The unconscionable murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care nurse, by federal agents on a street in the US city of Minneapolis after he was already thrown to the ground, marks a fresh low in President Donald Trump’s campaign on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. By all accounts, including eyewitnesses (except the official one), the victim was filming the violent crackdown on people of colour and was trying to rescue a woman facing pepper spray when he was shoved down and shot dead by border patrol agents. Independent media accounts and video footage give the lie to the official story that Pretti was intent on a massacre because he was found to have a weapon; the gun was covered by a permit, kept on his person and not brandished by him and seized by agents. This murder, coming soon after the killing of Renee Good in an equally egregious shooting, has become a symbol of urban America’s descent into a dark and dystopian time. Today, masked agents in military gear, often protected by chemical masks, are laying siege to local communities in cities. Images of a 5-year-old with a backpack and a legal immigrant wearing only a robe being marched off into the winter cold present an America bereft of constitutional idealism. The state of Minnesota, hosting the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, is a specific target for the Trump administration. The President has a record of scapegoating its Somali immigrant community led by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar—most recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos—as corrupt, and Democratic Governor Tim Walz, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate.
An unhinged campaign targeting people of colour and carried out by violent masked agents mostly beyond the pale of law and with no due process can only be characterised as malign. If Trump wanted to weed out criminals among illegal immigrants, it could have been done with warrants and in partnership with state and city administrations. What he has done instead is to pick people off the streets, from their cars, workplaces and even court precincts and send them to detention centres, ignoring the merit of individual cases. Some of them are US citizens. After the Minneapolis murders, the federal government even prevented the state law enforcement from investigating, choosing to keep the murders under the Department of Homeland Security, which has already pronounced adverse verdicts on both Pretti and Good. At a global level, Trump has made it clear that he finds international law of no value and justifies his military actions in Venezuela and Iran. For its part, the US Supreme Court dealt the country’s image of a beacon of freedom a terrible blow by accepting presidential immunity for core actions. Now the hope is that freely held midterm elections to the US Congress and state governor positions may steer the country back to constitutionalism.
