Trump's Troops Kill Again
If this isn’t an American Gestapo it’s a galloping band of dangerously inept federal agents subverting local authority to carry out Trump’s immigrant purge.
Watch the video. Trust your eyes. Don’t jump to conclusions, but know this: The federal agents who shot and killed an intensive care unit nurse in Minnesota on Saturday are either dangerously bad cops. Or they’re stone-cold killers.
Or both.
Those are the only reasonable conclusions one can draw from public video and other evidence released after the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, who local police identified as a U.S. citizen who lived in Minneapolis and lawfully owned a gun.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that federal officers were conducting an operation as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and fired “defensive shots” after a man with a handgun approached them and “violently resisted” when officers tried to disarm him. But her word holds no weight: McLaughlin has been caught lying about past clashes with protesters.
President Trump shared images of the gun that immigration officials said was recovered and said: “What is that all about? Where are the local Police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE Officers?”
A better question, sir: Why don’t you allow ICE officers to protect U.S. citizens? The evidence available today strongly suggests a swarm of federal agents failed to de-escalate the situation and then failed to safely subdue a man they had kicked, punched, and smothered into submission. At least one agent is seen walking backwards from a prone and motionless Pretti, firing repeatedly into his body. Another agent claps his hands. Yes, he claps — as if to celebrate.
Like the fatal shooting of Rene Good on January 7, Pretti’s shooting needs to be investigated and not covered up by the Trump administration.
The Associated Press, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that serves media outlets across the political spectrum, obtained a bystander video in which protesters can be heard blowing whistles and shouting profanities at agents on Nicollet Avenue. Here is how the AP describes the scene:
The video shows an officer shoving a person who is wearing a brown jacket, skirt and black tights and carrying a water bottle. That person reaches out for a man and the two link up, embracing. The man, wearing a brown jacket and black hat, seems to be holding his phone up toward the officer.
The same officer shoves the man in his chest and the two, still embracing, fall back.
The video then shifts to a different part of the street and then comes back to the two individuals unlinking from each other. The video shifts focus again and then shows three officers surrounding the man.
Soon at least seven officers surround the man. One is on the man’s back and another who appears to have a cannister in his hand strikes a blow to the man’s chest. Several officers try to bring the man’s arms behind his back as he appears to resist. As they pull his arms, his face is briefly visible on camera. The officer with the cannister strikes the man near his head several times.
A shot rings out, but with officers surrounding the man, it’s not clear from where the shot came. Multiple officers back off of the man after the shot. More shots are heard. Officers back away and the man lies motionless on the street.
The city’s police chief appealed for calm and chastised the federal forces.
“Our demand today is for those federal agencies that are operating in our city to do so with the same discipline, humanity and integrity that effective law enforcement in this country demands,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said. “We urge everyone to remain peaceful.”
But peace is not what Trump wants. He unleashed poorly trained ICE agents on U.S. cities with a mandate to confront anybody who looks foreign and to deport anybody who is not a U.S. citizen, even if they are following U.S. laws governing the journey from undocumented resident to citizenship. His agents wear face masks like back-alley thugs and haul people away in unmarked vans. In defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Homeland Security Department has given them authority to enter American homes without judicial warrants.
Like he was on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump is an inciter of riots. He’s using federal agents and U.S. military personnel as bait — deployed in places like Minneapolis to ignite animosity among protesters and then seize on any illegal or confrontational responses as the rationale for violent federal crackdowns. Violence on city streets is what he wants and violence on city streets is what he gets.
If this isn’t an American Gestapo it’s a galloping band of dangerously inept federal agents subverting local authority to carry out Trump’s immigrant purge.
And it must stop.
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When you look at it from all the videos available up to now, it's clear he was trying to protect two women being assaulted by federal agents. At one point he's covering the body of one woman with his own when agents drag him away, shove him face first to the ground, kneel on his back, and grab his arms. One agent can be seen scurrying away with a handgun, allegedly the one belonging to Pretti. Then another agent shoots Pretti once, agents back away, and the agent fires into Pretti nine more times (by my count).
The administration began trying to control the narrative from shortly after Pretti was killed, calling the ICU nurse an "assassin" and "domestic terrorist" who threatened federal agents. Nothing could be further from the truth. Setting that aside, the administration should not be saying anything except that it was being investigated and calling for calm. That they're attempting so quickly to control the narrative, and gaslight us, demonstrates clearly that they're covering up a killing.
What’s striking about these recurring incidents is how often accountability is forced to operate only after lethal force has already been used. By then, the legal, political, and narrative terrain is largely set, and public consent becomes something to be argued about rather than something that shaped decisions upstream.
That pattern isn’t just about individual actions — it reflects a structural gap in democratic feedback. When citizen priorities around enforcement, use of force, and oversight aren’t clearly documented and visible before crises occur, escalation becomes easier and accountability becomes retrospective by default.
This is why some of us are focused on building civic infrastructure that makes public priorities legible earlier, not louder later. Tools that surface and aggregate what people actually expect from institutions — before harm occurs — won’t solve everything, but they can narrow the space in which normalization and impunity take hold.