelty but from distance. “The trouble with evil is that it is often committed by people who refuse to think,” she observed, people who follow procedures without confronting consequences. Bureaucracy makes harm possible without hatred, and enforcement without reckoning.

On the other side are protesters, neighbors watching what they believe to be profound injustices unfold in real time. They have seen people dragged into the snow, teenagers pepper-sprayed, families torn apart, citizens labeled domestic terrorists. They are witnessing what feels like rule-breaking backed by raw, unaccountable state power. They are not neutral observers. They are shaken, enraged, and, in many cases, traumatized.

Here, too, something hardens.

The more one side appears inhuman, the easier it becomes to respond in kind. Agents become monsters. Protesters become threats. Names are hurled. Objects are thrown. Homes are targeted. Dehumanization accelerates, and the freeze deepens.

Philosopher Martin Buber gives us language for this moment. He distinguished between I–Thou relationships—where we meet one another as full, irreducible beings—and I–It relationships, where others are reduced to objects: problems to manage, threats to neutralize, obstacles to remove. “When we relate to an It,” Buber wrote, “we do not meet a being, we experience a thing.”

What is happening in Minneapolis is a collision of I–It encounters, stacked atop one another until the space for recognition collapses.

ICE, in this sense, becomes more than an agency. It becomes a metaphor.

Ice is solid. Ice preserves. Ice stabilizes. Ice keeps us from falling into the abyss beneath certainty. It offers the illusion of safety through rigidity. But ice cannot flow. It cannot adapt. It cannot respond to warmth. It delays reckoning—it does not prevent it.

There are no easy solutions, and that cannot be overstated. This is not about everyone simply learning to get along. Minneapolis is carrying the weight of deep historical forces: racialized policing, immigration policy built on fear, political incentives that reward division, and power structures that benefit when communities turn on one another instead of questioning who profits from the status quo.

And yet, thawing is unavoidable.

Thawing is destabilizing. It requires letting go of ideas that once felt protective. It demands tolerance for uncertainty, grief, and moral ambiguity. To thaw is to risk falling, to encounter the abyss beneath certainty, and to discover whether something relational, something alive, exists there.

This is where the question becomes unavoidable.

What do you do when you see someone being beaten and shot in the back? Do you stand silently with a sign? Do you shout? Do you film? Do you intervene? When the other side appears unconcerned with rules, when you are facing an overwhelming display of state power, moral responses are no longer theoretical. What do you do when you are a male doctor and you see a woman being pepper sprayed? Do you watch her suffer from the sidelines?

To scold protesters for dehumanizing ICE agents ignores the gravity of this moment and profoundly misrepresents the imbalance of power. The state holds weapons, legal authority, and narrative control. Protesters hold bodies, voices, and witness. That asymmetry matters.

At the same time, resisting dehumanization does not require moral naïveté. Many of the agents in Minneapolis are not there because they want to terrorize communities. They are there because they took an oath—because they believe they are safeguarding public safety. The question is not whether safety matters. It is who defines it, who bears its costs, and whose lives are deemed expendable in its name.

An I–Thou encounter does not erase conflict. It does not magically resolve injustice. What it does is refuse the lie that violence becomes moral simply because it is institutional, or that rage becomes righteous simply because it is understandable.

Minneapolis is a test case. Masks invite masks. Armor invites armor. Freeze invites freeze. But in candlelit vigils, court filings, and acts of witness, people are insisting on presence, on the dangerous, necessary act of seeing and being seen.

This is where policymakers must be confronted.

If federal leaders continue to authorize militarized enforcement without meaningful local accountability; if courts hesitate while lives are lost; if elected officials reduce this to optics rather than ethics, then they are not neutral arbiters. They are participants in the freeze. They are choosing preservation over relationship, control over trust, force over legitimacy.

The question Minneapolis is asking is not rhetorical. Are we relating to one another as problems to solve, or as beings to meet? Policymakers will answer it not with speeches, but with structures, limits, transparency, and restraint. If they refuse to thaw, if they cling to ice as a substitute for moral courage, then the fracture we are witnessing will not heal.

Because ice always breaks eventually.

And when it does, what survives will depend on whether anyone was willing to risk relationship before the thaw became catastrophe.

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