Today’s topic.The latest shooting in Minneapolis. On Saturday, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) shot and killed a 37-year-old man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, following an altercation with federal agents. Earlier this month, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed Renee Good, 37, in her vehicle in a Minneapolis neighborhood, setting off large-scale protests. The latest shooting led to renewed calls from state officials for President Donald Trump to pull federal immigration enforcement agents out of the state. Back up: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has deployed thousands of ICE agents to Minnesota as part of an immigration crackdown called “Operation Metro Surge.” Many Minnesotans have protested ICE’s presence in the state, organizing a general strike in Minneapolis on Friday. We covered the start of the Minnesota ICE operation and Good’s death here. The victim in Saturday’s shooting was identified as Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen who worked as a nurse in an intensive care unit. Video of the incident appears to show Pretti filming federal agents from the road, then stepping between them and another woman a CBP agent had shoved to the ground. The agent directs the spray at Pretti, who is then surrounded by several more agents and tackled. A gunshot sounds moments later, after which the officers back away from Pretti. At least two agents can be seen firing additional rounds at Pretti while he is lying on the ground. In the hours after the shooting, reports emerged that Pretti had been armed with a semi-automatic handgun. At a news conference, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Pretti was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry a firearm in public. However, Trump administration officials have described the victim as a “domestic terrorist” who intended to harm officers. “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said. State and city officials have strongly refuted this characterization of the incident. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said the Trump administration was “spinning stories” and “rushing to judgment,” vowing that the state would conduct its own investigation. In an interview on Sunday, President Trump said his administration is “reviewing everything” about the shooting and “will come out with a determination.” Many Republicans have broken with the administration on its description of the incident and called for an impartial investigation involving state officials. Others expressed concern about DHS agents’ tactics and training. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said the shooting raises “serious questions within the administration about the adequacy of immigration-enforcement training and the instructions officers are given on carrying out their mission.” Senate Democrats said they will oppose legislation that includes funding for ICE unless it is amended to reform how the agency operates; ICE funding is part of a larger government-funding package covering multiple federal departments. If the legislation is not passed by the end of the day on Friday, most of the government will shut down. Today, we’ll cover the response to the latest shooting in Minneapolis, with views from the left and right. Then, Executive Editor Isaac Saul gives his take. What the left is saying.- The left is appalled by the shooting, and many call for DHS agents to be pulled out of Minnesota.
- Some say the Trump administration’s justification of the officers’ actions runs counter to the Second Amendment.
- Others argue the administration is encouraging more chaos.
The Minnesota Star Tribune editorial board said “an ICE pause is the only path to peace.” “Minnesota is standing at a dangerous edge. After a third shooting involving federal immigration agents in less than three weeks, both the state and its largest city are trapped in a familiar and deeply corrosive moment. As of Saturday afternoon, key facts remain unsettled. That uncertainty is not incidental. It is destabilizing,” the board wrote. “The shooting death of 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti on Saturday morning cannot be reviewed behind federal walls alone. A joint investigation must be established immediately, with federal, state and local authorities granted equal access to evidence, witnesses, body camera footage and timelines.” “An ICE pause would not represent abolition. It is governance. It is an acknowledgment that tactics producing sweeping disruption, mounting injury and now multiple civilian deaths are failing their own stated aims,” the board said. “Members of Minnesota’s Republican congressional delegation are needed now. So are business leaders and institutional voices with access to federal power. This surge will end eventually. The damage may not.” In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper called the incident “a Second Amendment wake-up call.” “Although the administration claims that its immigration-enforcement operations are meant to protect Americans from an ‘invasion’ of foreign-born gang members, federal officials have now killed two American citizens — specifically, white American citizens, the kind Donald Trump and Stephen Miller tacitly signal they care the most about — in less than a month,” Harper wrote. “It is plain that Operation Metro Surge and Operation Catch of the Day — yes, that’s what ICE actually calls its Maine operation — are not about protecting the good citizens of Minnesota and Maine.” “Whether they lean right or left, are pro-immigration or have more restrictionist views, my fellow gun owners should understand the message that is being sent by this administration: If you exercise your constitutionally protected right to bear arms, masked federal agents can murder you in cold blood,” Harper said. “ It is not yet clear what exactly Pretti’s own views were, or what motivated