Once Alex Pretti was dead, the explanations began.
Kristi Noem, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that Pretti was “brandishing a gun” and trying to kill Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) federal agents. Both Noem and Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff who is responsible for the conduct of immigration policy, described Pretti as a “domestic terrorist.” The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement stating that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
But then the cell phone video emerged and was dissected minutely by the New York Times and CNN. It reminded me of the song with the following line: “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes.” Our eyes won because Pretti was being held face down on the street by four ICE agents and was obviously not a threat to anyone when he was shot in the back “at least” 10 times. The “lying” had been done by Noem and Miller, no great surprise to anyone who has observed them over the last year.
The federal government has sent 3,000 immigration agents to Minneapolis, 2,000 of whom are ICE employees and 1,000 of whom are employed by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. The difference is that CBP employees typically are snaring desperate people trying to cross the Rio Grande. Those people are certainly not blowing whistles, using their cell phones to record the interactions or calling the CBP agents fascists or other derogatory names. Indeed, it turns out that the two shooters were CBP employees from South Texas. These were the wrong fellows to entrust with a gun in an urban protest environment. Even to the ordinary observer there was absolutely no threat whatsoever as other the agents were holding Pretti on the ground.
According to the Poynter Institute, ICE has hired an additional 12,000 agents in the last year (2025) and the “training” time for new agents has been cut in half. To place this in perspective, at the beginning of 2025 ICE employed 20,000 agents so the increase has been more than 50%. So too, the CBP has ramped up its hiring, and both agencies are paying bonuses to attract and keep employees. It is not a reach to predict that both agencies will double their pre-2025 employment in the very near future.
Pretti was a pain in the butt to the immigration agents. I suspect they knew his name but they surely knew who he was since he was on the street often with his camera and his whistle. As it turns out, he had an altercation with a different group of ICE employees about 10 days before he was murdered. The video of that interaction shows him spitting on the window of a ICE vehicle and then kicking the back of the vehicle twice so as to dislodge one of the rear tail lights .The ICE agent who was the target of the spitting, got out of the car and tussled with Pretti and then gave up, got back in the car and left. For my money, Pretti should’ve been arrested then and there for damage to government property.
The characterization of Pretti as a caring and helpful ICU nurse is probably true but it doesn’t jive with carrying a gun even though it was “legal.” The fact remains that he was murdered and posed no threat to anyone.
Pretti’s death appears to be the beginning of a sustained national reaction against ICE. The White House reaction was telling. The commander of the Minneapolis surge was demoted and sent to California. Stephen Miller is the Darth Vader of the Trump immigration policy. He immediately called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” but, after the video had been widely viewed, went to the friendly confines of Fox News to opine that the agents may not have followed the “protocol” established by the White House (meaning him). In fact, those agents had followed his original protocol and, when it went sideways, Miller had to invent a new protocol.
This is all you have to know about Alex Pretti‘s death. A man was being held face down on the street and then this happened.
Bang/bang/bang/bang/bang/bang/bang/bang/bang/bang.
And then he was dead with at least 10 shots in his back.
Streets of Minneapolis (by Bruce Springsteen)
Jay, maybe you remember the same sense of National Socialist Germany I had as a Notre Dame student 1964-68. The textbooks and lectures of that sixties time produced a shock that a country could let itself be swept away in the manner of pre-war and World War II Germany. How could civilized people countenance a final solution? Well, here in the United States today, we are finding out how civilized people can countenance government agents making quota of “look like illegal immigrant” people who, minus legal process, can be confined in miserable conditions and deported to any point on the globe. How can civilized people countenance our own final solution? – Love, Tom
Not that it matters, but since he did not have his ID or permit on him he had no legal right to carry a gun. I agree if he had been arrested 11 days earlier or he obeyed the police and did not resist on the day he was shot he would probably be alive today. Nothing is going to bring him back and I agree that the shooting was not justified. I also believe that the Mayor and Governor are the real guilty parties in the whole mess, I believe they incited riot with there rhetoric, which is a crime for anyone else. They should have had the local police involved in co-operating with the Feds who are just doing there job. Freddie Gray, Michael Brown and George Floyd would all be alive today if they had just done what the police told them to do.
Bill: I don’t think that Freddie Gray (Baltimore) or George Floyd are very good examples for your point. Gray did get into the police vehicle and it was there that he died. Floyd was on the ground for nine minutes and then he died with the police on top of him.
Nor do I agree with your point about the mayor and the governor. The feds were running roughshod and the citizens reacted. There is a great power to social media these days and I bet that that was seriously at play here.
The current withdrawal is powerful evidence that the feds have overstepped And Trump knows it. I think the Republicans are going to pay the price in the midterm elections because of the masked immigration agents. Right after Pretti’s death all the agents now are having body cameras. They should be treated just like our police officers are: body cameras, identification, badges, and no masks.