On Saturday in Minneapolis, federal agents surrounded 37-year-old Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, who'd been filming them in the street with his phone camera as they conducted the federal government's violent invasion and occupation of the city. Video taken by others on the scene shows that agents pepper-sprayed and tackled Pretti as he attempted to assist a protester whom an agent had shoved to the ground without provocation. With at least three agents firmly holding Pretti down, a fourth drew his pistol and fired several shots at him from point-blank range. Within five seconds, agents had fired at least 10 shots, and Pretti had been executed in broad daylight, in the middle of a busy city street, by masked assailants who, as of this writing, have not been identified or apprehended.
Pretti, an American citizen, reportedly had been carrying a handgun on his person, which is legal in the state of Minnesota. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara told reporters that Pretti was a lawful and permitted gun owner. Video from the scene appears to show one agent disarming Pretti just before another shoots him, meaning that at the time of his summary execution, Pretti was unarmed and pinned to the ground by at least three agents of the federal government.
Within hours of the murder, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had lied about it, circulating extravagantly false claims that Pretti—whom DHS Secretary Kristi Noem accused of "domestic terrorism"—approached agents intending to "massacre" them and "wanted to do maximum damage," and characterizing the shooting as "defensive shots" by an agent "fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers." Multiple videos from the scene unmistakably show this to be false. Pretti did not in fact approach the agents at all; his hands were plainly visible as the agents approached and surrounded him. The only thing he was holding was his phone.
Anyone who cares to watch can see for themselves. The first agent to fire on Pretti is just standing there, watching the show, until he decides to draw his gun and kill someone. If he feared for his life and the lives of his fellow officers, that would be his problem, and he would be the sorriest coward in the world.
Pretti's parents, Michael and Susan Pretti, issued a statement Saturday night. In it, they decry the Trump administration's "reprehensible and disgusting" lies, and insist upon an accurate description of the circumstances of the shooting. The unbearable implication is that they have seen the video of their son's murder—of the moment when Donald Trump's paramilitary death squad tackled him, held him down, and executed him for, at the absolute most, recording their actions with his phone. Now the U.S. government is calling him a would-be mass murderer and saying he deserved to die.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that officers of Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) attempted to access the scene of the shooting, with a signed warrant from a judge, but were denied by federal agents. According to BCA Superintendent Drew Evans, DHS—the parent agency of Customs and Border Protection, whose agents killed Pretti, and whose spokespersons circulated blatant lies about the incident in the face of manifestly contradictory video—will lead the investigation, rather than local police or the FBI. Evans also told reporters that DHS has refused to identify or make available the agents involved in Pretti's killing.
This is the second unarmed protester or observer in Minneapolis murdered by masked federal agents in broad daylight since the start of the year. On Jan. 7, an agent fatally shot from point-blank range motorist Renee Nicole Good as she attempted to swerve her car away from the masked agents who had surrounded it. In both cases, the federal government hastened to tell baldfaced lies about the victims, both of whom were American citizens.
In any honest reckoning, the president bears personal responsibility for these deaths; he and his subordinates have gone to great lengths to ensure it. The masked agents, whom Donald Trump's government refuses to identify or hold accountable, are conducting this lawless campaign of terror against U.S. cities on his orders. Via countless presidential directives and a la carte rulings delivered to him by a servile Supreme Court, Trump has arrogated to his individual person and office virtually all the authority of the federal government. If any person in any position of lesser authority possesses the imagination to say out loud that the president did this, and has to go, they haven't shown it as of this writing.
At what point will elected leaders stand—literally, in the street—with the people of Minneapolis, who are demonstrating and fighting and dying to resist masked agents of the lawless regime that has now committed multiple murders and countless kidnappings there? The fecklessness of various authority figures, from Minneapolis cops all the way up to governors and U.S. senators, has been on continual display while Trump's goons kill people and kidnap children, and his mouthpieces slander murdered Americans. The common people of Minneapolis have been turning out in droves to protect each other over the past six weeks, in arctic temperatures and at growing risk of being brutalized and outright killed, growing only more galvanized by each next atrocity clearly meant to send them scurrying back into their homes in fear. At what point can they expect any of their supposed civic servants and leaders to do anything, any actual thing, to protect them, support them, or at the very least stand with them?
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey held news conferences. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that Democrats "will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included" when it comes before the Senate later this week. In the Twin Cities and elsewhere, thousands of ordinary folks were still out there in the screaming, punishing cold, in streets Alex Pretti's murderers might still be stalking, in their own government's crosshairs, for each other.
