A man approached Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis Saturday carrying a gun. That’s what the Border Patrol said. In fact, Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of Donald Trump’s Border Patrol operations, said the man with the gun approached the agents, intending to “massacre” them.
At a news conference, Bovino doubled down, claiming that the man with the gun, who was shot dead by Border Patrol agents, “wanted to do maximum damage.”
Bovino lied.
Or if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, the agents who shot the man could have lied to Bovino. Maybe. But as of Saturday evening, despite the video evidence, Bovino hadn’t changed his story.
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SUBSCRIBEDid you really think he would? Trump is blaming state and local officials in Minnesota for the trouble. He blames them even as, according to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, 15,000 marched in solidarity with those being hunted by ICE. Not a single window was broken, Frey said. Not a single person was injured.
Who’s to blame for what?
As videos of the shooting showed, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen born in Illinois, a registered ICU nurse at a VA hospital, with no criminal record, did not have a gun in his hand.
He had a phone.
It’s very clear in the videos, and presumably to the Border Patrol agents, that he had a phone.
It turned out, after they had taken him down, they learned he was carrying a concealed handgun, holstered at this back. It turned out, the police had grabbed the gun before anyone shot Pretti. It turned out that at least one agent fired as many as 10 shots at Pretti in less than five seconds.
It turned out, Pretti was licensed to carry a concealed weapon. And, by the way, the right to open carry is enshrined in Minnesota law.
And now, Pretti is dead. And Trump officials have lied, trying to cover their asses. The coverup is not worse than the crime, but it’s dangerous nonetheless.
Phones are dangerous, I guess, because as Trump’s war against migrants and their neighbors on the Minnesota streets rages on, the heavily armed, jackbooted ICE and Border Patrol thugs have but one thing to fear — the truth.
I mean, who you gonna believe, Bovino or your cell-phone-assisted lyin’ eyes?
There is a riot in the streets — a police riot, or more precisely, an ICE riot taking place in the frigid Minnesota temperatures, where thousands marched in protest Friday and hundreds of local businesses closed down, and clergy were arrested for praying for the victims.
And the victims, it turns out, aren’t necessarily undocumented, or even documented, migrants. They may not even be Somali pet-eaters.
It was barely two weeks ago that Renee Good was shot and killed in her car amid federal agents swarming the streets. The FBI and DHS said there was nothing to investigate in the case, in which the government claimed Good was trying to run over the agent who shot her. And yet, videos showed she was plainly turning the wheels of her car to get away from the agents, and still one of them killed her.
Local law officials were denied access to the scene and to the evidence. Any guesses as to why?
Good, too, was a U.S. citizen, a mother of three and also without a criminal record. Pretti’s shooting was at least the third shooting by federal agents in Minnesota in less than three weeks of out-of-control migrant hunting. Two have died, both U.S. citizens. One was injured, a Venezuelan migrant.
This is war. And a siege. And we can only wonder how many of the Geneva Conventions Trump’s personal paramilitary troops have broken.
We know the story — and the traumatizing photo of a terrified 5-year-old — of Liam Conejo Ramos, who was sent to his house by agents as “bait” to help them arrest his undocumented father. We know the father and his son have been sent to San Antonio for detention. We know the boy’s mother — another U.S. citizen — is at their home in Minnesota.
We know of the 2-year-old who was detained after a traffic stop and other kids who have been detained.
And soon after the shooting, we know what actually happened to Pretti, according to evidence from several videos — “Thank God we have video,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — that has been analyzed by the New York Times.
The Times reported that the attack on Pretti began when a small group of protesters were talking to a federal agent. Pretti was using his phone to record the agents, which is what protesters do these days. They blow whistles of warning. They follow the agents on their rounds. They protest, just as the First Amendment allows them to.
And in this case, The Times reports that an agent began shoving the protesters and firing off pepper spray. Pretti went to help a protester who had been sprayed as other agents approached and pulled Pretti to the ground and pummeled him.
That’s when an agent saw the gun and pulled it from Pretti. By that time, Pretti had been subdued. The agents seemed in control.
Then the shots come — as many as 10 in five seconds.
Pretti — who seems to have done nothing wrong, which may be why federal agents, again, did not allow state police to investigate the scene, even after they’d gotten a subpoena — was dead.
And then, the coverup began, almost immediately.
Pretti’s parents, who live in Colorado, learned of his death from an Associated Press reporter, who showed them the videos. Michael Pretti, the victim’s father, said he had warned his son a couple of weeks ago to “go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically.”
Pretti did engage, but not as carefully as he or his parents had hoped. He brought a cell phone to a gun fight. And now he’s dead.
The good guy with a gun, as we’re hearing him described by online posters, was shot by bad guys with guns. Shouldn’t the NRA be howling in protest?
Now Walz has finally sent the state’s National Guard to protect ICE and the Border Patrol from understandably enraged Minnesotans. They’ve watched the migrant-hunting operation, and the harassment that goes with it, lasting for week after week.
And they have seen U.S. agents killing U.S. citizens on U.S. streets.
At a news conference, Mayor Frey, who has asked a judge for a restraining order to halt the federal operation, asks, “How many more residents, how many more Americans, need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?”
That is the question that must be answered. Now. Immediately.
Trump has apparently backed down on using force in Greenland. Now, more urgently, he must back down from using force in Minnesota.
If he doesn’t, the whole national democratic project — even as we celebrate its 250th anniversary — is at grave and profound risk.
This is not the America that the founders of our nation hoped for. And it can’t be the one that we want.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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