Although the United States was stilled by an extraordinary ice storm covering 2,000 miles, the country felt like a tinderbox on Saturday night following the shooting to death of another Minneapolitan citizen by immigration law enforcement officials on an ordinary January morning.
Once again, the shocking incident, coming less than a fortnight after Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother and poet shot and killed by Ice agents on another Minneapolis street, was filmed by other protesters and observers from multiple angles. The footage was quickly disseminated and was interpreted according to entrenched political ideologies, with Kirsti Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security and Ice figurehead Greg Bovino asserting, in brief official statements “that an individual approached US border patrol agents with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun and that officers attempted to disarm him.”
Asked at a press briefing in Washington on Saturday evening if Alex Pretti, the deceased man, had “brandished a gun” prior to being shot, Noem replied that the “individual showed up to impede a law enforcement operation and assaulted our officers.”
” They responded according to their training and took action to defend the officer’s life and those of the public around him,” she continued.
“And I don’t know of any peaceful protestor that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign. This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers.”
The footage appears to contradict Noem’s statement, which also lacked any regret that another American citizen has met their death at the hands of a law enforcement agency which the administration insists has been sent in to protect those very citizens.
In the footage prior to the shooting, Alex Pretti is clearly carrying a camera and the altercation which proved fatal for him began after he rushed to assist a female protestor who had been shoved to the ground by an Ice agent. Rather than confronting the officials at this point, he is moving away from them. Pretti leans over the fallen protestor as both are pepper-sprayed and has his back to the agents, a number of whom converge and drag him away from the woman. Several angles have been interpreted as capturing one of the Ice agents remove a weapon from Pretti’s body seconds before a volley of shots are fired. Pretti died at the scene.
Demonstrators place candles and flowers at a makeshift memorial at the site where Alex Jeffrey Pretti was shot by Ice agents in Minneapolis. Photograph: David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Pretti, a Veterans Affairs nurse who lived nearby, was carrying a firearm for which he had a permit. Greg Bovino, the leader of ICE, accused city police chief Brian O’Hara of “omitting the fact that the suspect had a gun and magazine full of ammunition in what looks like a situation again where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement agents.”
Eyewitnesses, local officials and Alex Pretti’s family have challenged that account that he was brandishing the firearm, pointing out he had a phone in his hand, not a weapon.
Bovino, by asserting that it was “what looks like a situation again”, where agents were being targeted, carries echoes of the killing of Renee Good two weeks ago.
Good was branded a “domestic terrorist” by president Trump in the hours after her death, with the DHS and leading Trump officials insisting that Good was using her car to attempt to ram an Ice agent rather than simply leave the scene out of fear or panic.
Those details- the car in Good’s death; the brandishing of an alleged firearm in Pretti’s- will become central to whatever legal cases eventually take place. Governor Tim Walz stated that he told the White House that federal agents “cannot be trusted” to conduct the investigation into the shooting of Alex Pretti; that the state must lead the investigation. But leading Republicans appeared onnews channels on Saturday evening to accuse Minnesota’s political leaders of escalating tensions between civilians and the 2,000 immigration agents sent to the state in recent weeks.
“The mayor and governor both have blood on their hands,” Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma senator, said.
“Governor Walz was saying that the occupation of his city needs to end- words like that he knows exactly what he is saying. Tell me what crime Ice is doing except doing their job of getting the thousands of criminals the Biden administration let in off the streets.”
Vigils and protests continued in Minneapolis on Saturday evening, despite the Arctic temperatures. Although downtown Washington was utterly deserted as darkness fell on Saturday, a crowd of about 500 gathered outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building near L’Enfant Plaza to protest Pretti’s death. Some 1,000 New Yorkers formed a similar demonstration at Union Square in Manhattan. Democratic senators will hold an emergency caucus on Sunday evening, with minority leader Chuck Schumer vowing that his party will block voting on the bipartisan legislation required to avoid another government shutdown at the end of January unless the provision of $64 billion for the DHS is removed.
“Right now, we are focussed on getting Ice out of this state,” said Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, “and of course we will use every lever that we have.”
Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of the slain man, issued a brief, statement describing themselves as “heartbroken but also very angry” and describing their son as “a kind-hearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for”. They requested that people “get the truth out” about the events leadings up to his death.
Those legal ramifications and rulings will be slow and painstaking. Meanwhile, as the storm spread eastwards on Saturday evening, the rhetoric continued, thick and hot and deeply embittered. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs, it’s difficult not to wonder how the United States can disentangle itself from this truly dismal moment of crisis and hopelessness- a poet and a nurse gunned down by law enforcement in broad daylight on sparkling, unremarkable city streets -or where the country goes from here.
The historic storm will pass but the mood of engulfing fear and loathing will not. The republic can seldom have felt as bleak, or hopeless.
[ Who was Alex Pretti, the man shot dead in Minneapolis by federal agents?Opens in new window ]