Why Alex Pretti Should Matter to Conservatives
Or, The Constitution is for Commies Too
When I wrote something about the shooting of Renee Good, I didn’t expect to revisit the tangled web of discourse around ICE and ICE-related violence within the month. Immigration law and its enforcement has never been one of my “beats,” and I’m generally put off by discourse cycles around these kinds of violent deaths. But I unexpectedly found myself in the thick of one of those discourses last week as pundits left and right dissected the footage of Alex Pretti’s death to, well, death.
For those who are not very online or simply don’t feel like watching 50 angles of a man getting shot to death, here in plain jargon-free English are the bare facts of the case as we currently have them: At around 9 AM on January 24th, Pretti was observing and recording the movements of several Border Patrol agents (not ICE, as has been misreported in some places), along with a few women, all apparently part of the same loose community network of leftist agitators. Two of the women were in the street blowing whistles and shouting while agents tried to detain a man in a donut shop, who allegedly had a criminal record of domestic abuse. The agents were clearly annoyed by this, and a video shows one of them backing Pretti out of the street at one point.
The crucial video shows Pretti back in the street directing a car through the drama, after which an agent gets abruptly physical with the two whistle-blowing women and starts shoving them towards the curb. Pretti catches one woman falling back and maneuvers her away from the agent. Then he steps between the agent and the other woman just as she’s shoved into a snowbank. The agent whips out pepper spray, and Pretti turns away with a shielding hand up to focus his attention on helping the woman out of the snowbank. The agent then drags Pretti into the street, where he’s rapidly joined by several colleagues. One of them nervously tries to direct more pepper spray at the women, but after his canister jams, he pulls his gun upon hearing someone shout “Gun!” That cry came from an agent who had just discovered Pretti was armed, then evidently failed to signal that he had successfully slipped the gun out of Pretti’s waistband. Multiple shots were fired—whether one was a misfire from Pretti’s own gun is still unclear—and Pretti lay dead on the pavement. This whole interaction is over in less than 40 seconds.
My article on Renee Good looked back at the tragic shooting of Ashli Babbitt on January 6th, considering how both women became devoted to misguided causes that brought them into these confrontations with law enforcement. While I still questioned the judgment of the officers in both shoots, I could see the argument that they were justified. But when I saw the footage of Pretti’s death, I couldn’t make that case.
I was prepared for this take to be somewhat unpopular in my social media circles, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how unpopular. In light of this, I want to propose that the right needs to find better ways to talk about these cases. And by that, I don’t just mean finding better ways to talk about clashes between ICE and anti-ICE, but talking about clashes between civilians and law enforcement in general.
I remain sympathetic to the intractable problems of immigration law enforcement, and I write in the full awareness that anti-ICE agitators are not my political friends. I think there are legitimate unaddressed concerns about how ICE and Border Patrol are conducting their operations, but I’m well aware that the other side is for its part quite capable of thuggery and violence, and I’m happy to blame officials like Tim Walz and Jacob Frey for their part in stoking it. Already, it looks like activists are trying to run Portland 2.0 in Minneapolis, setting up roadblocks and aggressively intimidating people like this journalist here:
The leftist thug in that video is, in a bit of grim aesthetic irony, masked up and wearing camo.
This flyer is an example of the incitement to violence that’s circulating among some of these protestors:
For a deeper dive on all this, this City Journal article is pretty thorough.
However, a problem still remains for the right here. Because there is a range of behaviors that, while they may in their way be irritating, fall short of actually thuggish, violent agitation. They may even fall within constitutionally protected bounds. Every American citizen gets the same set of constitutional rights—yes, even the haters and leftists and commies. But to hear the way some on the right have talked about Alex Pretti, you would think one can forfeit one’s constitutional rights by being a commie.
Extreme recklessness and dishonesty about this case was modeled at the highest levels of the administration in statements by Greg Bovino, Kristy Noem, and Steve Miller, the latter further amplified in a retweet by J. D. Vance. The DHS’s original “report” gave the impression that Pretti had made a threatening approach with his gun, then “violently resisted” in an “armed struggle” when agents attempted to disarm him, so that one of them, “fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers,” was forced to fire “defensive shots.” This “report,” as footage from all angles quickly showed, was unmitigated bullshit. Incredibly, even after being shown the footage on live television, Bovino refused to retract his initial assertion that Pretti had the intent to “massacre” agents, and he praised the agents for taking Pretti down “before he was able to [shoot anyone].” He then proceeded to decry the radical leftist ideology that may have influenced Pretti. And there’s the implication: He was a radical leftist, so there you go. That’s all.