him to be on that Minneapolis street. But he knew what the Second Amendment is for: to affirm that Americans are a free people, and free people will not be cowed by masked federal agents. As this country’s gun enthusiasts have long known, freedom means little if you lack the means to keep it.” In Jacobin, Ben Burgis wrote “Trump and ICE are driving the country off a cliff.” “The DHS’s statement, never quite claiming he had drawn the gun but vaguely gesturing at a ‘violent’ struggle and the officer who shot him supposedly fearing for ‘his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers,’ is unlikely to be believed by anyone who watched any of those videos,” Burgis said. “Indeed, one of the most striking parts of all this is that these particular lies don’t exactly seem to be intended to be believed. Instead, it feels like the point is just to give the hardcore supporters of the current administration something to hang their hat on when a ‘libtard’ tries to give them a hard time about this.” “Thus far, the restraint and unity shown by the overwhelming majority of the protesters in Minneapolis is remarkable. There have been mass demonstrations, an impromptu strike called by local organized labor, and an abundance of people filming ICE and the Border Patrol and letting them know that they aren’t welcome and that no one plans to make it easy for them to drag away their friends and neighbors,” Burgis wrote. “Even so, the more lawless and violent the behavior of masked and therefore totally unaccountable ICE agents become… the more likely it is that some misguided individuals will meet violence with violence.” What the right is saying.- The right is mixed in their response, with many reaffirming their support for deportations.
- Some say the incident raises nuanced Second Amendment issues.
- Others criticize the Trump administration for its messaging about Pretti.
On X, conservative commentator Greg Price shared a note for “my leftist friends.” “I do not care that a leftist agitator got himself killed because he decided to arm himself with a gun and venture out to resist ICE, nor the other one who sped her car at an ICE agent while fleeing arrest, nor do I care about the little kid who was detained with his illegal alien father, ” Price wrote. “ And neither do you, because all you care about are turning people — whose deaths never would have happened if you people didn’t have a psychopathic opposition to lawful immigration enforcement — into martyrs who can be used to justify ending deportations.” “I, along with 77 million other Americans, voted for a government that promised mass deportations. And that doesn’t mean just gang members and criminals. It means every single person who crossed the border illegally or has overstayed their visa,” Price said. “I simply do not care about any of the sob stories that you manufacture on a daily basis to emotionally manipulate people against lawful enforcement of our immigration laws. I don’t care if federal agents wearing masks triggers you, I don’t care about your tug-at-the-heartstrings propaganda.” In Bearing Arms, Cam Edwards explored “2A groups respon[se]” to the shooting. “[Kristi Noem] asserted that the incident ‘looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement,’ though video shows that Pretti never touched his firearm before he was killed,” Edwards wrote. “Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, drew widespread condemnation from gun owners (including myself), for a post on X several hours after the shooting took place where he asserted that ‘if you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.’” “Was it a bad idea for Pretti to actively engage law enforcement while he was carrying? Yes, though from the video I’ve seen the only contact he made with a Border Patrol agent was a momentary hand on the agent’s shoulder after the agent had pushed another protester to the ground,” Edwards said. “Whether or not the shooting will be deemed justified depends on the totality of the circumstance and whether or not the agents who fired their weapons had reasonable cause to believe their lives and the lives of others were in danger. I’m personally leaning towards the ‘lawful but awful’ scenario given that Pretti’s gun appears to have discharged while it was in the hand of the agent who confiscated it and the shouts of ‘gun, gun.’” In his Substack, Erick-Woods Erickson wrote about “another dead American.” “Both Pretti and Good would be alive if Tim Walz and Jacob Frey would cooperate with the federal government like most other states do. Americans are not dying in other states. Minnesota is a major sanctuary state and cooperating with the federal government would get ICE and border patrol out of the state,” Erickson said. “Like the progressive left and Hamas, however, there is a well-coordinated PR campaign between the Left and press to make the federal government the bad guy. Frankly, the federal government has walked into the PR battle and is doing its very best to lose it. More dead Americans does not help.” “What we have right now is the Trump Administration, led by the head of the Border Patrol and Kristi Noem, rushing to seed a narrative into the minds of people before all the facts are known and some of the facts they presented have already turned out not to be true,” Erickson wrote. “These are government officials. They have an obligation to be truthful and measured while so many facts are unknown. They also have an obligation to protect the President of the United States and his policies. Rushing out with a narrative that then must change because more facts have come out will destroy the Trump Administration’s credibility on this issue.” My take.Reminder: “My take” is a section where we give ourselves space to share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment. - I feel like I’m screaming into the void, desperately hoping the right people will hear my pleas for de-escalation.
