The shooting death of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026, was recorded on video. One photo, which may become one of the most prominent photos of a public event, showed Pretti being shot in the back as he leaned over with one hand holding his cell phone and the other on the ground. The White House was caught having lied about his death. Today (January 26) the Trump administration is racing to reverse the narration that it supports highly visible and dangerous sweeps by federal law enforcement against anyone who might plausibly be an unauthorized resident.

A Pretti-like event was predictable from the outset of this Administration, but perhaps not as shocking and galvanizing as this one.

Events which impaired presidencies

     The 2021 Afghanistan Withdrawal and Joe Biden’s Presidency

In August 2021, the chaotic U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan made a lasting impact on the public perception of the competency of the Biden administration. It raised doubts about his foreign policy judgment and crisis management. This provided fuel for Republican attacks.

     Hurricane Katrina and George W. Bush’s Presidency

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast including New Orleans on August 29, 2005, devastating New Orleans and surrounding areas. The federal response by FEMA under the Bush administration—was widely seen as slow, disorganized, and inadequate. It created perceptions of cronyism (“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job”), insensitivity, and federal neglect.

     Iran Hostage Crisis (1979-1981) under Jimmy Carter

The prolonged captivity of 52 Americans and a failed rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, symbolized weakness and incompetence. It contributed to his 1980 landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan and a legacy image as one of the weakest modern presidencies.

Events which drove popular movements

The civil rights movement  (a sample of two)

    The bus arrest in Montgomery, Alabama

Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. Parks’ arrest became the catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 381 days and helped launch the modern civil rights movement.

    The Birmingham Children’s Crusade

On May 2, 1963, more than one thousand students marched from the 16th Street Baptist Church to downtown Birmingham, Alabama, and hundreds were arrested. The following day, May 3, Commissioner Bull Connor ordered police to use high-pressure water hoses and police attack dogs against the children and bystanders.  The fire hoses were so powerful they ripped bark off trees and clothes off people, thrusting children against buildings and cars. These images helped galvanize support for federal civil rights legislation, contributing to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Vietnam and anti-war sentiment

After the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Walter Cronkite visited Vietnam and concluded his February 27, 1968 broadcast by saying the war was “mired in stalemate.” President Johnson reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” This marked a turning point in elite and public opinion.

Life Magazine’s June 27, 1969 issue published photographs of all 242 Americans killed in one week in Vietnam. The visual impact of seeing so many young faces made the war’s human cost undeniable and contributed to growing anti-war sentiment.

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard troops fired on unarmed student protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine, amid anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. An iconic photo of a young woman kneeling over a victim’s body circulated widely, intensifying nationwide campus strikes involving over 4 million students and eroding support for the Nixon administration’s war policies. (A friend of mine stood within a hundred feet of the incident.)

Black Lives Matter

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd died in Minneapolis after a police officer knelt on his neck for over nine minutes during an arrest, as captured in a bystander video that went viral. This incident ignited the largest wave of protests in U.S. history, with millions participating in Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country and globally, demanding reforms to address systemic racism and police brutality. Public opinion shifted markedly: polls showed a surge in support for the BLM movement from about 43% in 2017 to over 60% in 2020.

Other

Challenger explosion (1986) – Live television coverage of the shuttle disaster profoundly affected public confidence in NASA.

Rodney King beating video (1991) – The first widely-seen amateur video of police brutality, though the officers’ acquittal then sparked the LA riots.

Abu Ghraib photos (2004) – Images of prisoner abuse undermined support for the Iraq War and damaged America’s moral standing.

 

 

A Chinese saying: “Lots of noise, no one coming downstairs.”

Asserting there is a problem

In March 2025, the Trump administration in an Executive Order put election integrity on the front burner.  True the Vote echoes the Executive Order without making any allegations of non-citizen voting. The Public Interest Legal Foundation claims that foreign national voting is a serious issue but does not provide any evidence that non-citizens are voting.

Asserting it is a vanishingly small problem

Two national organizations have systematically studied election fraud and in particular non-citizen voting and found negligable instances.

The Center for Election Innovation and Research found that even the largest claims never allege numbers that amount to more than a few tenths of a percent of the number of eligible voters in a state.

The Brennan Center, which studied and concluded that non-citizen voting is vanishingly scarce, has issued guidelines for ensuring to integrity of voting processes overall.

