Droogs

ICE murders another decent American. Democrats need to take over the narrative on immigration. Ten years too late, but better late than never.

This morning, ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked at a Veterans Administration hospital.

Before addressing the larger context of Pretti’s death, let’s establish a few facts.

The New York Times, to its credit, several years ago set up a visual investigations team. I first watched their meticulous work in a superb documentary, How To Build a Truth Engine, soon to be released in the U.S.

I’ll summarize their analysis. Minnesota is an open carry state and Pretti possessed a gun but it was holstered at his waist. Pretti was holding a phone - not a gun - when more than half a dozen ICE agents pushed him to the ground. After he was pinned and helpless, an agent removed a gun matching the description of Pretti’s from its holster. Ten shots appear to have been fired in eight seconds.

Alex Pretti

The Department of Homeland Security almost immediately issued a statement claiming that Pretti approached officers brandishing a 9 mm handgun. According to their statement, they tried to disarm him.

Nobody with half a brain believes them, including the Times visual investigations folks. (By the way, any purists who canceled their subscription to the Times over some kerfuffle should reconsider.)

We have seen this movie before, when Renee Good was killed. In fact, Good’s killing reportedly was one of the reasons Pretti came out to protest. Should he have been carrying a gun? I wish he hadn’t been. This gave the Department of Homeland Security the raw material for its counter-factual. But, again, as it was with Good’s death, there is video.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? If anyone needed more proof that the Trump regime is dangerous, this second ICE killing should have clinched it. Here is what Robert Reich wrote:

It’s becoming harder for Americans to tell themselves that Trump is going after only “hard-core criminals.” Or even “illegal immigrants.” Or even Latinos. Or Black people. Or communists or “radical left extremists.”

He’s coming after all of us.

He’s coming after all of us who oppose his tyranny and brutality. All of us who defy his dictatorship. All of us who challenge his out-of-control, murderous goons.

William Finnegan’s take was more intellectual, and in its way, more alarming, examining not only the significance of this second murder by ICE but also the Trump regime’s rapid recasting of the narrative. Remember that “Finnegan” is the nom de Substack of a former Bush administration official who worked in the U.S. Department of Defense. He knows how government works from the inside.

The social contract is unravelling. When federal law-enforcement actions reliably catalyze mass civil resistance — and when political elites either sanctify violence or offer procedural regret — institutional legitimacy erodes. This is not rhetoric. It is a historical regularity.

This is a crisis of legitimacy, he wrote.

Two people have now been shot dead by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in a matter of weeks — both of them U.S. citizens. The federal response has been notable not for alarm, but for bureaucratic serenity.

Everything was lawful.
Everyone deserved it.
Case closed.

The machinery hums on.

Things are getting worse, no doubt about it. What I’ve been seeing in the interregnum between killings, is that people have been looking backward, not so much soul searching as playing the blame game. I’ve listened to women like me - educated, in creative fields, a certain age - spewing irrational hatred of Bernie Sanders.

With respect? This is intellectually lazy and needlessly divisive. Bernie’s the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election? She didn’t lose because she failed to show up to campaign in Wisconsin? (Not once.) Ignored the blue wall states in favor of swing states like Arizona because she was so sure of winning? The deplorables comment?

No, it’s all Bernie to these women. They’re wrong, accordingto the Center for Politics at The University of Virginia. But facts don’t matter, apparently to the Left as well as the Right. We wuz robbed! It’s as if Hillary has become the symbol of every sexist affront a certain cadre of women have suffered.

Hey, I’ve gone through my share of getting fucked over by sexist (and sexually harassing) bosses, but a second wave feminist, Wellesley-educated corporate lawyer who abandoned her career to follow her husband to Arkansas, screwed up health care reform, and backed regime change in Libya without adequate thought to the incredible suffering that intervention unleash is not my kinda gal. Yes, Hillary cares about women and children. She would have been a better president, no doubt about it. It would have been cool to have a woman.

All true. It’s harsh and unforgiving, perhaps, but in politics, you get graded on performance, not intention. She ran a shit campaign (twice) and lost. If you’re not looking at the flaws in her campaign strategy, you’re setting Democrats up to lose again. We must be honest about the problems in the Democratic Party, starting with its elitism. Some of that is happening, thankfully.

At the same time, I have to plead guilty to my own version of “coulda woulda shoulda.” I desperately wish Barack Obama had anointed Joe Biden instead of Hillary for 2016. Even if Hillary is your spirit animal, white working-class men hated her guts. They have hated her with the fire of a thousand suns since the 1990s, when Bill was president.

Nobody in the Democratic establishment talked to those people, from what I can tell. A larger problem, for another day. But for the record, I do talk to them. News flash: They hated Kamala, too.

This is sexism; it is also class warfare. (Can we say “bougie”?) Bernie knew that income inequality was the paramount issue. Give him that. Trump pulled a Hitlerian move, harnessing that anger and powerlessness under the flag of white supremacy.

It worked. Twice. That’s the lesson. Now we need to look at how Republicans and the MAGA machine weaponized immigration. Circling back to the Minneapolis protests, on one hand, these are community members protecting their neighbors. But why do they have to do it? Immigrants have been demonized and dehumanized by a relentless propaganda assault for at least a decade, offering a pretext for Trump’s lead-in to a military coup. It’s shocking, but perhaps not surprising if you’ve been paying attention to the hate speech purveyed by MAGA media, which is identical to that of genocidal regimes from Nazi Germany to Rwanda in the 1980s.

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Have we hit bottom yet?