- Both the responses from the administration and some of its supporters are incredibly disorienting.
- The political tides are shifting, and an emerging majority is against DHS’s approach.
Executive Editor Isaac Saul: When I was a kid, I used to have a recurring nightmare where a roomful of friends and family were talking to me, and I was responding, but they’d all keep asking me why I wasn’t answering. At the end of the nightmare I’m yelling as loud as I can to get them to hear me, and they all just keep looking around at each other, wondering why I won’t talk. Then I’d wake up in my bed screaming. This week, I’m reminded of that nightmare; for so many months, I’ve felt like I’ve been shouting and unable to get the people I want to hear me most to listen. As I did after Renee Good was killed, I’ll start by describing the events as objectively as I can, based on the available video evidence. Alex Pretti is standing in the middle of a street recording DHS agents. A car approaches and he waves it past. One of the agents appears to approach a woman standing in front of Pretti, and you can hear him and the agent both yelling. Pretti then grabs the woman and walks her toward the sidewalk, away from the agent, who follows them. There, another woman approaches and yells something at the officer, who shoves her to the ground. Pretti steps between the officer and the second woman and lays a hand on the DHS agent before raising his other hand into the air. The CBP officer sprays a substance into Pretti’s face, and Pretti turns away from him while keeping one hand in the air, filming with the other. He then tries to help pick the woman up off the ground. The CBP agent continues to spray him and the woman on the ground from behind. More agents then surround Pretti, who is clinging to the woman he was trying to help, and throw him to the ground. They begin spraying him, punching him, and trying to restrain his arms and legs. Pretti struggles. What happens next is difficult to parse, but one officer appears to see Pretti is carrying a firearm and pulls it out of its holster. Another screams “gun,” and then the shooting begins — 10 rounds in total, several after Pretti is lying motionless on the ground. These were my first thoughts after watching the video: Recording law enforcement is legal, and carrying a legal firearm is a constitutional right. Pretti seemed to be trying to keep his distance from the CBP agents, and he only ever got close to them after one followed Pretti toward the sidewalk then violently shoved a woman who yelled at him. Pretti’s instinct to put himself between the agent and the woman seems totally normal — if not explicitly admirable — to me. He touched the CBP agent, which was his gravest error; but he did it in about the most conciliatory way possible, with one arm in the air as if to say “I’m not trying to start any trouble” with his body language. A screengrab from one angle of the shooting captures his demeanor well:  Screenshot of video of the incident What happened after the agents began pepper-spraying, beating, and disarming Pretti was pure chaos. Pepper-spraying someone while trying to handcuff them generally does not produce a perfectly compliant response. Whatever you think of Pretti, one agent screaming “gun” after he has been disarmed, then another shooting and killing him while he was held down by several agents, is not orderly law enforcement. Nor is an officer shouting “Where is the gun?” while searching Pretti’s body nearly a minute after he was shot. I’ve been doing this job for long enough that I’m rarely shocked anymore. But what happened in the wake of the shooting genuinely shocked me. For starters, the brazenness of the smearing of Alex Pretti is disorienting; the administration has claimed Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who was trying to “massacre” government agents and “inflict maximum damage” and was “brandishing” a weapon. Stephen Miller called him an “assassin” who tried to “murder federal agents.” However, Pretti never brandished his weapon. He never threatened an agent. Before stepping between the CBP agent and the woman he’d shoved, I’ve seen nothing to indicate that he so much as verbally antagonized officers. We now know the playbook: If an immigration officer assaults or kills someone, the administration will respond by trying to make the victim look as evil as possible. Remember, President Trump claimed Renee Good “viciously” ran over an ICE agent whose survival was “hard to believe” and that the officer was recovering in the hospital — all