The campaign to root out non-citizen voting

DoJ  sent invites to state election officials that would allow them to upload voter data on a mass scale — including full name, date of birth and social security numbers — to check for anyone who was not a citizen on their voter rolls. The administration has also, for the first time, brought in data from the Social Security Administration that had previously been kept separate. (Go here.)

At least 14 states — all with Republican secretaries of state — publicly indicated in 2025 that they would use the revamped D.H.S. system to upload voter information, according to an analysis of public statements, records and interviews with people involved.

In September 2025 the DoJ sued six states for failing to hand over voter list.

Eleven Democratic secretaries of state wrote a letter to D.H.S. in December, raising alarms about the potential impact on eligible voters, warning that the expanded version of SAVE “will introduce unnecessary and unwarranted reliability, privacy and security issues into the sensitive voter information data we are entrusted to protect.”

Many Democratic states have also refused to provide similar information to the DoJ, which is suing at least 24 states that have refused to turn over data.

Florida

In Charlotte County, Fla., for instance, the elections supervisor Leah Valenti, an appointee of Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, said she found that just 15 out of 176,000 names she uploaded to D.H.S. came back as noncitizens. Of those, she found that three were people mistakenly added to the rolls who never intended to register to vote; they have since been removed. Two others already sent in documentation to prove their naturalized citizenship, she said.

 

 

Louisiana

In Louisiana, the system found 403 noncitizens out of 3 million registered voters, or .01 percent, with 83 having voted, according to a November memo obtained by The Times through a public records request.

Georgia

The search found 1,634 individuals who had attempted to register to vote in Georgia despite not being citizens. None of these individuals have cast ballots in Georgia elections.

Assume that 85% of the non-naturalized foreign born are adults, or 510,000 persons, This means that 0.3% attempted to register to vote.  however, is it very likely that some of these persons had incorrectly labeled themselves as non-citizens in their drivers license forms. Databases do not match 100% each other and the facts in the ground.

Ohio

There are approximately 8 million registered voters in Ohio.  This means that one of out 13,000 registered voters were deemed by the state as being non-citizens.

Texas

David Simcox, former executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, released a study Tuesday afternoon that said an estimated 1.8 million to 2.7 million non-citizen immigrants in the Unites States may be illegally registered to vote, thereby potentially influencing the outcome of the upcoming presidential and congressional elections. The report also estimated that anywhere from 161,000 to 333,000 non-citizens may be registered to vote in Texas.

In August, 2024, Governor Greg Abbott announced that since 2021 the state has found on voter rolls 6,500 non-citizens, of whom 1,930 non-citizens had a voting history.  6.500 is of the current total of 18 million registered voters, three one hundredths of one percent, or one per 2800 registered voters. It is very unlikely that most of these 6,500 are in fact non-citizens, if the state’s earlier misadventure and that of other states are a guide.

Virginia

In August 2024, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order directing state agencies to identify and cancel voter registrations of people flagged as non-citizens in DMV data. That effort led to about 6,303 registrations being canceled because those individuals were identified in DMV records as non-citizens. 6,370,342 people were registered to vote in Virginia as of December 1, 2025 .

Common finding: non-citizens mistakenly note on driver license applications that they are citizens and citizens fail to record that they are citizens.

Nevada

A statewide audit released in 2017 found that only three noncitizens had voted in Nevada’s 2016 election.

 

U.S. District Court, Minneapolis, CASE 0:25-cv-04669-KMM-DTS Doc. 107Filed 01/24/26

I am a resident of the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am over 18 years of age. I am a children’s entertainer who specializes in face painting.

On Saturday, January 24, 2026, at about 8:50 am, I was getting ready to go to work when I heard whistles outside. I knew the whistles meant that ICE agents were in the area, so I decided to check it out on my way to work. I’ve been involved in observing in my community because it is so important to document what ICE is doing to my neighbors. Connecting to your local community and knowing who your neighbors are is something I profoundly value.

I drove to Nicollet Ave. and 26th where I could hear the whistles coming from. I turned south onto Nicollet. There were already several ICE agents there and they’d set up a sort of vehicle convoy on Nicollet and 28th. There were also about 15 observers there, recording and observing ICE.

I saw ICE agents surrounding cars and punching car windows. I also saw them stopping vehicles further down Nicollet, so I backed up because I didn’t feel safe continuing on.

I noticed a man sort of acting to help traffic move more smoothly. He helped me find a place to park. I got out with my whistle and my camera. I went over to him and said something like, “I’m going to film and use my whistle.”

