This was the situation when they fired:
Right hand holding his phone. Left hand on the ground. Zero threat to anyone. His gun, holstered, which he never went for, had been removed by an agent.
This is an execution. The Agent has not been positively identified (though there’s a possible ID floating around), and was immediately removed from Minneapolis. The ICE agents attempted to keep local police from the scene.
This is the best summary I’ve read:
an ICE agent physically assaults an annoying woman who is whistling at him to antagonize him, Pretti steps between the officer and the woman to protect her, Pretti is the restrained by 5 officers on his hands and knees, one of the officers notices he is armed and yells “gun,” an ICE officer disarms Pretti and while running away accidentally discharges the weapon, then another ICE agent reacts to the negligent discharge by shooting Pretti in the back multiple times while he is on his hands and knees.
No one has been charged, I can’t tell if there’s any investigation into the shooting: there certainly isn’t a federal one, and the local governor and mayor appear to be wimping out: going thru the motions without any attention of charging anyone.
This isn’t the first ICE execution, and who knows how many have occurred that weren’t filmed. Then there are all the people dying in detention, where they routinely keep 80 people in a cell, lights on all the time and beat people who ask for medical aid.
One of the ICE agents applauded when Pretti was killed. When Renee Good was killed the agent who shot her called her a “fucking bitch” and refused to let a doctor help her.
Police in the US are almost always bad. The job attracts authoritarians who like the idea of being able to push people around, but even the minimal safeguards were let loose on ICE and the Border Patrol—they took the job because they like being able to hurt people without even the remotest possibility they might be held accountable.
This is part of a larger pattern. The Trump administration ignores about a third of all court orders against it. Just ignores them. The rule of law has completely broken down in America at the elite and enforcer levels. It was already mostly broken, but there was a final red line: elites smarter than Trump weren’t willing to obviously ignore courts. Perhaps important people might ignore Congressional subpoenas, but Congress wouldn’t actually institute contempt against them, so the facade remained.
Now law is gone entirely. The first, second and fourth amendments are in tatters. Habeas Corpus is dead, ICE and the BP just routinely ignore it. This a common law protection, centuries old. (In the UK they’re making it illegal for jurors to not convict people if the judge disagrees, ending jury nullification.)
Civil liberties seem like “nice to have”, and so does the rule of law, but they aren’t. Without them a society can’t function. That whole “high trust” thing goes away, and no one trusts anyone else. The economy grinds to a halt and civil society collapses.
The silver lining here, the hope, is that Minnessotans have come together to resist this. Thousands of people, not just protesting, but feeding those who can’t leave their houses, helping legally, and putting their bodies on the line. There are good people left in the US, but what they need to recognize is that fixing this requires replacing almost every member of the current elite: Walz has failed, Congress has failed, business has mostly been supine to trump as have universities. Everyone who’s in a position of power, whose duty and responsibility it is to resist has either failed or not even tried.
What needs to be done is to note the ones who tried or resigned rather than engage in illegality and immorality. Go after everyone else, replace them and if they actively engaged in evil, convict them and send them to prison. Put the people who did resist back in, not just politicians but prosecutors and judges and city councillors and so on, and then fill the rest of the ranks with people who went out on the streets in Minnesota and elsewhere and put their bodies in the way of evil, or who otherwise meaningfully resisted.
These are the people who proved themselves. When the brownshirts came, they are the ones who stood up. We now know who is actually moral, who is actually brave and who can actually be trusted when the chips down. This is the new leadership cadre, if Americans are wise.
Not saying this will be done, but these are the slivers of hope. The Brownshirts came.They were resisted. Those who actually resisted proved themselves.
Those should be your leaders. Anyone who failed should be out or in prison.
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Trump’s administration is routinely ignoring court orders. It’s often refusing to let attorney’s see clients. It’s not respecting Miranda rights. It claims the right to enter homes without warrants and routinely searches without cause. It’s violating habeas corpus every day. ICE and the border patrol (the border patrol is often lumped in with ICE, but many of the worst abuses have been theirs) are brownshirts or Gestapo, whichever analogy you prefer.