The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the local Minneapolis county attorney’s office shouldn’t have had to sue the federal government for access to the evidence from Saturday’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents, but in the age of President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, it was needed.
As with the ICE shooting of Renee Good, Pretti’s killing was caught on many different cameras and everyone has already seen, from various angles, the circumstances. But despite that, Noem and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino have been publicly and brazenly lying about both fatalities.
What must happen here are independent investigations that can examine the facts and, as necessary, hold the responsible agents accountable, including criminally if warranted. Unfortunately, it’s far from clear that that will happen if the federal government remains at the helm of the inquiries.
Yesterday’s phone conversation between Trump and Gov. Tim Walz seemed to have lowered the temperatures in the frozen state, with both men saying that the discussion was productive (of course, Trump had been calling Walz all kinds of names).
Maybe Walz reminded the president of his goal to remove violent criminals who are here without legal immigration status. That was the campaign promise, but the reality this past year has been far different with the obvious and well-documented fact that ICE has been trawling around arresting people based on looks or accents or location. Now, even legitimate and constitutionally protest against the administration’s authoritarian tactics is itself perceived as inappropriate and warrants detention or force.
The Trump/Noem disdain for any semblance of accountability has been driven home by the response to both fatal shootings in Minneapolis, which from the U.S. standpoint has been reflexive defense of federal agents and a refusal to even entertain the idea that they might have acted improperly.
In every normal police force in the country, the standard operating procedure when an officer kills someone is to put them on administrative leave at least until a preliminary investigation can be conducted, even when officers initially believe a killing was justified.
Not only are the federal agents involved in these shootings back on the street but federal investigators looking into the killing of Good were instructed instead to probe the victim and her widow, not the agent who fired the shots. In the killing of Pretti, the authorities are now promising an internal probe that no one can possibly trust after DHS has spent months flagrantly violating the law and people’s civil and constitutional rights.
We’ve reached the point where every federal judge in the state has been inundated with cases resulting from plainly unlawful, even sadistic, behavior by federal agents. Judges appointed by presidents ranging back to Ronald Reagan have been uniformly shocked by the facts of these cases. One such judge, Katherine Menendez, is now tasked with hearing a case brought by Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul against the federal occupation of the city. We understand that there are a number of complex legal questions at issue, but there are some simpler, higher-level ones, namely: are we going to remain a democracy with rule of law?
