ICE Is In Hot Water Again
When "peaceful protestors" show up armed and ready to fight, it's just never going to end well.
I didn’t want to write about ICE again. I’m exhausted by violence and protesting and so much same-carnage-different-day. (Also, do you have any idea how hard it is to inject a respectful amount of humor into an otherwise gruesome story ♫♪♩♬ falalalala kittens and sunshine ♫♪♩♬ ?) I certainly didn’t want to watch a hundred or more super-slow-motion clips of someone’s last living moments—fuzzy still shots pulled out and marked up with glowing pen (“See! He’s brandishing a loaded handgun!” “Actually, Helen Keller, that’s a phone!”) in a way that renders them exactly zero percent more decipherable or definitive.
But here we are.
Unless the weekend’s historic winter storm wiped out your Wi-Fi, you’ve surely heard that ICE agents mortally wounded a second protester in Minneapolis on Saturday. Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old nurse, cyclist, and singer, described online as a kind-hearted soul who wanted nothing more than to help others (qualities I formerly would have assumed applied to all nurses until Lexie Lawler single-handedly dismantled that hypothesis, but I digress).
“Masked Government Thugs Snuffed Out Alex Pretti’s Life In Broad Daylight,” The Guardian proclaimed, priming the outrage pump before the facts even landed.
“His last words,” The Guardian opened gravely, “spoken to a woman who had been tackled to the ground and pepper-sprayed by nearby ICE agents, were ‘Are you OK?’ Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a VA hospital; those who knew him recalled, among other things, his devotion to his elderly dog, Joule, who died about a year ago.
This, I’ll point out, is intended to serve as news coverage. As a veteran of the industry, I can say this lede breaks just about every law of journalistic integrity on the books. It’s biased. It leads the reader. It’s loaded with emotional language, speculation, and insinuation. It’s sensationalistic, treats a single uncredited anecdote as a character witness, and completely ignores critical context surrounding what was arguably a preventable catastrophe.
A real news outlet would write:
Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis nurse, was shot and killed on January 24, 2026, when U.S. Border Patrol agents confronted him during an immigration enforcement operation. Officials said he was armed, told to stand back, and inserted himself into an arrest in progress.
But who cares what people actually involved in the incident say anyway?
Right on cue, the hysteria horn began wailing like a tornado siren at a Midwestern state fair. Never mind the tens of thousands of Americans who have been robbed, raped, kidnapped, maimed, or killed by illegal immigrants. Never mind that this guy was carrying a loaded weapon, broke the law by interfering with a federal operation, and was part of a group literally trained and organized to oppose ICE agents. The algorithm told people to rage, so rage they did.
Within hours Pretti was canonized, sanctified, and added to the ever-expanding wall of “victims of federal fascism,” laminated and backlit for immediate use on TikTok.
The reasonable reaction to posts like this is completely lost on the anti-ICE crowd.
PLAINTIFF: I stuck my hand in the blender and it chewed my fingers off! I am a victim of appliance violence!
JUDGE: Were you aware that the blender had sharp blades?
PLAINTIFF: I was, your honor.
JUDGE: And were those blades moving at the time?
PLAINTIFF: They were indeed.
JUDGE: Did it occur to you, even briefly, not to stick your hand in there?
PLAITIFF: No, sir, it did not.
JUDGE: And the violence, you allege, is… the blender’s fault?
PLAINTIFF: Obviously.
This is the page that’s been scribbled over in the history books: George W. Bush—famous for organized workplace immigration raids—ordered the removal of twice as many illegal immigrants as Trump. Clinton was hardly a slacker in the deportation department. Obama booted more illegals than any president on record. But they did it quietly—a foreign concept to Trump—and also the media forgot to tell the masses they were supposed to be furious about it, so people didn’t rush out to rally and risk their lives for the poor maligned criminals of their communities.
But now, two Minnesotans are dead after choosing to physically insert themselves between ICE agents and violent fugitives. Both had one tragic thing in common: they bought the lie. They copied the hashtags. They believed the breathless declarations that ICE is a “fascist death squad,” that illegal immigrants are gentle woodland sprites who occasionally steal catalytic converters so they can feed their crippled children—you’d do the exact same thing, don’t even try to deny it—and that true courage means squaring off against armed federal agents like you’re an extra in Les Misérables.
Sadly, they both found out.
Both Pretti and Good (pretty good?) were promptly and widely portrayed as “innocent bystanders” gunned down by reckless law enforcement. To be clear, Alex Pretti wasn’t strolling to brunch, latte in hand, when ICE ambushed him in a coordinated back-alley attack. According to neighbors (and only reported by the UK’s Mirror, incidentally), he was part of a neighborhood “Signal ICE watch group,” a self-organized rapid-response squad that mobilizes whenever federal agents are spotted doing—brace yourselves—their jobs. These aren’t casual onlookers; they’re activists trained to swarm enforcement scenes, doxx agents, alert residents, obstruct operations, and “bear witness to the horror” of… deporting criminal offenders.
