Monday, January 26, 2026

Latest ICE Killing Of VA Nurse Marks Tipping Point: Expect Senate Dems To Withhold DHS Funding & Major Protests To Continue

                      Video shows Pretti's gun was removed before ICE shot him
                           Alex Pretti - VA nurse - latest victim of Trump Gestapo

                                Video capture from one of the anti-ICE protests
                         
   
Alex Pretti's slaughter has energized new protests with his image.
                      
 

Despite the stream of lies and misinformation emanating from puppy-killer Kristi Noem's DHS and the ICE maggot Greg Bovino, people can see with their own eyes the truth in recently released videos, such as shown yesterday on Velshi, i.e.

‘I don’t hear threatening behavior:’ Fmr. NYPD Lt. analysis of new Renee Good shooting video


Bovino can yap and bark all he wants about Mr. Pretti "coming to massacre federal agents" but the detailed analysis by a former NY PD Lieutenant belies that insane claim. It shows clearly, Pretti was already on the ground being pummeled by the fed goons before being pumped in the back and head by ten rounds (which I counted) fired by the ICE henchmen. (Who Traitor Trump called "the ICE Patriots" - yeah like he called the January 6th insurrectionists "patriots" - which is why he pardoned them. Traitors pardon traitors.)

Hell's bells, even the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal now agrees the recent videos contradict Noem, Bovino and their other DHS imps and liars, including one maggot GOP MN congress critter (Tom Emmer):


Indeed, separate analyses by The New York TimesThe Wall Street JournalThe Associated PressCBS News and other organizations all concluded that the recently released videos contradict the Trump administration’s description of the killing. Hence, we have seen not only a state-sponsored execution by Trump's private Gestapo but a massive gaslighting effort to cover it up and blame the victim.  This is desecration of a nation and its Constitution beyond belief, but what do you expect from a traitor put into power again?

 Am I exaggerating here by referring to a Trump Gestapo? Well, what would you call it if a cadre of ICE agents goes house to house banging on doors in the Rochester, MN area and ends up arresting 64 people. Sounds like what Hitler's Gestapo used to do in the 3rd Reich in late 1930s-early 1940s.  And what were Alex Pretti's crimes anyway? From the video analysis, it was: (1) His recording of ICE activity using his cell, and (2) helping a woman who'd been pushed to the sidewalk by an ICE goon. As Pretti helped her to his feet, the ICE apes went ballistic, hurling him to the ground, beating him then firing at least ten rounds.  This was AFTER they'd removed Mr. Pretti's gun (see top frozen image from video released by WaPo).

 In addition to the slaughter of Alex Pretti, Trump's criminal regime has mounted a despicable smear campaign to tar Pretti's good name (as a former VA and ICU nurse) by labeling him a "domestic terrorist" because he was found - only after his butchering - to have had a 9mm gun in a holster. Which btw, he never brandished and had a right to have under the state's conceal carry law. Justifiably 2nd amendment backers in the state are also enraged at Noem's and Bondi's blathering about the gun including photos taken of it (still in its holster).  Newsflash! They don't mean squat, they are merely a propaganda tool to prop up the Trump syndicate's claim Pretti was a "domestic terrorist", but which the latest video totally skewers. Again, we are being relentlessly gaslit by the Felon-in-Chief and his bootlicking pawns. See e.g.

Opinion | The Trump Administration Is Lying to Our Faces. Congress Must Act. - The New York Ti

This is why Sen. Chuck Shumer is correct to call for Senate Dems to withhold any further funding for the DHS. Dems only need 41 votes to succeed, though it likely means the 2nd government shutdown in two months. But true patriots and citizens need to suck it up as a price to be paid for preserving what is left of this nation and its putative democracy.

Despite winter storms creeping across much of the country, major anti-ICE protests and strikes arrived yesterday (including here in Colorado Springs) in cities including Chicago; Los Angeles; Omaha; Madison, Wis.; and Portland, Ore. While some planned protests are part of regular, continuous anti-ICE demonstrations, most organizers have mentioned the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti as a reason for their rallies. 

We are in a precarious moment for our nation, and it will require every sane citizen's attention and adhering to the same reality- refusing to be gaslit by the imps in Trump's hegemon, criminal regime.  My Revolutionary War ancestors, the Brumbaughs, would be foursquare behind the effort to drive out the autocrats, as they were the British Redcoats in 1776.

See Also:

Senate Democrats will block government funding after Border Patrol shooting - The Washington Post

Excerpt:

Senate Democrats plan to block a sweeping government funding package after U.S. Border Patrol agents killed a man in Minneapolis on Saturday — increasing the likelihood of another shutdown at the end of the week.

Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis on Saturday morning during an immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota. Federal officials alleged that Pretti approached officers with a handgun and resisted attempts to disarm him. Videos of the incident show federal agents swarming Pretti, wrestling him to the ground and shooting him after he attempted to get up.

 And:

Timeline: How the Shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti Unfolded - The New York Times

Excerpt:

A video shared with The New York Times by an eyewitness and her lawyer, as well as other video footage posted on social media, documents the violent scene, where agents appear to fire at least 10 shots in a span of only five seconds.

And:

 Alex Pretti’s Friends and Family Denounce ‘Sickening Lies’ About His Life - The New York Times

Excerpt:

He was a calm presence amid hospital chaos. A mentor who taught kindness and patience to younger friends and colleagues. A singer with a knack for dancing. A bicyclist who treasured the beauty of Minnesota.

This weekend, the family, co-workers and friends of Alex Pretti, who was killed by immigration agents in a confrontation after he was apparently filming them, remembered his life, even as the circumstances of his death were debated on the national stage.

They shared photos of the Alex they knew: a smiling, bearded Mr. Pretti in the powder-blue scrubs he wore at his job as an intensive-care nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital, an outdoors lover posing with his mountain bike on a wooded trail and a student wearing a green cap and gown as he sang a solo at his high school graduation in Green Bay, Wis.

And they denounced what they saw as smear campaigns in the aftermath of Mr. Pretti’s death.

Within hours of the killing by federal agents on a Minneapolis street, Trump administration officials labeled Mr. Pretti a “would-be assassin” and asserted, with no evidence, that he had committed an act of “domestic terrorism.”

And:

by Robert Reich | January 25, 2026 - 6:16am | permalink

— from Robert Reich's Substack

Friends,

Trump’s goons have murdered another American in Minneapolis.

This is the third shooting involving federal agents in the city this month, including the murder of Renee Good, 37, on January 7.

This morning, they murdered a 37-year-old man, an American citizen named Alex Pretti. Pretti was a registered nurse who lived in an apartment in Minneapolis a short drive away from where he was murdered. He had no criminal record. He had a firearms permit, required by state law in Minnesota to carry a handgun.

At least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds. The video appears to show a group of masked agents mobbing someone, pushing him to the ground, then shooting him multiple times, even as he lies motionless.

» article continues...

And:

by Robert Becker | January 26, 2026 - 6:10am | permalink

Thuggery against the innocent — with depraved slayings, warrantless invasions and kidnapping of toddlers — cross every civilized notion of justice reliant on rules, due process, trials, even compassion.

The loudmouth bully running the White House has never hidden his knee-jerk appetites for brutal, violent responses to those he can’t abide. That’s especially true if they’re “enemy” minorities, legal protesters, swarming critics or victims seeking judicial regress. Even one “treasonous” ex-military chieftain. Long before channeling today’s vile grievance/vengeance crusade, Trump voiced his “dump-trials, hang ‘em high” vigilante mentality. So far, only E. Jean Carroll won criminal, sexual-harassment/defamation convictions (and massive penalties) for what that judge rightly deemed violent rape.

» article continues...

And:

by Sarah K. Burris | January 26, 2026 - 6:41am | permalink

— from Alternet

Russian-American columnist M. Gessen wrote for The New York Times on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s ICE operations in Minneapolis have crossed into state terror—not mere repression, but deliberate, arbitrary violence designed to instill pervasive fear in which no one feels safe.

In the past month, ICE agents have shot and killed two US citizens: Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Neither had a criminal record. Another U.S. citizen was pulled from his home in his underwear by agents who later realized he wasn’t their target.

Gessen argues this is part of a Trump effort “to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.”

The randomness is the point, he continues. In Pretti’s case, agents fired 10 rounds into him at point-blank range while he was already subdued. The Department of Homeland Security labeled both Pretti and Good “domestic terrorists” before any investigation.

» article continues...

And:

by Heather Digby Parton | January 26, 2026 - 6:26am | permalink

— from Salon

Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave what is likely to be remembered as an historic speech in which he declared “there has been a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” He made it clear that America’s allies finally understood that the reelection of Donald Trump had ushered in a new era in which the rule book that had, for better or worse, guided the world for over 80 years has just been thrown out the window. Carney urged what he called the “middle powers” to stand up for their principles and self-interest.

One couldn’t help but think of that call to arms just a couple of days later when former special prosecutor Jack Smith appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to testify for the first time in public. While his opening statement will not have the historic significance of Carney’s speech, the sentiment was very much the same: There has been a rupture and something important is at stake.

» article continues...

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