Forget Hillary’s fuckups and Bernie not getting out of the race soon enough, even though I would argue, along with The Center for Politics, that the latter made no difference in the end. The conflict between Hillary and Bernie was merely a window to a larger historical split in the Democratic Party playing out before our eyes.

If we truly do hit bottom as a county - and I believe that nothing can stop the destructive MAGA juggernaut in the near future - we have a chance to address the structural issues that made Trump possible. The driver behind all of these is corruption and its attendant inequality. But the high-visibility policy issues are immigration and health care.

The failure of Democrats to counter the racist, nativist Hitlerian MAGA narrative on immigration re-elected Trump, full stop. I lived in Arizona for 17 years, and one of the things I learned is that people who don’t live in a border state simply do not understand immigration, or the border. I saw this over and over again, and it hasn’t changed. The Trump campaign and its supporters, notably the Border Patrol union, took full advantage of that national ignorance, invoking the buzzwords of in group/out group dynamics. Illegal aliens! Invaders! All bullshit.

The Biden administration had a chance to recast the issue, but they blew it. Admittedly, they inherited a mess from Trump 1.0. Even before Trump, the country’s immigration system was dramatically outdated and dysfunctional, easy prey for Stephen Miller and the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. The Biden administration made positive changes despite the decades-long political deadlock on the issue, but they didn’t act quickly or forcefully enough, and most importantly, they did not grab the bully pulpit.

My sources in D.C. told me that Biden himself was not particularly progressive on immigration. More tellingly, his staff consisted of experienced Beltway hands but they were drawn from his decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Immigration and the border are a different animal, as you’ll hear in the video below.

This was a missed opportunity, possibly a fatal one. Immigration is arguably the most profound moral issue of our time, and it is not going away. Estimates of climate refugees are as high at 50 million by 2050. The human suffering is already immense. Denial is not an option. Adopting a reactionary stance on immigration not only harks back to Hitler scapegoating Jews, it just won’t work.

Historically, Democrats have been only marginally better than Republicans on immigration. (Remember Obama, the Deporter-in-Chief who couldn’t get the Dreamer legislation passed?)

Nobody has been talking about what we should learn from the mistakes and missed opportunities of the Biden years. Until now.

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a long time, so I was excited this morning (when I wasn’t grieving for Pretti and my country) to see this headline come over my transom: “An Autopsy of the Biden Years at the Border: A Podcast with Andrea Flores.”

When I listened to it (OK, most of it; I can only make it through a whole podcast when I’m driving) I was even more heartened. Flores, a native of Las Cruces, New Mexico, went to Columbia University’s law school and Harvard, and if you’ve been to Las Cruces, you know just what an accomplishment that is. She worked in both the Obama and Biden administrations, including a stint at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In her interview with Melissa del Bosque of The Border Chronicle, Flores gives us an insider’s view of why and how the Biden administration failed to change the terms of debate on immigration. Some of it was simply because, as I mentioned, the D.C. people never really understood the border.

We cannot make that mistake again.

Everyone is focused on the short term, understandably. The killing of Alex Pretti may result in a government shutdown.

This week, seven Democrats broke with party leaders to vote for a controversial $64 billion ICE funding bill. What progressive critics miss is that the vote was 220–207, so with a Republican majority controlling the house, Democratic opposition would have been largely symbolic, anyway.¹ ICE already has a staggering $170 billion in funding through Trump’s budget bill, so this additional funding wouldn’t have an immediate effect on ICE activities.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voted against the bill, but didn’t whip votes, probably because he knew these seven blue dog Democrats wouldn’t line up. His job, after all, is counting votes. It didn’t seem worth it to expend political capital on a losing gesture.

For the record, the Democrats who voted for the bill cited, as The New Republic put it, meager wins on reining in ICE: $20 million to outfit ICE personnel with body cameras, cuts to ICE funding for enforcement and removal operations, and a downsizing of the number of detention beds. The real reason is they’re pandering to their more conservative constituents in tight districts.

But after today’s shooting, Senate Democrats are saying they won’t support any budget bill that includes additional funding for ICE. It’s not just the usual suspects but the entire delegation, and in the Senate, 60 votes are needed for passage. According to Semafor, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Saturday night that “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.” A stalemate on the bill could shut down the government - again.

Even Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., who voted repeatedly to fund and reopen the government last fall amid a record 43-day shutdown, said on Saturday afternoon that she would support five of the House-passed bills funding the rest of the government but “will not support the current Homeland Security funding bill.”

“I’m a hell no — not a penny more for ICE. We should not fund this terror,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote on X. Nevada’s Jacky Rosen and Hawai’s Brian Schatz, Virginia’s Mark Warner also pledged to vote against the funding bill.

Trump himself reportedly is worried about bad polling on immigration enforcement in the wake of these killings. Polls show that while many Americans support immigration enforcement, there is widespread concern that ICE is going too far. The fact that there is so much ire regarding enforcement is more evidence of the ignorance surrounding this issue, and a clear map of work that needs to be done to educate Americans on the issue.

Accordingly, this is the time for Democrats to act, not merely react. The work is short term and long term. As this interview with Andrea Flores reveals, for the past decade, MAGA has funneled enormous resources into controlling the media landscape, effectively setting in place a virulent anti-immigration narrative. It is way past time for Democrats to create their own narrative on immigration.

Here, reporter Melissa del Bosque and Andrea Flores reveal just how effective the MAGA effort to capture this issue has been, and how dishonest. At the same time, they talk about where and why the Biden administration went wrong. Let’s not make that mistake again.

The full interview is below.

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1. Voting in favor were Henry Cuellar (Texas), Tom Suozzi (New York), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Laura Gillen (New York), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Washington), Jared Golden (Maine), and Don Davis (North Carolina).

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