It seemed like most ICE activity was happening a little farther down the street from us, near 27th. Someone was being thrown to the ground.

I started recording. There was an agent by a car across the street. Two observers were a few feet away from the agent, blowing their whistles. One was wearing a backpack.

I and the man who was observing and helping direct traffic were standing in the street. There was a phone in the man’s hand recording a video.

An agent approached and asked us to back up, so I moved slowly back onto the sidewalk.

The man stayed in the street, filming as the other observers I mentioned earlier were being forced backward by another ICE agent threatening them with pepper spray. The man went closer to support them as they got threatened, just with his camera out. I didn’t see him reach for or hold a gun.

Then the ICE agent shoved one of the other observers to the ground. Then he started pepper spraying all three of them directly in the face and all over. The man with the phone put his hands above his head and the agent sprayed him again and pushed him.

Then the man tried to help up the woman the ICE agent had shoved to the ground. The ICE agents just kept spraying. More agents came over and grabbed the man who was still trying to help the woman get up. All three of the observers looked to have been badly affected by the pepper spray. I could feel the pepper spray in my eyes.

The agents pulled the man on the ground. I didn’t see him touch any of them—he wasn’t even turned toward them. It didn’t look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn’t see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground. Four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times.

I don’t know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet from him and they just shot him.

The video I recorded of what happened accurately depicts the events leading up to the agents shooting him and several minutes afterwards. The video is attached as Exhibit 1.

I have read the statement from DHS about what happened and it is wrong. The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up and they took him to the ground.

I feel afraid. Only hours have passed since they shot a man right in front me and I don’t feel like I can go home because I heard agents were looking for me. I don’t know what the agents will do when they find me. I do know that they’re not telling the truth about what happened. I’ve heard that other witnesses might have been arrested and taken to the Whipple Building.

I am disgusted and gutted at how they are treating my neighbors and my state. I keep alternating between crying and feeling determined—it is important to remember the value of documenting injustice. We show up for the people who need us to bear witness, because it can’t just be one group of people bearing the brunt of their tyranny. This is a struggle to protect our freedom and democracy, those things are on the line. He lost his life for those values.

I declare under penalty of perjury that everything I have stated in this document is true and correct.

Dated and signed on January 24, 2026 in Hennepin County, State of Minnesota.

[signature block redacted]

On January 21 ICE agents arrested a Cumberland County, ME corrections officer recruit. Cumberland County includes Portland. The arrest took place at Portland’s East Bayside neighborhood. ICE has just announced “Operation Catch of the Day” for Maine. Governor Janet Mills has referred to “secret arrests.”

The arrest was recorded. Sheriff Kevin Joyce made the following statement:

“We’ve all seen the three minute video. And I’ve heard some people say oh, it’s, it’s hard to watch. What was hard is that there were five to seven ICE agents there. In my world, my colleagues, we’ve arrested some dangerous people on the back roads of Cumberland County with three or less deputies. This was a show of force, a show of whatever they were trying to do with seven people. What’s even more disturbing is the comment made by the witness to videotaped this encounter who said that in the three minutes they got out, they pulled the guy from the car, handcuffed him, put him in the car, they all took off, leaving his car with the windows down, the lights on, unsecure, not occupied. They left it right on the side of the street. Folks, that’s bush league policing. Again, in my world, you’ll wait for a wrecker, You wait for somebody to come pick it up that the individual wants, or you get permission to drive the vehicle into a public parking spot and you lock it up. You give the person their car keys. You don’t leave their personal belongings unsecure along the streets. With the city of Portland, it’s fair to the guy that owns the car. It’s surely not fair to the Portland police and it’s what my understanding is going on. I’ll end with this. We’re being told one story which is totally different than what’s occurring or what occurred last night.”

Several polls show some spillage of support for mass deportation, but not enough in my judgment to change administration policy.  Republicans continue to support the administration by over 80% on pretty much every question; Democrats opposed by over 90%. Independents show noticeable slippage but I can’t see how that will affect policy.