I’ve talked about how this cycle plays itself out every time, this cycle of opinions and counter-opinions where the salient feature is not “Was this killing lawful?” but “Do I personally have warm feelings toward the person who wound up dead?” Was Ashli Babbitt a salt-of-the-earth, small-business-owning military veteran, or a troubled QAnon conspiracist with anger management issues? Was George Floyd a meth-addled bum with a violent criminal past, or a gentle giant who mentored young men and worked with church ministries? The false dichotomy presumes that a narrative—either narrative—must trump reality. And right on cue, everyone did this dance all over again with Pretti, one side literally giving him a halo (or making him look more handsome with AI, because that’s the timeline we’re in now) and going on about his work as a veterans’ nurse while the other side pointed to his track record of radical leftist agitation. Maybe the footage of his shooting is kind of iffy, but hey, look over here at this footage of him on a different day kicking out a taillight and goading the agents with obscenities! So there you have it. He was “no angel.” He “wasn’t innocent,” by which we don’t mean we have any more clarity about the facts of his death, but we now have permission to care even less about it.
Am I saying it was maximally wise for Alex Pretti to drive to the scene of a Border Patrol operation and pull out his phone while carrying a concealed weapon? No. Am I denying that it would have been better for everyone, including Alex, had he been detained for the previous week’s aggressive behavior, which for whatever combination of reasons didn’t happen? Also no. And am I saying his female co-agitators bear no blame in all this for refusing to get out of the street and stop blowing insanely shrill whistles? Also no. What I am saying is that it is very clear the agents in this picture did not have an orderly plan for what to do with these people who, while making themselves annoying, weren’t posing a violent threat. So they began to act on impulse and adrenaline instead, and they screwed up, and within seconds, someone was dead. And it seems all but impossible for anyone on the right who’s not named Rand Paul to admit this out loud.
Even after a suggestion of turnover and backpedaling at the level of the administration, various influencers like Benny Johnson, Matt Walsh, and Chris Rufo kept the train rolling. Then there was this fellow who I don’t follow, though somehow or other he seems to have amassed 200k followers, boiling it down very succinctly:
More dispiriting for me personally, though, were the various people who kept popping up to argue with me in my comments on Twitter and Facebook. In real time, I could see little lies and half-lies becoming memes, even in the mouths of conservative acquaintances: He “assaulted” or “put his hands on” the agent. He was “grappling,” “fighting,” “resisting,” or even “violently resisting.” (To my disappointment, even Ben Shapiro recycled the “resisting arrest” cliché.) One person kept insistently trying to convince me that the mere act of taking a step towards the agent constituted “violent assault” before any physical contact. Sometimes the goalposts would shift from “He pushed an officer” to “Well, whether or not he pushed an officer, he was still impeding law enforcement,” or “He was still resisting arrest.” Someone else said I really wasn’t qualified to assess the footage, because I’m a woman who’s never been involved in a physical struggle with a grown man. This same person kept repeating that “the state gets a monopoly on violence.”
Several people breathlessly recommended I watch this take, in which someone pontificates for 8 excruciating minutes on the importance of discussing “responsibilities” at the same time we discuss “rights.” Okay. I agree. That’s a good discussion to have. So at what point, I’d like to know, do we have a conversation about the responsibilities of law enforcement? At what point do we say that as the entity capable of acting with overwhelming force, LEOs have an extra responsibility not to “escalate” or increase the risk of violence needlessly? At what point are we allowed to notice when the word “resisting” is being defined down to within an inch of its life, or when the word “reasonably” is being stretched to the breaking point in the phrase, “The officer reasonably feared for his life”? (Although as a side note, I actually don’t place the lion’s share of blame in Pretti’s case with the agent who pulled the trigger, but with the agent who first kicked off the scrum and with the agent who screamed “GUN!” without further alerting anyone that the gun was in his own hands. Footage of the aftermath shows one of them scrabbling around and asking, “Where’s the f*cking gun?”)
I submit that right-wing Americans have never sat down to have these conversations properly over the years, partly because racial politics have created so much static around them, thus obscuring what I think is the actual root problem: not a white supremacy problem, but a “cop supremacy” problem. The problem of an unspoken class divide in which cops belong to one caste, and ordinary citizens belong to another. In which yes, yes, mistakes happen, but we really ought to remember how hard cops have it out there, and the most important thing is that the cop isn’t the one leaving the scene in a body bag.
