Editorial written by The Virginian-Pilot Editorial Board
Federal agents fatally shot another American in Minneapolis on Saturday: 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Minnesota VA hospital. Pretti was observing immigration operations and stepped in when an agent threw a woman to the ground. He was tackled by several U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, who repeatedly struck him before they fired as many as 10 shots, killing him.
Pretti’s killing follows the shooting death of Renee Good, a poet, wife, mother, and Old Dominion University graduate, on Jan. 7. Good was given conflicting orders by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — who told her to move her car and to stop and exit her vehicle — before she was fatally shot attempting to move her car as ordered.
Bystanders filmed both incidents as they unfolded, providing the public with unvarnished evidence of what transpired from multiple angles. But, after both, Trump administration officials have insisted that agents acted properly and halted efforts to conduct thorough, transparent investigations.
To adopt the administration’s line of defense requires one to ignore their eyes and ears — to dismiss clear and overwhelming evidence of federal agents using excessive force against people who are not a threat to them.
It also requires believing that those killed were “domestic terrorists,” as administration officials such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have alleged, rather than Americans standing up for their neighbors, exercising their constitutional rights and opposing the increasingly brutal and arbitrary immigration campaign directed by President Donald Trump.
Americans have long recognized the value of immigration enforcement, and would probably still support the administration’s efforts to remove dangerous criminals from our streets had this campaign adhered to that goal.
Instead the nation has witnessed federal agents act in increasingly unrestrained and dangerous ways — brutalizing suspects, acting aggressively toward protesters, entering homes without warrants, arresting and even killing American citizens — and public support has plummeted. Americans by growing margins want officials to stop the lawlessness — and to do so now.
The reaction to Pretti’s shooting suggests they will not.
On Saturday, Pretti was helping to direct traffic around federal operations when agents initiated a dispute with two observers by aggressively pushing them to the ground. When Pretti intervened, he was swarmed by seven agents who tackled and beat him in the street.
He was a legal, permitted gun owner, and video of the scene shows an agent disarmed him as he was restrained. Then, unarmed and no threat to the agents, the ICU nurse who devoted his life to helping the nation’s veterans was shot multiple times and died.
Noem then followed the same playbook as after the Good shooting: smearing the victim as a radical, claiming without evidence that he was intent on shooting agents, and attempting to create the false belief that peaceful protesters are a threat to law and order.
In fact, the greater danger is federal agents violating constitutional rights, laying siege to an American city and putting the public at risk. Anger is growing, as is support for abolishing ICE and building a new immigration enforcement system from the ground up.
Not that this is all about immigration, as the Trump administration admitted over the weekend. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Saturday saying the White House would withdraw ICE and CBP forces if given access to the state’s voter rolls, among other requirements.
Americans cannot accept a federal government that threatens a state with further brutality for its refusal to submit to the president’s demands for voting information. They cannot stand idle as ICE and CBP routinely ignore rights guaranteed by the Constitution. They must not allow those who kill people in the street without cause to go unpunished by the justice system.
Congress has repeatedly refused to exert its power to act as a check on the executive branch, but the time for dithering is over. Federal agents killed another American on Saturday. How many more will it take before lawmakers do their duty?