Anthony Salvato head of CBS poll polling summarized on January 18 opinions.  “The mass deportation election promise from President Trump, it used to really be a winning one for him. He began the term with majority support. He’s now down to 46% approval. What accounts for that drop? It’s about The Who and the how that’s driving views of it. Who do people think the administration is targeting for deportation? It used to be more people thought it was just dangerous criminals. Now it’s more people think it’s expanded beyond that. That goes with more disapproval of the program. And the how, when I ask people, what do you think of the ICE operations, the tactics that you see, are they about right? No more. People now say they think they’re too tough. That goes with more disapproval. A couple of important points, though. Republicans remain very strongly supportive of this program and Republicans think the protesters against ICE operations have gone too far. Sum it up this way. Difference between the perceived goals and the approach. The goals divide the country are more mixed, but the approach, it gets more negative ratings.”

 

As of January, 2025 about 7.8 million Venezuelans were displaced outside their country.  At that time, 6.1 million Syrians were outside Syria, and about 6.5 million Ukrainians.  With the overthrow of the Assad regime and change in immigration policy by the Trump administration, what has and is happening to these populations? I will focus on a few key population segments, in sum: Regime change in Syria and decapitation of Venezuelan leadership has not materially affected any reverse migration — and may not for some time

Venezuelans in the United States

At the start of the Trump administration there were on the order of one million Venezuelans in the United States.  Roughly 600,000 were here on Temporary Protected Status, about 115,000–120,000 as humanitarian parolees, and about 300,000 with pending asylum applications.  These large numbers were largely the result of Biden administration policy of pro-active or permissive nature. In January 2021 there were no Venezuelans in humanitarian parole, about 300,000 in TPS, and about 150,000 with asylum applications.

The Trump administration has closed down, or sought to close down with issues still before the courts, the entire humanitarian parole and TPS population of Venezuelans. It is seeking to speed up asylum application decisions.  By eliminating substantially all of these populations, there will remain several hundred thousand Venezuelan-born persons who immigrated, largely before the Biden administration, and enjoy permanent status.  How will the Trump administration account for this population decline? Possibly as a roughly one million person reduction in total “illegal” population. The administration does not use consistently one estimate of those it considers “illegal.”

By removing these one million +/- persons who had some form on legal protection, if this takes place this will be the largest nation-specific forced migration from an advanced country possibly since World War II, noting the massive move of some 6 million Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of that war.

The Trump administration has not taken any public steps to resolve the refugee program throughout Latin America – specially in Columbia – after its capture of Maduro.

Syrians in Europe

Between 2015 and the end of the Assad regime, about 1.4 million Syrians sought and were granted protection in EU countries, more than half in Germany, with large numbers in Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and Norway.

​The EU’s first act to stem this flow was the EU–Turkey Statement of March 2016, under which “irregular migrants” crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands would be stemmed. At this juncture, Syrians fleeing their country pretty much had to settle in countries neighboring Syria.

In the first six months alone after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, UNHCR estimated that about 600,000 Syrians returned to Syria, the great majority of them from neighboring countries rather than from the EU. Reverse migration from the EU has been minimal. Some countries offer financial incentives. But forced out-migration such as the Trump policy for Venezuelans have not happened for several reasons: (1) refugee status is permanently granted, (2) inter-group conflicts  in Syria remain high, and (3) the EU is aware of the literal and figurative cost of violating “non-refoulement,” or the provision in the 1951 refugee agreement banning the return of refugees from their country of origin. (4) some sections of the refugee population are valued members of the EU workforce.

Germany has been the most visibly successful in integrating Syrian refugees into its workforce. One 1 – 2 % of practicing doctors are Syrian.

Ukrainians in the U.S.

Currently, roughly 250,000 Ukrainians have entered the U.S. in some form of formal recognition, Half of them came through Uniting for Ukraine (U4U), a government / private sector partnership whereby sponsors in the U.S. vouch for the immigrant. The Biden administration applied this model for some Venezuelans as will. The Trump administration has shut down this program for Venezuelans but not U4U.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DHS officers (ICE, Border Control) in Minneapolis were conducting a targeted traffic stop at about 6:50PM, on the 600 block of 24th Avenue North. A Federal officer got into a struggle with a man he was trying to detain. Several persons began to attack the federal officer, who shot the person to be detained. The man received a non-fatal injury.  A crowd formed. Minneapolis police quickly arrived. Later the evening Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara appeared together at a press conference addressing the incident.

Mayor Frey’s remarks:

​There’s still a lot that we don’t know at this time, but what I can tell you for certain is that this is not sustainable. This is an impossible situation that our city is presently being put in and at the same time we are trying to find a way forward to. Keep people safe, to protect our neighbors, to maintain order. And we’re in a position right now where we have residents that are asking the very limited number of police officers that we have to fight ICE agents on the street to stand by their neighbors. We cannot be at a place right now in America where we have two governmental entities that are literally fighting one another.