Whenever I try to do a reductio and ask, “Where is the line? What if officers go out of their way to tackle and try to arrest someone for no good reason whatsoever, perhaps because he ‘fits a description,’ or maybe even just for the heck of it?” the stock answer is “Just comply and fight it in the courts.” Well, number one, “not complying” is defined so sweepingly that the slightest twitch can get binned in that category (particularly dangerous for anyone who’s not fully with it cognitively or socially, or for anyone who’s involuntarily reacting to something like mace). And number two, “fighting it in the courts” is an infamously slow and expensive mechanism for getting justice in even one case, let alone for effecting a change of practice across the board. If there is some level on which the violation of civil rights has become an engrained habit for law enforcement, then something needs to change at that level. And the more blank checks conservatives write them with their rhetoric, the less likely that is.
We need look no further from home than Dearborn, Michigan to see an example of how a whole police department can act in lockstep with a tyrannical (in this case de facto Muslim) government. In that case, several Christian missionaries were arrested for sharing their faith in the street with Muslims. One officer told a girl to stop filming on her phone, then asserted that she had broken the law by refusing. The missionaries eventually settled and were awarded damages, but their case remains instructive. You could easily come up with similar scenarios in a context where thuggish law enforcement is going after pro-life protesters. I’m giving examples like this not to say that every leftist agitator is pure as the driven snow or has just as legitimate a complaint as a missionary or a pro-life protester, but to warn against language that allows very bad precedent to be set for what LEOs can do with impunity.
Returning to the present context of federal law enforcement, I want to draw out a detail in another case where a woman was apprehended and ordered out of her SUV at gunpoint for “impeding a federal operation,” which could have meant anything from merely observing agents to trying to ram them with her car. The official DHS account is that she engaged in the latter, which would make the agents’ reaction understandable. Then again, the official DHS account said Alex Pretti had shown up to assassinate agents and engaged in an “armed struggle” with them, so people might now be understandably reluctant to take the official DHS account of anything with any seriousness. In any case, when the woman’s husband arrived and started to ask why the agents were constitutionally allowed to search her car, it’s been claimed that one of them brusquely replied “I’m not getting into the legality of everything.” This suggests a rather alarming state of affairs in which federal officers neither know, nor particularly care, nor are particularly trained to care what the “legality” of a given situation might be, beyond the training to keep repeating that they have a right to arrest anyone they decide is “impeding a federal operation” (language taken from 18 U.S.C 111, which a few have explicitly cited).
Here is a concrete example of how that MO can affect even people who are literally doing nothing, courtesy of a friend of mine who’s a drone pilot. In aviation, there’s something called TFRs, or temporary flight restrictions, published weeks in advance in a public database so that pilots know which areas to avoid—Washington DC, for example, or certain military bases, or an air show or a wildfire in progress. Well, apparently ICE has now created their own dedicated moving TFRs, which are not published anywhere, and which are fluid by definition. So, picture Mr. Smith the drone pilot, legally flying his drone, when suddenly ICE drives within 3000 feet of him. And just like that, Mr. Smith is violating a TFR he couldn’t have detected or proactively avoided. Before he knows it, half a dozen shouting agents are approaching him with guns drawn, demanding he land the drone with no chance to explain himself or exercise his obligation to complete this landing sans outsider interference. My friend points out that this would pose a risk to manned aviators and individuals on the ground.
As I stated at the outset here, I am aware that multiple people on multiple levels have a share of the blame for this present state of affairs, including agitators themselves. But this present state of affairs will continue to go on unresolved as long as both sides insist that the blame is one-sided, and federal law enforcement officers are trained that they don’t need to “get into the legality” of their actions beyond a dubiously sweeping application of 18 U.S.C 111. And I fear that on the political right, the groundwork for allowing this to keep sliding has been laid over years of habitually deferring to the whims of law enforcement.
I realize that old habits die hard. But maybe now is a good time to practice some new ones.
Very well said! Balanced and thoughtful. I have noticed in myself the tendency to be so fed up sick and tired and disgusted at the antics and insanity of the left that my knee jerk reaction to anything that hinders them or stops them is good. It's scary to see that in the mirror. It's scary to see that in faces and attitudes all around me left or right.
Thanks for holding up the mirror!
May the Lord have mercy.
Glad you waited to write this article. I appreciate your analysis and measured response. It is hard to find people to trust in these situations since no one seems eager to analyze a case like this carefully. Once it happened, once video came out, everyone chose a side, and stuck with it.
Additionally, I am very cynical. If this happened under any other president would people care as much? Maybe. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t.