“WHO are you prioritising?” Chris Murphy, the Democratic Senator from Connecticut, asked US immigration enforcement officers during a recent visit to an immigration court in San Antonio, Texas. Murphy had already been denied access to two immigration detention centres in Texas despite his constitutional right as a member of Congress to access federal buildings.

“Everyone,” came the quick reply. “I said, wait, I thought you were prioritising criminals?” Murphy asked. Instead, he was told they were looking for anyone and everyone, including asylum-seekers without criminal records who were in the country legally and following the law.

As we now know, that “everyone” includes a five-year-old child, Liam Ramos, arrested with his father, and a 37-year-old ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, who was tackled to the ground on a Minneapolis street by a swarm of Ice agents, then shot at point blank range. And, of course, Renee Good, a Minneapolis mother of three, shot in her car three times on January 7, and pronounced dead at the scene. A third person was shot in the leg by Ice agents in Minneapolis on January 14 and survived.

US Border Patrol agents allege Pretti was armed and a threat. But, similar to the self-defence story spun by Good’s killer and later exposed as false by video evidence, footage taken at the scene of Pretti’s killing and from multiple angles seems to contradict the officials’ version.

In those videos, obtained by Drop Site News, Pretti appears to be filming on his phone, then tries to aid a woman who had been pepper-sprayed and assaulted by Ice officers before himself being wrestled to the ground by multiple agents and shot, possibly multiple times.

Concluded New Yorker journalist Susan Glasser of Pretti after viewing the footage,“the final act of his life was trying to help a woman who was being physically assaulted by the masked agents who would then kill him.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who has previously lashed out at Ice agents using an expletive to urge them to leave his city, said at a Saturday press conference, “I just saw a video of more than six masked agents pummelling one of our constituents and shooting him to death. How many more residents? How many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?”

“Minnesota has had it. This is sickening,” said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz after Saturday’s killing. “The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.”

Good was killed while attempting to drive away from Ice agent activity on a Minneapolis street. Much like Pretti’s, hers was a murder carried out in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses whose video footage belied attempts by the Trump administration to exonerate the shooter — Ice officer Jonathan Ross — who claimed self-defence. Ross has since resigned.

The five-year-old Ramos, whose solemn photo in his fuzzy blue hat with droopy white rabbit ears and pom-poms has now gone viral, was arrested in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights on Tuesday alongside his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, an Ecuadorian asylum-seeker. After securing the father inside the Ice vehicle, agents used the child as bait, sending him to knock on the door of his home to lure out other potential relatives. Within 24 hours, Liam and his father were in a San Antonio detention centre 1,250 miles away from home.

Four detainees have died in Texas immigration facilities since the start of the year, prompting Senator Murphy’s attempt to inspect the facilities. Ice officials tried to claim the January 3 death of Cuban migrant Geraldo Lunas Campos at a Texas Army base was a suicide. But on January 21 a coroner ruled Campos’s death a homicide, based on an autopsy report.

Minneapolis continues to be the epicentre of extreme violence on the part of immigration enforcement and right-wing provocateurs. Trump has threatened to send troops to Minnesota, effectively militarising US streets. The turmoil there appears designed to provoke a pretext for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to justify military deployment.

Shortly after Good’s killing, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security posted a warning on social media: “To all Ice officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anyone who lays a hand on you or who tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no-one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

It was signed by Trump’s Goebbels-like chief adviser, Stephen Miller. But Miller had made the statement months earlier, last October, when Ice-provoked violence flared in Chicago. The fact the DHS chose to resurrect it without context after Good’s murder sent a chilling message of what was to come.

Minneapolis resident Nasra Ahmed, a 23-year-old Somali-American US citizen with no criminal record, was another such victim. Last week she described how racial profiling played a role in her unwarranted arrest, during which agents used a racial slur and such extreme violence she sustained a concussion.

“They kidnapped me,” she said at a press conference last Friday after her release. “They called me the n-word.” She was held for two days before being released. “I was screaming, I was crying, I was so scared. My body still hurts. It’s really hard for me to speak because of the concussion.”

Ahmed said she was incarcerated with a Native American woman, highlighting the absurdity of the Trump anti-immigration sweep in targeting the first peoples of a country in which everyone else is an immigrant. “She had gashes on her face, they shattered her windows, she had blood on her jeans,” Ahmed said.

Walz has appealed several times to President Trump to withdraw Ice and reduce tensions in his state, but is not optimistic. “Do I have any confidence that Donald Trump will do the right thing?” Walz asked. “No I have no confidence that Donald Trump will do the right thing.”

In the San Antonio immigration court, Murphy sat in on a procedural hearing for a young couple and their two-year-old daughter. “We were told that under normal circumstances, just like it happened to everybody else, when they walked out of that courtroom they were likely going to be put into detention,” he said. “Possibly the two-year-old daughter who is literally sucking a lollipop inside the courtroom, was going to be thrown into detention.”

That did not happen, Murphy said, because he and other observers were there to escort them to safety. “At least today, that two-year-old isn’t in detention,” Murphy said. But he railed against the unfettered actions of Ice across the country. “This has nothing to do with people who are violent. This has nothing do with targeting criminals. This is just creating an entirely new body of law where might makes right,” he said. “I’m still seething.”

“Seeing it firsthand, looking into the eyes of that two-year old girl, who maybe were it not for my presence in the court would be in jail today, it just makes you absolutely furious that this is what our country is doing to people,” Murphy said.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. Her book, No to Nuclear: How Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, will be published by Pluto Press in March.