ICE Executes Another Civilian in the Street
Alex Pretti should still be with us
When ICE operatives shoved a peacefully demonstrating woman to the ground, a nurse tried to help her while still filming the aggression. He put his body in between hers and the growing number of masked men coming toward her. Within a devastating moment, Alex Pretti was dead.
Seven mercenaries from a questionably-trained taxpayer-funded paramilitary state police force killed another civilian in the streets of Minneapolis. They murdered another human being for trying to defend vulnerable people. Alex Pretti was exercising his First Amendment Rights: freedom of speech and freedom to assemble when he was shot to death on January 24, 2025.
According to the Wall Street Journal, and their investigative team’s verification of multiple witness videos, masked men fired “at least ten shots in less than five seconds” at ICU nurse.
Pretti was filming heavily armed masked men with his cell phone when one of them shoved the woman backward into the snow. They pepper-sprayed Pretti in the face when he tried to use his body to shield her. Then, they knocked him down to his knees where one ICE operative shot him from behind. They pinned him to the ground and kept shooting.
Dear friends and strangers, your eyes are not deceiving you. Millions of people will not accept DHS’s party cover-up. This was a broad-daylight execution. We trust our own eyes, and numerous independent analyses from the New York Times to PBS to Customs and Border Patrol itself.
Immediately after the now-viral heartbreaking state assassination, the MAGA machine, predictably, is trying to frame a man for his own murder.
Just as in the aftermath of ICE employee Jonathan Ross murdering Renee Good, the MAGA administration is trying to doublespeak the narrative with their knee-jerk script.
Kristi Noem: “This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism.”
Stephen Miller: “An assassin tried to murder federal agents ...” VP Vance retweeted Miller’s post.
Gregory Bovino: He “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
FBI Director Kash Patel: “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple. You don't have that right to break the law and incite violence.”
Donald Trump: “I don’t like that he had a gun. I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That’s a lot of bad stuff.”
Even if Pretti had been violent, even if he were illegally carrying a loaded weapon, even if he weren’t, by all accounts, an enormously kind and generous person who dedicated his career to literally supporting our troops as an ICU nurse at the Veterans Medical Affairs Center, properly trained law enforcement following protocol do not shoot people in the back.
When law-abiding American citizens exercise their First and Second Amendment rights to protest the MAGA administration they are immediately reclassified as “domestic terrorists.”
When 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse strode into a Kenosha, Wisconsin protest with an AR-15 style rifle he was too young to purchase and did not have a permit for, he killed two men, and injured a third. The president of the United States did not publicly denounce him as a domestic terrorist. After Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges he later met the president of the United States at Mar-a-Lago where Trump described him as “a fan” and said, “He’s a really nice young man.”
“I need my conservative friends and family to decide RIGHT NOW whether carrying a firearm is a constitutional right or a death sentence. It cannot be both,” Matthew DesOrmeaux said on Threads.
How many Americans defend the Second Amendment like Jesus Christ himself inked it on ancient papyrus with his own blood? There is no constitutional right they hold more sacrosanct. Until a liberal has the gun.
"We respect that Second Amendment right. But those rights don't count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers,” said Gregory Bovino, the now reassigned head of Customs and Border Patrol of Alex Pretti, whose lawfully obtained and permitted concealed carry weapon was holstered while he tried to help the woman they shoved to the ground. Pretti was “brandishing” nothing but his cell phone. And when they found his gun they immediately took it and slid it away from him.
Alex Pretti was the archetypal “good guy with a gun” that everyone in the far-right ecosystem from the NRA to Christian supremacists hold up as proof of the Second Amendment’s moral imperative.
And now we have to talk about that good man in the past tense.
He was not a threat. He was not “violently resisting disarmament,” as DHS heavily armed masked men were violently overpowering him. And if seven “agents” can’t disarm one man, they are either grossly incompetent in their training, or they are not being trained to deescalate. It is becoming clear that both factors are escalating the domestic terror ICE is inflicting on residents in “dissident” cities.
But every MAGA atrocity is another spin on the flaming carousel of “Do as we say, not as we do” hypocrisy. It is tragically obvious that DHS, ICE, and CBP “agents” are not maintaining or enforcing law and order; they are punishing dissent.
If they will assassinate a white man in the street in broad daylight while dozens of people film, what do you think they’re doing to vulnerable people in custody they dehumanize as “illegal criminal aliens”, with no oversight and an administration who keeps promising them “absolute immunity”?
Rest in peace, Alex Pretti. Thank you for fighting to protect our democracy. I’m sorry you’re not here anymore, where you belong, with your friends, family, and tireless colleagues.
We will keep fighting the good fight for our Constitutional rights and the humanity of our neighbors.