Americans are strongly united against people being gunned down on our streets by federal agents.
Saturday, the victim was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse working at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. Pretti was an American citizen with a conceal-carry permit. Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino quickly informed the public: “During this operation, an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol agents with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. The agents attempted to disarm the individual, but he violently resisted. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, a Border Patrol agent fired defensive shots.
“The suspect also had two loaded magazines and no accessible ID,” added Bovino. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Had this farfetched narrative been even close to true, maybe we could partly reconcile the killing we witness relentlessly in cellphone videos. I like to reserve judgment until all the facts are in, but to me the videos don’t implicate Pretti as a “terrorist” in the slightest and leave little doubt that, in law enforcement lingo, this was not at all a “good shoot,” i.e. a justified use of deadly force.
Yesterday, President Trump told The Wall Street Journal that he had a “very good telephone conversation” with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. “The president agreed the present situation can’t continue,” offered Frey.
This change is driven democratically: Republicans at the White House, in Congress and across the country know the voters will crush them if this continues through the fall elections.
Now if voters can only unite on reform beyond merely stopping the shooting.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “ICE Melt in Minnesota”
So what kind of reform you looking for, Paul? People seem to have forgotten that the biggest deporter president was Obama, by a mile. Removal of illegal immigrants:
Obama (8 yrs) ~3.1+ million total (high annual peaks)
Trump I (4 yrs) ~932,000 total
Trump II (2025) ~400,000+ estimated
I’m no great fan of Obama. But he somehow managed deportations at a far higher rate than Trump, but with no outcries, protests or public executions. So how did he do it? Very quietly, it would seem. And he certainly didn’t use ICE as a tool in any vendetta against his political opponents. That’s a big difference in methodology. Whatever you have in mind for “reform,” it surely has to begin with reining in the current iteration of ICE…
Common Sense? Poor life choices don’t make anyone a victim. Who tries to run down a federal agent? Who shows up in that cahos with a loaded gun? Provocation. Do your homework. ICE does not receive crowd control training. The Democratic Socialists in charge of a leaderless party know that. ICE ops rely on local police departments to provide crowd control and keep citizens from interfering with their ops. It’s working in Texas and other states. No shootings. But Minneapolis Mayor Frey has told the Minneapolis PD NOT to support ICE ops. Why? They are purposely setting a trap for President Trump. If he invokes the Insurrection Act, they will say “see, we told you he was a dictator.” Common Sense or lack thereof.
It doesn’t help that there are multiple anti-ICE Signal groups there using the system to track ICE agents and call for more people to show up to block officers in the performance of their duties.