ICE Force Meets an Immovable Object and Shoots to Kill

We Will Not Acquiesce To This

I needed a few days before I even attempted to write about the event of the last week. I am heartbroken for the family of Alex Pretti, who was executed by DHS officials (hard to make out which ones are ICE, CPB or Border Patrol) on Thursday in Minneapolis. Pretti’s execution was caught on bystander videos. Those videos show that Pretti was attempting to help a woman who was being assaulted by agents, when he did, he was pepper-sprayed, dragged to the ground by six officers, beaten and then shot ten times by more than one of the officers. Another appears to clap his hands in glee once the shooting ended.

The grotesque choreography of law enforcement denial unfolded as expected. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and (now former) ICE supervisor Greg Bovino insisted that Pretti “advanced on the officers with a 9mm gun.” They continue saying this even after multiple videos, a video analysis by the New York Times, and the sworn affidavits of multiple eyewitnesses who attested to what really happened. It is clear that Pretti did not “advance” on any officers. The only weapon he brandished was his iPhone as he videotaped what was unfolding on the street. Pretti is a licensed firearm owner, and Minnesota state law permits concealed carry. Pretti had his weapon holstered. There’s no evidence that he ever reached for it. In any case, one of the officers removed Pretti’s weapon from his holster and stepped back. Pretti is disarmed. This is the point at which shots begin to ring out as multiple officers shoot at Pretti as he remains in the kneeling, crouched position that he had assumed when the six officers began piling on him.

I recount all of this because the persistence of the Administration’s lies in the face of what anyone with eyes can clearly see is part of the assault this Administration doles out on Americans every day. It must be rebuked at every turn. The disgrace of federal officials referring to Pretti – a VA nurse, bicyclist, and decent and deeply-admired human being – as a domestic terrorist to justify what looks like an execution is a measure of the degradation of Trump’s coterie. That these officials were not chastened just a week after offering an account of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis that was disproved by videos from bystanders and even the video from the Border Patrol agent who killed her, demonstrates the arrogance and shamelessness of this group.

They will say and I fear, do, anything to justify their lawlessness, their brutality, and Trump’s overreach.

I was overcome by a wave of exhaustion by the “kill, justify, demonize the victim, brazen-it-out” dance that unfolded after the killing of Pretti. The macabre choreography is painfully familiar to those of us who have been fighting against police brutality for decades. Amadou Diallo had a gun ( it was his wallet). Terence Crutcher was a “bad dude.” Walter Scott “grabbed my taser” (he didn’t). Laquan McDonald was coming toward us with a knife (he was walking away from the officers). Samuel DuBose was dragging the officer with his car ( he wasn't). The 12-year-old child Tamir Rice – and the 10-year-old child Clifford Glover, forty years earlier – “had a gun” (neither did). Not one person with a brain believes that if a courageous 17-year-old had not filmed the murder of George Floyd, the officer who killed him would have even been charged.

The fundamental refusal to accept accountability for anything is feature not a bug of those bent or exercising power to the exclusion of all else. No matter how preposterous the lie is, they will continue repeating it. Their superpower is their brazenness – their unconscionable, soulless refusal to accept the basic rules of human decency. And every time they do it and get away with it, they feel more powerful.

Now we’re starting to hear horror stories coming out of ICE facilities, and the same preposterous, obscene lying to cover-up what appears to be the death of a legal immigrant who was set upon by multiple officers and suffered a massive head trauma. Agents brought the man to the hospital four hours after his arrest, where he was diagnosed with “life-threatening bilateral skull fractures and hemorrhaging.” ICE’s explanation? The detainee “purposely ran headlong into a brick wall.”

The President has pitched us into the dark night of a police state, using the same tactics of victim-smearing, lies, and justifications for lawless conduct that has been perfected by police officers engaged in brutality for decades in this country. Now it is national policy for anyone who can walk, wear a vest, and who is desperate enough to terrorize their fellow citizens and call it a “job.” In the past, when local police officers engaged in brutality and were not held accountable, we appealed to the federal government – the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Now that division has been hijacked by Trump loyalists to prosecute what it regards as discrimination against white people.

Coming on the heels of Trump’s ludicrous performance at Davos, his saber-rattling imperialistic ambitions, his smash and grab pillaging of our nation’s treasury, lands and influence for his own enrichment and that of his friends, and his abuse of pardon power to build-out his army of the felonious loyal, the U.S. is also fast becoming a pariah nation.

Our responses must meet the nature and character of the regime that has dragged us into the abyss. We should be overflowing with allies prepared to challenge this regime. After all legions – literally tens of millions of Americans on the right -- had built their worldview on the three-legged stool of state’s rights, gun rights, and ending a constitutional right to abortion. Having achieved the latter, suddenly they appear to have lost interest in the former.

