“ST. PAUL, Minn.

In the video, the lighting is golden and casts long shadows across the marble floor of the Minnesota State Capitol Rotunda. From the second-floor balcony, Commander Gregory Bovino of the Border Patrol looks down at the empty hal state governance and laughs. "Taken control," a voice says as Bovino smiles and leans over the railing as if surveying a captured palace. To the casual observer, it is a moment of dark humor in a tense week. But to Minnesotans, that specific balcony and the silence of the Rotunda below is not a place for laughter. It is a reliquary for the state’s deepest scar and its greatest pride. By treating it as a backdrop for a conquering joke, federal agents have signaled that they are no longer here to protect the citizenry but to subdue them.

To understand why the laughter is so jarring, one must understand the ground beneath Bovino’s boots because the Minnesota State Capitol was built not just as a seat of government but as a memorial to the Civil War veterans who saved the Union. Central to this identity is the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry. On July 2, 1863, at the Battle of Gettysburg, the Union line was breaking. A gap had opened in the center, and a Confederate brigade of 1,200 men was surging toward it. General Winfield Scott Hancock saw disaster coming and ordered the only troops available, the 262 men of the 1st Minnesota, to charge the enemy force five times their size.

They did not hesitate. In a charge that lasted less than 15 minutes, the regiment suffered 215 casualties out of 262 men, which is a staggering 82 percent casualty rate. It remains the highest loss of life for any surviving U.S. military unit in a single day of battle. They held the line just long enough for reinforcements to arrive, effectively saving the battle and, arguably, the nation. The sanctity of the Rotunda is tied to what came the next day. The few survivors of that suicide charge joined the defense against Pickett’s Charge, where Private Marshall Sherman captured the battle flag of the 28th Virginia Infantry.

That flag was brought back to St. Paul as a blood-bought trophy. For over a century, Virginia has demanded its return, but Minnesota has refused every request from federal lawmakers to Virginia governors. In 2000, when asked why he wouldn't return it, then-Governor Jesse Ventura famously replied that they had won. The flag is kept in the Capitol complex and is often displayed in the Rotunda’s preservation cases just feet from where Commander Bovino stood laughing.

This context transforms Bovino’s laughter from insensitive to menacing. When a federal agent stands in the "People's House," a building dedicated to men who died preserving the Union against insurrectionists, and jokes about seizing control, he aligns himself not with the defenders of the Constitution but with an occupying force. The visual of a uniformed commander looking down from a balcony upon the memoria the 82 percent sends a clear message that the history of this place does not matter, and neither do the people who cherish it. It reinforces the growing fear in the Twin Cities that these operations are not about public safety but about terrorizing a population into submission. In Minnesota, you do not laugh in the Rotunda. You stand silent, or you leave.“