Alex Pretti was shot to death on the sidewalk of a street in Minneapolis after he didn’t leave when federal agents demanded he leave. Renee Good was shot to death in her car on a street in Minneapolis because she tried to leave when federal agents demanded she not.
Advocates of President Donald Trump’s administration will cite this disobedience as a central factor in Pretti’s and Good’s deaths. Each also has been assigned a contrived danger to reinforce the urgent need for their killings: Pretti had a gun (that he doesn’t appear to have drawn) and Good had her car (that she doesn’t appear to have used as a weapon).
But their central offense, among those eager to champion Trump’s politics and policies, was their failure to be pliant. They were at odds with the state and, well, sometimes that’s punishable by death.
It is stunning, though not surprising, to see the president of the United States and sworn federal officials impugn dead citizens so callously.
It has been posited that the eagerness with which Trump and his allies have defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against charges of excessive force, and the alacrity with which they assign blame to the victims of those shootings, demonstrates hypocrisy, given their collective willingness to absolve — to beatify! — the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They, too, defied state authority, and in many cases far more aggressively. But they are hailed as heroes by the current administration.
But this isn’t hypocrisy at all. It’s consistent. If you object to or impede their politics, they will hurt you. That is the consistency, and it is why off-duty police were in the mob on Jan. 6 and why Trump supporters defend ICE today. It’s not the badge that matters. It’s the red cap.
The most jarring element of the response to the deaths of Pretti and Good is the speed with which the administration has disparaged the victims rather than the perpetrators. Each of them was also immediately asserted to have committed premeditated violent actions. To be a terrorist. When each, instead, was at the scene of their unwitting death because they were part of and supportive of their community.
It is stunning, though not surprising, to see the president of the United States and sworn federal officials impugn dead citizens so callously. It’s utterly immoral, if not deranged. What flows through their veins is partisanship, and what dominates their thoughts is knocking their opponents and critics back on their heels. Perhaps there are flutters of recognition that this is not how human beings should behave, much less how political leaders in a democracy should act. But if those flames flicker into existence, they are quickly snuffed.
And for what! This is the question that continues to baffle me more than any other. Why has the Department of Homeland Security dispatched vans and SUVs filled with masked men to Minneapolis? Most immediately, it seems, it’s because a bad-faith “investigation” from a right-wing media personality made Minnesota the focus of the right’s collective anger. So the president pointed at Minnesota, and his shock troops marched.
Their mission has been described in multiple ways, which means that (as with so much else in Trump’s world) the effect was decided before the cause. Maybe it’s about combating the fraud alleged by the media personality, even though prosecutors had been investigating and securing convictions for social services fraud in Minnesota for years. Or maybe it’s just about uprooting immigrants.
This is the government’s most common explanation. Trump and his aides have repeatedly insisted that the expansive, guerrilla-style raids being conducted by federal agents in Minnesota have been effective at removing the “worst of the worst” criminal immigrants from the area, something it insists that the state’s Democratic leaders had refused to do. (The state disagrees.)
What’s the right ratio here, Mr. President? How many citizens being shot to death is worth this campaign of fear and its sporadic deportations?
At a White House press conference on Jan. 20, Trump held up images of 40 individuals who he claimed had been detained by federal agents in Minnesota. A DHS website titled “ARRESTED: WORST OF THE WORST” identifies just less than 500 such people in the state. As was the case with Trump’s visual aids, some of them seem less like “the worst of the worst” than like “people with any criminal record at all.” Does having a DUI make you one of the nation’s worst criminals? If you weren’t born here, I guess so.
Even by DHS’ count, though, the government isn’t targeting only “the worst of the worst.” On Jan. 14, the agency put out a press release claiming that it had arrested 2,500 of the “worst of the worst,” meaning that the website, even with the drunk drivers, is a couple of thousand short in its tally. Nationally, of course, ICE has accelerated its detention of people with no criminal record at all. One analysis estimates that 92 out of every 100 people added to ICE detention last year faced no criminal charges and had no past convictions. Besides, violent crime in Minnesota was already on the decline before DHS and ICE showed up (also mirroring national trends).
So the feds rolled up some people with criminal records or maybe pending charges. In doing so, they spread chaos and confusion around the city, shipped a 5-year-old off to Texas and sent a baby to the hospital.
In doing so, they killed two residents of Minneapolis, their dying bodies lying at the side of the road.
What’s the right ratio here, Mr. President? How many citizens being shot to death is worth this campaign of fear and its sporadic deportations?
It seems as though the answer is clear by now: as many as can be killed with his base still believing they were violent opponents of the president’s politics. As long as that belief is sustained, the killings can continue, because it means that his supporters’ confidence and trust in him is sustained, too. And that, more even than purifying the populace, is what matters to Trump.
The White House and DHS frequently validate their work by pointing to the killers they’re taking out of the country, outsiders who killed Americans. It would be a more effective argument if they weren’t defending the outsiders they brought into Minneapolis who did the same thing.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor.