A dark day in America
ICE enforcement and the death of Alex Pretti
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.
– Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776
On Saturday, 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was walking down the middle of Nicollet Avenue during an immigration enforcement operation, four miles from where Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. He was filming Border Patrol agents with his phone when one of them pepper sprayed a nearby woman to force her off the road. Pretti tried to help her. When the agent sprayed Pretti and began pushing him off the road too, he resisted. The agent threw Pretti to the ground and other agents came to help subdue him. There was a scuffle. One agent yelled that Pretti had a gun. Another agent removed a SIG Sauer 9mm from Pretti’s belt and walked away with it. That particular gun model is notorious for easily misfiring, and it may have gone off as the agent walked away with it, though it’s hard to say. Suddenly, with his arms pinned near his head, Pretti was shot 10 times in five seconds.
Hours earlier, 50,000 people had taken to the streets of Minneapolis in minus 20-degree weather to block immigration enforcement and demand that ICE leave the state. Minnesota is now the burning focal point of our national immigration debate and will likely become the greatest organizing center for leftists since Gaza or George Floyd. The Trump administration’s posture toward the crisis appears to be fuck around and find out. Powder keg, match.
Only weeks earlier, and mere blocks away, an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three, during an enforcement action. After blocking agents with her car, Good’s wife Becca taunted them to fight then told Good, “Drive, baby, drive!” Agents rushed the car and told Good to get out. Instead, she gunned it, appearing either to flee the scene or attempt to murder the agent with her car, depending on who you voted for in the last presidential election. It was yet another case of one screen, two films. Was she simply trying to drive away? Should she have put it in park when the agent told her to get out? Was she trying to run the agent over? Is it relevant that she and her wife were members of Minnesota ICE Watch, a local chapter focused on resisting lawful ICE operations? Is it relevant that Agent Ross, the man who shot her, had recently been dragged by a vehicle? These questions were debated for days, but the answers were mostly predetermined. Again, I can predict what you think about Good’s death by asking whether you think a trans woman is a woman, whether you think vaccines cause autism, or how you choose to pronounce the name Kamala. And that should disturb us all.
Ironically, left-wing protesters who oppose ICE as authoritarian are often the same ones who support the Iranian regime, the Russian regime, the Maduro regime, and the “liberation” of Palestine. Of course, a similar point can be made in the other direction. When it comes to political hypocrisy, clean hands are few in the crowd.
Lions of Iran
About a year ago, I attended a beautiful party and ended up standing at the back of the room talking to a beautiful woman. As she listened, she gave her full attention. When she spoke, she did not raise her voice. There was a kind of restraint in her presence that communicated power,…
Nor are these deaths isolated in the broader context of President Trump’s expansion of ICE operations, under which federal agents have now killed a total of five people nationwide. One was a man who tried to flee. One was a man who fired a rifle at an agent. One was a man who tried to drag an agent to death with his car. One was Good. One was Pretti. For the sake of argument, let’s shove aside all nuance and say two of these deaths were self-defense while the other three were psychopathic public executions, even though the circumstances around Good and Pretti’s deaths are still fiercely debated. Let’s also ignore the fact that Pretti wasn’t killed by ICE, but by Border Patrol, and add his death to the tally. That means over the past 12 months, ICE and officials working with them have killed three innocent people in the process of making 328,000 arrests. Even one death is too many, but that’s actually a very low rate for law enforcement. Even if we count all five deaths, that’s one per 65,600 arrests. By comparison, the New York Police Department made 189,774 arrests and fatally shot 13 people in 2022, which pencils out to one death per 14,598 arrests. This means ICE efforts are more than four times safer, so why isn’t Mamdani calling for the abolition of the NYPD?
Obviously, this is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, nor is it meant to be. I’m simply highlighting the prevalence of lethal force as a ratio of arrests in order to illustrate how dangerous immigration agents are, or are not. But we should also acknowledge that though these numbers are relevant, they are not what people are reacting to when they oppose ICE. They are reacting to masked men roaming the streets, or drive-by macing people, or throwing bags over people’s heads for no reason but expressing a constitutionally protected opinion, as recently unsealed documents show. They feel, as communities, they are under attack. And Trump’s rhetoric does nothing to ease those fears. But if agents are being compared to Nazis, and if that is encouraging already fearful people to take violent action, then it’s also important to point out that despite their often thuggish and brutish behavior, these agents are not actually going around killing people. Quite the opposite. That said, a friend of mine is an immigration lawyer who has worked in the field for many years and to hear him tell it, this new batch is indeed distinct in their behavior. “They were always a bit surly, confrontational, high school caricatures, but bearable, ultimately bare-minimum professional,” he tells me. “The same cannot be said of the new goons.”
But as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently observed:
It’s a complicated political thing because you’ll see polls now where voters will say, “I don’t approve of Trump’s immigration policy, maybe I even support defunding ICE.” But then you’re asked, “Who do you trust more on immigration, Republicans or Democrats?” And they still say Republicans, right? But I think the basic challenge for the Trump administration is, they see themselves, I think reasonably, as having been elected on a promise to conduct mass deportations. I think you can make a case, and I would make a case, that with better training and different hiring practices and so on, you could reduce abuses and reduce, you know, some of the things that show up in everybody’s social media feed right now. At the same time, there is a way in which ICE has always done raids in immigrant neighborhoods that, you know, arrest sympathetic-seeming people or, you know, pick up people who don’t have infractions while going after someone who does have infractions. Like, what we’re seeing right now is just what ICE normally does, but times three, or times four, or times five. And a lot of Americans are uncomfortable with it. But it’s not clear to me that there’s some other way that the Trump administration can say to themselves, “We’re pursuing this policy,” that would be vastly more popular. Maybe somewhat more popular. But I don’t know.
He later went on to add:
But there is a larger sense among conservatives, basically, that the Biden era was a kind of revelation of what liberals and Democrats, or at least the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, really wants to do, right? That, for a long time, you had liberals who were favorably disposed to immigration but always said, “Well, of course, we’re not for open borders.” But finally, they got the chance, and it effectively was open borders for two or three years. And then they sort of felt like they needed to, I mean, you can say it’s not open borders. We can have the debate. But if you just look at a chart of the sheer number of people who came in in the first three years of the Biden administration, it was an unprecedented wave of immigration, unlike any basically in my lifetime. You don’t have to call it “open borders,” but imagine yourself as a conservative skeptic of immigration watching this happen. And then you basically decide that if you, when your party is in power, can’t conduct substantial deportation, then you’re in a kind of sucker’s game where the Democrats are in power, they let 5 million people in, the Republicans take power, they secure the borders for a while, don’t do anything about immigration, then the Democrats come into power and do it all over again. So behind Stephen Miller is this sense that we can’t let the Democrats get away with that. And again, the fact that Republicans still are slightly more trusted than Democrats suggests that this is not just a kind of hard-right concern. And the other thing to note is that it is, in fact, true what the Department of Homeland Security keeps saying, that a policy that’s focused just on deporting people in jails and people with criminal records does yield some kind of conflict with sanctuary city laws and rules in liberal jurisdictions. They’re not making that up.
You may be wondering why agents are walking around Minneapolis in the first place. The reason is, they’re carrying out their assigned duties under the ongoing Operation Metro Surge. That means they are actively patrolling public streets looking for individuals believed to be in the country unlawfully. But they’re not just eyeballing people and asking to see their papers. Instead, ICE typically operates off pre-existing information such as target lists with names, photos, and criminal records. This is why operations often happen outside businesses, on sidewalks, in parking lots, and near apartment buildings. They’re positioning themselves where a known target is expected to appear. And some of the people they’re going after are truly evil—rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers. Last month, a dozen men were arrested in Minneapolis. One was a pedophile. One was convicted of robbery, fraud, and domestic assault. One was convicted of domestic abuse and assaulting a peace officer. One was allegedly a gang member with a long list of criminal convictions. Of course, this requires us to take federal authorities at their word, to some degree, and that’s a tall order these days. But I have found no evidence to suggest ICE arrest records are falsified. Or that they are going after Mexican housemaids and Somali truck drivers. And as you can see below, they’re getting a lot more criminals than Biden did. But I don’t remember anti-ICE protests under him.
Speaking of hypocrisy, what of the fact that there were also no ICE protests under President Obama? On the contrary, his ICE chief received an award for 920,000 removals while Trump’s ICE chief was called a Nazi—even though they’re the same person: Tom Homan. It gets worse. In 2012, Obama deported 409,000 people. In 2025, Trump only deported 290,000 people. And yes, innocent people were killed under Obama’s ICE efforts too. There was Anastasio Hernández-Rojas, who was killed after repeated taser and beating by U.S. Border Patrol officers during an immigration detention dispute. There was José Rodríguez, a young boy killed when an agent fired 16 shots at him—and was later acquitted of murder. Indeed, an investigative project found that between 2015 and 2021, ICE officers were involved in 59 shootings across 26 states, resulting in injuries and deaths. But no anti-ICE protests. Obama was not compared to Hitler. People in Minneapolis did not view ICE agents as Gestapo.
One of my own family members, on the Latino side, is a woman I simply refer to as Tía, which means “aunt” in Spanish, even though she’s not actually my aunt. Tía once had her own experience with U.S. immigration under the Obama administration. At the time, she was a 59-year-old woman who barely spoke English and had lived illegally in the United States for 10 years. She worked as a nanny and was deeply beloved by the families who employed her. With the money she made, Tía was able to help feed and support her family back home in Peru. She helped her sons and daughters, her grandchildren, helped pay for their school, their hospital bills, and was a raft for nearly two dozen people.