Why are we put in this position? We’re put in this position because we have approximately 600 police officers in Minneapolis, far fewer that are able to work at any given time. And there are approximately 3000 ICE agents in the area, 3000. The 600 police officers that we have are charged on any given day with investigating crime, stopping homicides from taking place, preventing carjackings. That’s the work of a police officer in a city. Meanwhile, we have ICE agents throughout our city and throughout our state who, along with Border Control, are creating chaos. This is not the path that we should be on right now in America.

Thankfully, there’s another path, and I want to talk to everybody who’s out there, even people who aren’t living in Minneapolis right now. Maybe you just put your kids to bed. Maybe you’re cleaning up the dishes. I’m sure you love your family. There’s no doubt in my mind that you love your town. Imagine if that city or that town was suddenly invaded by thousands of federal agents that do not share the values that you hold dear. Imagine if your daily routines were disrupted, the local cafe that you eat at was shut down because they’re scared that their own family might get torn apart. Imagine if schools shut down and suddenly parents got to figure out what to do for daycare. This is not creating safety. It’s certainly not creating safety when a huge percentage of the shootings that have taken place so far this year in Minneapolis have been by ICE.

So let’s be very clear, I’ve seen conduct from ICE that is disgusting and is intolerable. If it were your city, it would be unacceptable there too. And for anyone that is taking the bait tonight, stop. That is not helpful. Go home. We cannot counter Donald Trump’s chaos with our own brand of chaos. And I have seen thousands of people throughout our city peacefully protesting. For those that have peacefully protested, I applaud you. For those that are taking the bait. You are not helping and you are not helping the undocumented immigrants in our city. You are not helping the people that call this place home. ICE can leave and this massive deployment can come to an end. We have filed litigation to hopefully make it so. And at the same time, I’m deeply concerned that we don’t have that kind of time. This is already the second shooting that we’ve had in a week. People are scared, the atmosphere is tense. But again, there is another option. We can stop going down this route together.

One’s initial response to the fatal incident was shock. Renee Nicole Macklin Good, on January 7, 2026, at about 9:30 AM in the Central neighborhood of South Minneapolis, was shot to death by ICE officer Jonathan E. Ross.

After some time viewing videos, one notices the peculiar way in which Ross circles Good’s car and comes to stand in front of the car.. More precisely, in front of the left front fender. The engine is on, and Good, in the driver’s seat, is approached by another ICE officer who tries to open the driver’s side front door. At this point Ross takes his pistol out of its holster, as if he were anticipating something.  What is going on?

Ross began his career in immigration law enforcement with Customs Border Patrol, 2007–2015. During that period there were many incidents involving the use of deadly force. There was sufficient concern about these incidents that a report was done on them: “U.S. Customs and Border Protection Use of Force Review: Cases and Policies,” published February 2013.

Here are two passages from the report:

Page 8  (under the “Shooting at Vehicles” section): “Based on a review of the submitted cases, it appears that CBP practice allows shooting at the driver of any suspect vehicle that comes in the direction of agents.  It is suspected that in many vehicle shooting cases, the subject driver was attempting to flee from the agents who intentionally put themselves into the exit path of the vehicle, thereby exposing themselves to additional risk and creating justification for the use of deadly force. In most of these cases, the agents have stated that they were shooting at the driver of a vehicle that was coming at them and posing an imminent threat to their life. In some cases, passengers were struck by agents’ gunfire. Little focus has been placed on defensive tactics that could have been used by shooting agents such as getting out of the way.  It should be recognized that a ½ ounce (200 grain) bullet is unlikely to stop a 4,000 pound moving vehicle, and if the driver of the approaching vehicle is disabled by a bullet, the vehicle will become a totally unguided threat.  Obviously, shooting at a moving vehicle can pose a risk to bystanders including other agents.”

Page 6 (under the “Shooting at Vehicles” recommendation): “Recommendation:  Agents’ and the public’s safety will be enhanced by policy changes related to shooting at vehicles.  CBP should make policy changes that restrict agents from shooting at vehicles.  Likewise, agents should be trained to get out of the way of oncoming vehicles as opposed to intentionally assuming a position in the path of such vehicles.”