Another Death in Minnesota
Changes and Continuity Coming to the Cities
On Saturday, Alex Pretti was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis.
Again, most of the facts of the case are not in dispute, but the interpretations vary. They certainly did shortly after the moment. (More on that below.)
What We Know
Alex Pretti was part of a group of people making noise and filming Border Patrol agents as they they detained a targeted individual in Minneapolis. “Targeted” means BP knew who he was, where he was, and what he had done. So officers went to a very specific location to arrest a specific person. His name has since been released and he is a very bad man.
How did Mr. Pretti get involved?
There is a coordinated group of people in Minneapolis who track ICE and BP (yes there are two different agencies operating in the same city with largely the same task; it’s the government). They send people to locations where officers are attempting to arrest someone and usually blow whistles, put their cars in the way of official vehicles, and generally try to make the task more difficult for the officers. They also film the entire interaction.
Mr. Pretti seems to have been a member of one of these groups, although no one knew that at the time. We now also know he received an injury during an altercation with ICE or BP just weeks ago. While filming officers he stepped between an officer and a protestor who had been shoved by the officer. The officer then tried to detain him.
Several other officers assisted the original officer. A gun was spotted on Mr. Pretti. One officer cried “Gun!” as is standard procedure. He then grabbed Mr. Pretti’s gun. At this point it seems the gun discharged by itself, which is apparently not uncommon with this model (Sig Sauer P320 AXG Combat). At the sound of gunfire, other officers shot Mr. Pretti.
Reactions
As seems inevitable now, both of the usual sides took opposite positions. Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey claimed that Mr. Pretti was assassinated, which would require a level of intention on the part of the officers that is completely unlikely. Not to be outdone, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Noem described Mr. Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and that the was “brandishing a gun.” Sigh. At the time there was not the slightest evidence of the former and, from every camera angle, absolutely no evidence of the latter.
In Minneapolis the riots got worse. Hotels where ICE and BP agents were thought to be staying were attacked Saturday night. According to city policy, the police did not respond to an ICE-related incident. Some people have set up an “autonomous zone” in the location where Mr. Pretti died. On the model of the George Floyd riots, these are areas protestors take over and control, allowing only approved people to enter. The irony that they set up a border and then patrol it seems to be lost on these people.
The most significant reaction came from President Trump. He seems to be very displeased with Sec. Noem and her handling of the situation. He has sent his “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, to Minneapolis to sort things out.
The Czar position is a very strange post. First, “Czar” is Russian for “Caesar,” so having someone in a republican form of government referred to as a Caesar is a little unsettling. As with so many unsettling features of the American government, this one started under President Woodrow Wilson with the appointment of Bernard Baruch as industry czar during WWI. It is an informal position that does not require Senate confirmation, so it really means “a guy I want to have on staff in the White House and I’ll give him a lot of responsibility but no power.” Czars don’t actually run any agencies or direct any departments.
Tom Homan
Tom Homan has worked for decades in immigration enforcement. Pres. Obama awarded him the 2015 Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service. Homan worked at the time as Obama’s Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations at ICE.
Homan is also a favorite of Trump’s, both in this administration and his first four years in office. How many people have been respected by these two presidents? There can’t be many. But his intervention may actually signal continuity rather than change.
One thing we do know is that Homan’s priority has always been to remove any illegal alien with a record of crime. Sen. Noem, however, has been focused on absolute numbers of deportations. This has been a tension inside the Trump administration. But because Noem is a Senate-confirmed cabinet secretary, she has had significantly more direct authority and power than Homan. If this has changed it can only be informally unless Homan is given her job and confirmed by the Senate. Again, the czar role is really only advisory.
Changes
Tom Homan has already arrived in Minneapolis and spoken with both the Governor and Mayor and things are changing.
On Monday night another hotel was attacked but Minneapolis police responded immediately and arrested several people. This is a big change. And it seems that police are now working with ICE and BP throughout the city, reducing a lot of the conflict that was almost unique to Minneapolis. ICE and BP are deporting illegals all over the country, but riots are ensuing only in one city. (This happened briefly in Chicago over the summer but stopped as soon as the Chicago police department stepped in to assist the federal agents.)
Did Homan work some magic on Walz and Frey? Probably not. More likely they both got spooked by the work of a few online sleuths. Remember the organized protestors I mentioned at the beginning of this post? Someone got into their Signal account (which now seems completely useless as an encrypted communication service) and not only got a list of all the people working to disrupt ICE agents, they also found all the funding sources.
Not only are several government officials involved in impeding arrests (an illegal offense), the money coming in to support their efforts in doing so is now attached to names. Some of these names are aligned with China. The information has been posted on the internet and it does not look good. The protests look a lot more like a coordinated foreign operation than most would have suspected.
Just a few weeks ago, although it feels like a year, the Somali daycare fraud scandal forced Tim Walz to drop out of the race for governor. The ICE raids and deaths seemed to wash all that away and he again became the Democrat’s standard bearer for masculinity. Although some people pointed out that his encouraging people to put their bodies on the line against ICE (while he stood behind the locked gate of the governor’s mansion) looked a bit like Lord Farquaad from Shrek, he was riding a wave.
Now he’s humbly sitting on a beach blanket and working with the czar. Unfortunately, he already whipped people up into a frenzy. Today his offices were overrun by protestors protesting that he is working with the Trump administration. Poor Tim can’t win.
Where this goes next is impossible to tell. Polls continue to show very high support for deporting illegal aliens, regardless of their criminal status. But a lot of people find the scenes recorded by protestors to be just too much to watch and would like things to be toned down. The nation has the same internal tensions as the Trump administration.
Some people have compared the deaths in Minneapolis to the shootings at Kent State in 1970 where four students protesting the Vietnam War were killed by National Guardsmen. That might be a good analogy. But don’t forget that two years after that event Richard Nixon won 250 electoral college votes to George McGovern’s seventeen. Distance can sometimes exaggerate the importance of an event. Sometimes distance can also obscure. It’s hard to tell.
With the midterms in November the President is going to need every vote he can get. But as news comes at us so fast, will voters remember the headlines from January when they vote in November? As I write this we are all waiting to hear about a strike on Iran and the collapse of the Islamic Republic. What else could happen?