One year for Thanksgiving, she took a Greyhound to visit family down in Florida. Immigration officials commonly run Greyhound operations, and will wait for the buses to come to a stop and then arrest everybody because they know most illegals can’t fly. So they were at the bus station when she got to Miami. It was midnight when they got there, and ICE came onto the bus and started arresting everybody. She was an old woman, thin as paper, on the edge of 60, and couldn’t communicate well. They started grabbing people, violently, dragging them off the bus without explaining to them who they were or what was happening. They didn’t punch her or anything. But they yanked her by her arm, dragged her down the aisle, and shoved her down the steps. The detention facility was horrible. The conditions were filthy and cold. There were people inside with terrible wounds to their faces and bodies, inflicted by ICE agents. They gave people $1 a day for food. In detention, she met an old woman from Poland who had been racing to the hospital because her husband was dying. That’s how she got caught. Pulled over for speeding. When they arrested her, they didn’t arrest her American husband, of course, but she had no idea what happened to him. She asked my family to visit different hospitals looking for him because no officials would help her or even talk to her. My family tried to find him, visiting every hospital in the area, but found nothing. To this day, it’s a mystery. But we know that the woman got deported back to Poland.
There are three reasons for the crisis. First, Trump is being aggressive. He should have better messaging, more concern for harm done to innocent people, and a zero-tolerance policy any time agents hurt innocent people or violate their constitutional rights in any way. That is not happening and it’s a national disgrace. Moreover, he and his administration should be held to a higher standard when it comes to such things because they have more authority, both legal and moral, than either Walz or Frey. Second, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States reached an all-time high of 14 million in 2023, thanks to Biden’s refusal to address the problem. Critics claim this was intentional because seats in the U.S. House are apportioned based on the number of people, not citizens. Third, Democratic leaders have encouraged resistance to Trump’s immigration efforts. Over 77 million Americans voted Trump into office, and immigration was one of the primary reasons why. Yet Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has refused to cooperate with Trump’s immigration efforts. He has called Trump a fascist. More recently, he referred to ICE as Nazi forces. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has said he will not cooperate with the federal government. He has told ICE to “get the fuck out of our city.” Meanwhile, I have seen half a dozen or more Instagram videos of leftists saying, “Kill ICE,” “Shoot them in the face,” “This is fucking war.” And I have seen footage of protests that looked like war zones. Is it any surprise that if you rile people up in this way, convince them they are literally fighting Nazis, and support them in trying to obstruct justice, that someone might get hurt?
Walz and Frey should be cooperating with federal agents while also working to turn the temperature down. They have done the exact opposite. In Tennessee, three out of every four ICE arrests occurred at a local jail or other lockup—quiet, controlled, no bystanders, no confrontations. It could have been this way in Minnesota too. Instead, violent encounters with ICE are 590 times more likely to take place in just nine non-cooperating counties than in the country’s remaining 3,134 counties. Minneapolis is one of them. Good and Pretti’s blood is on Walz and Frey’s hands too.
Ultimately, none of this negates the core principle that no violation of civil liberties can be tolerated. Federal authority does not excuse excessive force, nor does political opposition justify violence against law-enforcement officers. Americans did vote for stricter immigration enforcement when they elected Trump, who ran explicitly on that issue, and federal agencies are executing laws enacted by Congress and upheld by the courts. But at the same time, the legitimacy of law enforcement rests on restraint, accountability, and adherence to constitutional standards. For an excellent analysis of the laws surrounding protester rights, the shooting of Alex Pretti, and relevant First Amendment concerns, I recommend the essay below.
Only a thorough, independent examination grounded in evidence can determine what went wrong this past weekend, who bears responsibility, and how similar tragedies might be prevented in the future. But Pretti’s tragic death stands as a reminder that unresolved conflicts between lawful police mandates and political opposition carry real human costs. The deaths in Minnesota represent a profound failure of policy, political rhetoric, and human judgment. They demand sober investigation rather than reflexive justification or blanket condemnation. But those answers are slow-coming, and the fear in people’s hearts is palpable. It is a dark day in America when enforcement of the law and preservation of liberty appear to be in direct conflict, and when lives are lost in the space between political absolutism and institutional responsibility. But the fact is, Alex Pretti would be alive today if he’d been standing on a street in Nashville instead of Minneapolis. That is not a defense of ICE abuses. But Democratic politicians who willfully turned Minnesota into a theater of confrontation don’t get to act surprised when the curtain comes down on someone.
From the feed
Before becoming a United States citizen, I was an illegal immigrant for 13 years of my teen and young adult years. My parents fled Israel using visitor visas and never left the United States (that was about the only way to leave Israel for the United States back then). We’ve all since been naturalized, but it took many years. We all paid our dues, taxes and penalties, rightfully so.
Living in the United States as an illegal immigrant back in the 1990s was scary, too bad. Democratic politicians passed Prop 187 before it was overturned, and school officials were required to report all students who didn’t have a green card or refugee document 🙋🏻♀️. I didn’t go to school for a few weeks when it happened.
Immigration policies and ICE like programs have existed for many years and were far more severe than they are today. However, the immigrant communities back then were quiet, grateful, and didn’t raise an eyebrow. The sheer audacity these days blows my mind.
FAFO.
David, in one of Rod Dreher’s columns, he quotes an informant of his in Minneapolis claiming that the demonstrations and protests are financed, organized, and led by outside instigators associated with far left organizations associated with Marxist, communist, and socialist political groups. Do you know of any evidence that would back up these claims?