Trump tramples the prerogatives of states, to the point of sending federal officials to occupy a state because he doesn’t like the Governor; withholding state emergency relief because the state’s voters didn’t vote for him; demanding that states bar trans athletes from competition or risk losing education money; and muscling state universities to change curriculum, investigate teachers, and students, and end programs supporting diversity at the gunpoint of federal aid. And when his thugs kill a peaceful bystander, Trump’s Attorney General swings for the fences, sending a laundry list of demands that ends with a demand for the state’s voter rolls – presumably in exchange for ending the occupation. But we hear nary a peep from those individuals and organizations that have maniacally insisted on “state’s rights” as an unshakeable demand.

We have known for some time that the claim of allegiance to gun rights was hollow. We learned that when Philando Castile was killed in his car after telling the officer who pulled him over for a traffic stop that he was a licensed gun owner. And it was reinforced when Atatiana Jefferson, who while babysitting her nephew at her home, was awakened by noises at 2a.m. and went downstairs to investigate, carrying her licensed handgun. She was shot dead in her home by a police officer lurking outside her home. The silence of the gun lobby was deafening.

We knew then that only white people were deemed to truly have Second Amendment rights. But the silence of the NRA and other gun rights advocates in the immediate aftermath of the death of Alex Pretti, tells us that the cult of Trump has now limited gun rights to only those who support this Administration and its lawless policies.

Interestingly in just the last 24 hours gun lobby groups have started to speak out. They are hardly condemning the Administration, but they are speaking their displeasure at the Administration’s rhetoric about what it claims is the right of federal law enforcement to shoot and kill those who are legal gun owners and carriers.

The First Amendment has fared no better among its most ardent defenders on the right. The loony tech lord obsession with their version of First Amendment rights has been deployed to cover the platforming of hate speech, election misinformation, Nazi symbols and memes, misogyny, rank racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. Now peaceful protest and resistance is left out to dry by these hypocrites, who could use their cash-bought proximity to Trump to press the First Amendment purity to which they have claimed allegiance for years. Instead, Alex Pretti’s First Amendment rights have been left out to dry. Elon Musk did comment on the events in Minneapolis after the killing of Alex Pretti. Musk called for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Others in the tech cabal joined Trump and his wife at the White House the night after Pretti was executed, to watch a screening of the Amazon film “Melania.”

It is important to underscore that many of these are people who have no sustained belief system. It is futile to count on consistency, truth-telling, or an inner core of principles with this lot. Those who are assembled around Trump are focused on the bottom line. For some that bottom line is financial. For others it is remaining in positions of power. Others in Trump’s coterie are those who could never sustain their current positions of power and influence without him. Even Elon became aggressively involved in the 2024 election because he feared, as he told Tucker Carlson, that if Vice President Harris were elected, he would be deported or imprisoned. Given his dependence on government contracts and subsidies, certainly he faced loss of status at the apex of the billionaire pile.

Bovino, Noem, Homan, Hegseth were drawn from the dregs of those who would sign up for Trump 2.0. Not one of them could have ever dreamed of leading a government department or sitting in cabinet meetings if not for a President so fundamentally corrupt and compromised. Their allegiance is to him. And to staying on the perch where he placed them. They know that there is nowhere to go but down after this. Or to prison.

The good news is that they are hopped up on power and photo ops. Bovino and Noem have overreached in ways that appear to have provoked Trump’s displeasure. This is likely because the Wall Street Journal, Joe Rogan, and some gun groups have denounced the bizarre and expansive statements of Noem, Bovino and Trump’s Assistant Attorney General in California, who posted on social media that, [i]f you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!” Now Bovino is getting his ears slapped back by being removed from Minnesota as the front man and being stripped of his made-up fantasy title “Commander at Large” for the Border Patrol. The title will be eliminated apparently. DHS leadership in Minnesota will now be undertaken by Tom “$50,000 in a Cava bag ” Homan. You can’t make this up.

Every week you think it can’t get worse, and it does. And I suspect, it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I know that it can be no comfort to Mr. Pretti’s family, friends or colleagues, but he and Keith Porter and Renee Good and the other victims of ICE brutality are martyrs - unwilling martyrs to the only pathway out of this nightmare. Through it. Our determination should honor their collective spirit. I believe we will get through it. I believe this because of what I have seen this past week in Minnesota, and before that in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, in courtrooms around the country, on stages, in the streets, in pulpits, outside detention centers, inside detention centers, in independent media and organizing spaces. We are not having it. We will not acquiesce to this.

I say this not to tamp down the truth of the danger we face. But as a way of remembering that we must sustain this fight for those already martyred to this battle for our lives, our families, our communities, and our country.

In Part II, I share some thoughts about actions for the coming weeks.