We are being told by the Trump administration that a critical care nurse, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, and a mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, both shot and killed by ICE agents in Minnesota, were a new breed of domestic terrorist. You can watch the videos of both incidents and judge for yourself how grotesque and absurd these claims are. Or take the word of the White House’s own Renfield, Stephen Miller, who spoke out on social media. And called Pretti a “potential assassin” who “attempted to murder federal officials.”
The images contradict the claims
Videos of Pretti’s gruesome killing, filmed from multiple angles, show six or seven officers wrestling a passive Pretti to the ground. When they discover a weapon on his body, one of the officers appears to disarm Pretti. Whereupon another shoots him four times in the back. A third officer also fires at his body. Shooting an overwhelmed man from behind is the definition of excessive force and cowardice.
Despite visual evidence to the contrary, Department of Homeland Security director and self-proclaimed canine executioner Kristi Noem claimed Pretti’s killing was justified. “This appears to be a situation where an individual came to the location to cause maximum damage and kill law enforcement officers.”
Further misrepresentations from government officials
Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, whose recent wardrobe choice is reminiscent of someone cosplaying a villain from an “Indiana Jones” movie, said Pretti wanted to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement officers.” According to available videos, Pretti was only holding a cell phone during the encounter. He does not appear to be resisting the ICE officers in any way. Bovino also made the absurd and insulting comment that the officers were the actual victims of the incident. The untruths are piling up. And insult our intelligence.
Regardless of what the Trump administration claims, federal agents do not have the authority to act as judge, jury, and executioner on the streets of America. These officials are not above the law. But in both killings in Minneapolis we see behavior that violates police firearms protocol. The officers leave the crime scene. Local authorities are prevented from investigating evidence of the killings.
Elected officials and the White House trade insults and abuse. But there is no effort from Washington to conduct the kind of thorough investigation that the death of any human being requires as a matter of principle and in the eyes of a constitutional nation. Partisan politics and extreme measures have turned into a literal blood sport.
Escalation instead of de-escalation
A serious and thoughtful president would seek to defuse this situation before the vortex widens further and the country is convulsed by more violence and destruction. Instead, President Trump attacked Minnesota Democrats in a particularly uninhibited fit of rage on Truth Social.
“Where are the local police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect the ICE officers? Did the mayor and governor blow them off? Word is that many of those cops weren’t allowed to do their jobs, that ICE had to protect themselves. No easy task! Why does Ilhan Omar have $34 million in her account? And where are the tens of billions of dollars that were stolen from the once great state of Minnesota? We’re there because of massive financial fraud. Billions of dollars have disappeared. And locally because of illegal criminals running through the “We want the money back and we want it back NOW.”
What the alleged fraud in Minnesota has to do with ICE’s killing of civilians, beyond distraction and misdirection, remains unclear. This year-long barrage of perfidious government distortions has worn us all down. There is a clear pattern of untruth. From DOGE to the “Big Beautiful Bill”, from the clear-cutting of public services to the instrumentalization of the Justice Department to punish political opponents. It was an exhausting year of ugly productions.
Unfortunately, false claims have been used to justify violence before. If the killing of Venezuelans in boats with rockets was supposedly about drugs, where are the drugs or any evidence? The government asks us to simply trust it.
International impact and political consequences
Last week, Trump brought his dark cloud to Davos, insulting European allies and openly plotting to seize the territory of a long-friendly country. Greenland. An island where the US already has military access that meets its strategic needs. Trump’s long and confusing speech, full of other falsehoods and ugly insults, drifted into the realm of a mad king. He called Greenland Iceland four times.
The performance was an embarrassment that only obsequious supporters within the administration refused to recognize as a complete exposure of the president’s mental deterioration. Trump’s crude and venal character has sparked horror, fear and justifiable anger around the world and across much of the country. At home and abroad, the president’s anger and lies are sowing chaos, confusion and disgust.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney summed up the situation. “We are in the middle of a turning point, not a transition,” Carney told the audience in Davos. “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have exposed the risks of extreme global integration.
More recently, however, major powers have begun to use economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as a coercive tool, and supply chains as vulnerabilities that can be exploited. One cannot live in the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of one’s own subordination.”
Demand for political action
The bloodshed must stop. Congress has broad powers and must act. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said after Good’s killing, “We just saw them murder an American citizen in cold blood in the street. No matter what falsehoods the president wants to tell, you can see for yourself what happened.”
Despite a bipartisan call for an investigation into Pretti’s killing, led by Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota, there are too few signs of courage beyond the usual vocal dissent. Unless significant numbers of the Republican majority join the minority, this outrageous and consistent abuse of power will only continue to escalate.
We cannot allow thousands of federal officers to roam through cities, picking up people off the streets, acting with impunity, clashing with demonstrators. And then expect that there will be no more acts of violence and senseless deaths. If ICE is not reined in, we are headed for more tragedies and bloodshed across the country.
Americans can no longer live in all these falsehoods.