misleading or outright false. Pretti, Trump claimed, was a “gunman” whom CBP had to “protect themselves” from. All this is to say, this playbook totally justifies why people are recording immigration officials. When the federal government tries to call people they apprehend or kill “assassin” or “domestic terrorist” or “murderer” or “pedophile,” it’s crucial to have some evidence to show they are lying. In the public sphere, a lot of people who support DHS have claimed that Pretti was “obstructing” law enforcement or “resisting” arrest. In my view, both of these allegations are flawed. Obstruction implies Pretti was stopping agents from carrying out some kind of law-enforcement action — the supporting evidence is that he was standing in the street filming and waved a car past him, which some alleged was him “directing traffic” to block the agents. However, since the action was occurring in front of Pretti, it looks to me like Pretti simply waved a car past him while filming in the street. The other claim is that, by standing between immigration agents and the woman he just shoved to the ground, and making contact with said agent, Pretti was obstructing an arrest. Again: This is odd, since they don’t appear to be trying to arrest the woman in question. In fact, it looks like the agents are just assaulting her — shoving her to the ground and pepper-spraying her, without any effort to actually detain her. This is one element that’s making this issue feel so dissonant: Onlookers, and traditional defenders of law enforcement (often on the right), are talking like we’re witnessing traditional law enforcement tactics — as if a police officer was assaulted by an onlooker while trying to put handcuffs on a thief. In reality, immigration officers are brutalizing American citizens for filming them, standing in the street, or yelling insults at them — and when one guy instinctually tries to protect a woman being roughed up by one of these agents, he gets ganged up on, beaten, disarmed, and shot multiple times. Let’s be serious. Pretti is an ICU nurse at the VA with no criminal record. He was no “domestic terrorist.” Others (like Greg Price under “What the right is saying”) called out that no Democrats protested for Laken Riley, a nurse who was murdered by an immigrant here illegally. The difference, obviously, is that Riley’s killing wasn’t committed, celebrated, or justified by the state — her murderer was arrested, tried, and convicted. Then, finally, is the defense of a person’s Second Amendment rights, which I discovered in the last 48 hours is ideologically flexible. Many liberals who have long attacked the Second Amendment are now preaching about Pretti’s right to carry; meanwhile, many conservatives who have historically defended the right to carry firearms tried to make Pretti look bad by framing him as someone who “had a gun” at a protest. Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, told his followers that “if you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.” FBI Director Kash Patel went as far as claiming you don’t have a right to bring a firearm to a protest, which is precisely the opposite of the actual law. All of this, obviously, is nonsense. You can legally exercise your Second and First Amendment rights at the same time, as many Trump supporters have been doing (sometimes with great fanfare) for years. And cops don’t get to assume you’re a threat because you are legally carrying a firearm — in fact, the Second Amendment was explicitly designed to protect citizens against government overreach, especially the violent kind, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen more clearly on display in my lifetime than right now in Minneapolis. We don’t know why federal agents are acting so brazenly, so aggressively, as of late — but a questionable recruitment and training process undeniably has something to do with it. Even though the officers who pulled the triggers on Renee Good and Pretti were both veterans of the force, DHS — through CBP and ICE — has been quickly amassing an army of aggressive recruits, training them poorly, and giving them a green light to treat both American citizens and illegal immigrants as hostile entities in a warzone. DHS’s diminished hiring and training standards can only contribute to the decay of standards in the agency, and they’re also easy to observe. Recently, ICE literally offered employment to a journalist who applied for a job just to write a story about the process, and whom the administration apparently didn’t even run a background check on. As