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A protester holds up a placard as they gather to demand that federal immigration agents leave the city during a “Hands Off MN ! Reject Pam Bondi’s Demands” demonstration along an avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 28, 2026. The Trump administration said on January 28 that two immigration agents involved in the fatal shooting of a civilian in Minneapolis had been placed on leave, as the president slammed the city’s mayor despite a promise to de-escalate the situation. The officers have been on leave — a move US officials said was “standard protocol” — since Saturday, when Alex Pretti was shot multiple times after being forced to the ground by camouflaged officers in a scuffle captured on video. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP via Getty Images)

Apparently, “state terror” has finally arrived in America.

That is the claim M. Gessen writes in a recent New York Times opinion column, written amid national outrage over the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents during an expanded enforcement operation in Minneapolis. The piece is accompanied by an image of masked, heavily armed officers in tactical gear, rifles slung, faces covered, moving through a residential neighborhood like an occupying force.

Gessen’s catalog of violence is chilling: Renee Nicole Good, a white middle-class mother, shot and killed by ICE. A pregnant immigration lawyer threatened. U.S. citizens dragged from their homes and cars. Children tear-gassed. Airport workers rounded up and forced to show papers. A 5-year-old detained. And now Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, shot to death by Border Patrol agents, reportedly while already subdued on the ground.

RELATED CONTENT: This Is America. ICE In Minneapolis Shoot & Kill Alex Pretti, Another US Citizen: Watch The Horrifying Video

What is really being named is not the birth of state terror, but the moment it has slipped the leash of racial containment and bumped up against white bodies.

For Black folks, masked men with guns, arbitrary detention, children seized, bodies made disposable, and law operating as spectacle rather than protection have never been unthinkable. They have been the grammar of white supremacy in America. The only thing new is the target. The only thing unprecedented is that the terror is no longer confined to populations already marked as expendable. It is now visible in white communities, attached to white names, and narrated through white shock.

Posters of Alex Pretti and Renee Good are seen pasted to the wall of a building on January 29, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. DHS continues its immigration enforcement operations after two high-profile killings by federal agents in recent weeks. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

So when Gessen declares that America has crossed into something darker, what they are  really documenting is a collapse of insulation. The machinery did not suddenly become fascistic; it simply widened its reach. What feels like a rupture is actually a recognition lag finally closing. This is not the arrival of state terror. It is the end of the illusion that it was ever absent and that citizenship and whiteness would provide armor from it.

Because state terror does not “arrive” in a country that built itself on slave patrols and settler militias, where policing was born as a racial project and expanded into a national creed. It does not suddenly appear in a nation that perfected surveillance, political repression, and extrajudicial killing long before this current moment. What has arrived is not terror. What has arrived is recognition, and it has arrived unevenly.

Black thinkers have been trying to hand this recognition to America for generations, and America has spent those same generations refusing to accept it. 

Langston Hughes said it plainly in 1936: “Fascism is a new name for the terror the Negro has always faced in America.” 

The post Yes, White Folks! This Is What ‘State Terror’ Feels Like [Op-Ed] appeared first on MadameNoire.

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Tags Alex Pretti Border Patrol DHS Feels Folks ICE Ilhan Omar Minneapolis Minnesota OpEd Paul Robeson Renee Good Renee Nicole Good Richard Wright State Terror W.E.B. Du Bois White