In other words, Pretti wasn’t caught in the crossfire—he ran toward it, because his party spent years preaching that ICE is a state-sanctioned terrorist organization and that it’s your civic duty to intervene. Yes, police violence happens. Yes, some officers use excessive force. No sane person denies that. But none of that changes the facts of this particular case.
The tragedy here wasn’t random. No one—hopefully—is saying it was justified or that he “deserved it.” It was simply, sadly, the predictable result of rhetoric so incendiary it convinced ordinary citizens to act out resistance fighter fantasies in highly charged situations where real guns are involved and real danger exists.
And yet, the narrative machine rolls forward, insisting that Minneapolis is “living in fear.” If you haven’t broken any laws and don’t intend to, what’s there to fear? Deportations are happening in all fifty states. Minnesota makes up just 2% of ICE arrests. Texas accounts for about 23%. Why is the violence only happening in one place?
It turns out that when your political leaders demonize federal agents and reward confrontation with sainthood, people start doing incredibly stupid things. And sometimes those stupid things get them killed. See BLM in your history books.
Is our immigration enforcement process the best it could possibly be? Please. Is ICE perfect? Hahahaha you’re cute. Sometimes good people make mistakes under pressure. Sometimes bad people are given too much power. And sometimes decent, hardworking, innocent ones get swept up in the dragnet—especially after a decade of open-border policies that turned the whole system into a bureaucratic Jenga tower.
The intent of immigration enforcement is to uphold the law and remove violent offenders. The reality occasionally resembles the TSA on a bad day. But one thing’s for certain: If you stick your hand into the blender, you’re probably going to lose a finger.
Here’s the truth the left can’t see and wouldn’t admit if they could: They routinely accuse ICE of “failure to de-escalate” a situation they created. It would be like setting your shared fence on fire and then yelling at your neighbor for not putting it out quickly enough.
And now their leaders stand before cameras with a straight face and talk about “senseless violence” as if they have no earthly idea how any of this could have possibly happened.
But of course they know how it happened. They scripted it. They encouraged it. And now they’re milking it. They demonized enforcement, glorified confrontation, and normalized the idea that obstructing federal operations was a form of civic virtue. Once you teach people that resisting the law makes them heroes, you can’t feign disbelief when they are harmed following your orders.
Social media is flooded with vigilantes talking about “getting their affairs in order” before heading out to take on “the people in power.”
I guess I get the whole “standing up to tyranny” thing. I was ready to be carted off to a FEMA camp during Covid if it came down to “get the jab or get in the van.” Funny how these are the very people I’d have been standing up to.
A woman who’s been a nurse in Minnesota for more than twenty years claims the state’s healthcare unions are “radicalizing their employees and have been for years,” and have actively encouraged members to go out and protest ICE—a claim verified on the Minnesota Nurses Association website. “We call upon MN and National Companies to become 4th Amendment businesses, cease economic relations with ICE and refuse ICE entry or using their property for staging grounds,” they urge, advice that sounds powerful on paper but implicitly asks people to put themselves in harm’s way.
Which makes sense: Violence against ICE supports their cause. It doesn’t matter to them which direction that violence comes from; as long as it’s ICE-adjacent, they know their disciples will blame Big, Bad Orange Man.
(To be fair, the political right isn’t exactly scrambling to put out the fire, either. Why would they? Now they can accuse Democrats of creating the very confusion and conflict they’re trying to pin on ICE. It helps mobilize support for their own pet causes, namely border security, law and order, and deference to federal authority. They may not have initiated the chaos, but they’re definitely leveraging it.)
And of course, both Democrats and Republicans are using Pretti’s death to further their gun arguments.
The left: He was exercising his Second Amendment right to carry a weapon! This was unjustified use of force.
The right: So now you support 2A? You built your entire platform on “guns kill people”… but when it’s an ICE agent, suddenly it’s people who kill people? You can’t have it both ways.
The insane part is, both sides claim to be fighting for the exact same thing: safer communities. And yet half the population has somehow been trained to believe the people trying to remove rapists and murderers—a job that’s existed under every administration in modern history—are the bad guys in this movie. I don’t know what’s more dangerous—the criminals themselves, or the propaganda that protects them.
Keep it respectful, peeps—even if you disagree with me or each other. TIA! :)
Totally off topic and I want to give a shout out to Dr. Kory and Jenna for their amazing and important book, The War on Chlorine Dioxide. Please order and read it if you can. And donate to the Grenons on Give Send Go if you can as well.
This could have turned out differently if ICE had been using more effective non-lethal weapons: ultrasonic speakers, millimeter wave pain guns, water cannons, and bean-bag shotgun rounds. I have zero sympathy for any of these people getting hurt. I care infinitely more about the ICE agent losing a fingertip.
What these people are doing is NOT observing, protesting, or peacefully assembling. They are interfering, screaming, spitting, throwing objects, and in some cases…fully rioting. In my mind, nothing in excess of marching orderly on the sidewalk with a poster is protected behavior.
Why we’ve waited decades to arrest and execute George Soros for all of the murder, rape, treason, and theft he has created, though, I still can’t understand.