Minneapolis’s police chief pointed out in a remarkable, must-watch interview, his department recovered 900 guns, arrested hundreds of violent offenders, and went the entire year in 2025 without a single officer-involved shooting. Consider that. This is now the third DHS-involved shooting in Minneapolis in less than three weeks and the second American citizen killed by immigration enforcement in that time span. On top of that, DHS has repeatedly tried to detain off-duty, non-white Minnesota police officers, and in at least one case allegedly approached an officer during a traffic stop with their guns drawn. On top of that, after 48 hours, we still know very little about the DHS agents who shot Pretti. No names, just that one of the shooters was a Border Patrol officer who had been on the force for eight years. And no accountability. As I’ve been screaming into a nightmare, these agents are masked, anonymous, and protected by the state; unlike police officers or other law enforcement, they’ve been given carte blanche to act however they like without being easily identified, something that should never be normalized in American society. If you spend a lot of time online, you’d be forgiven for thinking that these shootings are “divisive” or that DHS actions are becoming a partisan issue. Some may even read “My take” today as left-leaning or overtly “liberal.” But I believe this division is an illusion. Asked if Pretti’s shooting was justified, respondents to a YouGov poll came out 28 points for unjustified, with nearly a third of respondents unsure (probably because they hadn’t seen the video of the shooting). Support for abolishing ICE — not defunding or limiting or restraining, but abolishing — is now 46–41 in support, and is a +12 issue with self-identified independents. The list of Republicans calling out the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts is only increasing: Sens. Dave McCormick (PA), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Bill Cassidy (LA), Thom Tillis (NC), Susan Collins (ME) Jon Husted (OH), and Pete Ricketts (NE) have all (to varying degrees) criticized DHS or called for investigations. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) pleaded with supporters to see how bad this is getting; Rep. Andrew Garbarino (NY), the House Homeland Security Chair, has stepped up requests for heads of ICE, CBP, and USCIS to testify before his committee. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) said “Americans don’t like what they’re seeing right now” and criticized the “bad advice” Trump is getting, careful not to actually go after the president himself. Some Minnesota Republicans in Trump counties are beginning to jump ship, and Chris Madel — a GOP candidate in Minnesota’s gubernatorial race who is also the lawyer representing the agent who killed Renee Good — has now ended his campaign and said that DHS has gone beyond its stated focus on real public safety threats. Perhaps most jarringly, John Mitnick, who helped establish the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and 2003 and was Trump’s Senate-confirmed choice for General Counsel for DHS in Trump’s first term, is now calling out DHS’s “lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty” and suggesting Trump should get impeached. If you think I’m taking a partisan line here or overreacting, read that sentence a second time and let it sink in. Even President Trump appears to be looking for an off-ramp — he announced he’s sending “Border Czar” Tom Homan to Minnesota, and officials are beginning to leak that he’s unhappy with DHS. My own politics have circled the political center for the last decade, and I’ve been an outspoken critic of the left’s immigration policies. Yet the Trump administration’s actions here — its shameless smearing of dead Americans, its violations of civil liberties, the overt violence of its agents — are decisively turning me against this enforcement effort. I’m glad to see I’m not alone, and that The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and The New York Post’s editorial boards are all on the same side of this issue. Democrats, waking from their stupor, say they want to separate DHS funding from an upcoming spending bill, even if it causes a government shutdown. That’s a good start — but it should only be a start. Oversight and accountability for everything that has happened, from the unlawful searches to the unjustified arrests to these horrific shootings, should come next. And it should come swiftly. 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