The Battle for Minneapolis

I arrived in Minneapolis on January 9, 2026, two days after Renee Good was killed by US ICE agents. What I saw shocked me. It was not the city’s reaction that stood out, but the sheer, industrial scale of the federal paramilitary occupation.

A constant, aggressive kinetic energy defined the deployment. I photographed hundreds of vehicles moving in synchronized groups through residential blocks and downtown corridors. These convoys ran red lights and drove the wrong way down one-way streets with a frantic urgency more characteristic of a combat zone than an American town.

In one instance, I watched a line of federal vehicles circle an elementary school while parents stood on the sidewalk. The vehicles moved in a slow, intentional rotation–a mechanized presence that asserted absolute federal authority over the street.

These were not police as most Americans would recognize them. They wore full tactical gear–ballistic helmets, gas masks, body armor–and carried automatic weapons. They had been assembled from across the federal system and deployed together into American neighborhoods. The Whipple Federal Building became a staging area, its surrounding streets and parking lots filled with agents gathering before moving out again.

I worked to develop a visual language that was direct and restrained to match this environment. In these images, federal authority is stripped of individual humanity. The agents’ faces were entirely concealed behind balaclavas and tinted goggles, and the absence of name tapes or badge numbers was a recurring detail in every interaction. This lack of identifying markers extended to the vehicles, which frequently operated with blacked-out windows; some had no license plates, while others had plates that were frequently swapped between vehicles. These omissions transformed them into anonymous enforcers of a federal siege. The individual is replaced by the apparatus.

I chose to shoot exclusively on film, using two Leica M3 cameras–one fitted with a 50mm Summicron, the other with a 28mm Elmarit–and Kodak Portra 400. The rangefinder format forced a different kind of attention. There is no motor drive, no burst mode; each frame is a deliberate act. The days I spent waiting for the film to come back from the lab provided a necessary buffer from the instant feedback of digital shooting. Without a screen to check, I was forced to work intuitively, focusing entirely on the physical details of the deployment. This delay prevents the work from becoming a simple reaction to the daily news cycle, allowing the images to function as a long-form study–a way to step back and look at the systemic patterns that emerge once the immediate rush of
events fades.

I am not yet sure what the final use of these images will be. In the past, I have shown projects as outdoor installations, in magazines, and in newspapers. For now, they remain a private archive of a public event.

I see Minneapolis as the beginning of a larger project tracing the expansion of federal power across American cities. I returned twice more that month. I have since been working in Oakland, along the U.S. border, and in Los Angeles, and intend to continue as that presence grows.

My final visit followed the death of Alex Pretti, a VA nurse who was killed by federal agents on January 24. By then, the patterns I had been documenting–the synchronized movements, the anonymity of the agents, the militarization of residential streets–had solidified into a permanent condition. The presence was no longer an emergency response; it was a fixture.

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