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ICE KILLS 37 YEAR OLD VA NURSE IN MINNEAPOLIS AND SPARKS BACKLASH (UPDATE 2)

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ICE agents shot and killed a 37-year-old VA nurse Saturday morning. And it ended in a now familiar pattern.

Trump and DHS officials immediately denounced the dead man, calling him a terrorist who wanted to murder ICE officials. But more info emerged indicating that the Trump and Trump administration officials’ version of what occurred was at variance with the facts.

Federal agents shot and killed a man in south Minneapolis on Saturday morning, sparking a new round of outrage in a city still reeling from the shooting death of Renée Good by an ICE officer earlier this month.

A video posted to social media showed several agents wrestling the man to the ground before a gunshot rings out. Agents scattered and fired multiple shots at the man, who then lay still on the sidewalk.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told the Star Tribune that the victim, 37-year-old Alex Pretti, was dead.

In a statement posted to X, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Pretti approached US Border Patrol officers while carrying a semiautomatic handgun and two magazines, and “that officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted.”

UPDATE: Pretti’s family has issued a statement expressing their grief and blasting the government’s version of events:

Amid a massive outcry over the shooting, top Democrats vow to oppose a government funding bill that’s needed to keep the government open if it includes ICE funding.

Bipartisan legislation to fund a broad swath of the government and avert a shutdown at the end of the week appeared to be in grave danger on Saturday, as key Senate Democrats vowed to oppose it after federal agents shot and killed a Minneapolis resident.

The rapidly escalating opposition to the measure, which includes $64.4 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, including $10 billion for ICE, amplified the likelihood of a partial government shutdown at the end of the month. The legislation requires the support of Democrats to muster the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster and advance in the Senate.

“Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the D.H.S. funding bill is included,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said in a statement, calling what is unfolding in Minnesota “appalling” and “unacceptable in any American city.”

Recognizing the depth of Democratic outrage, Senate Republicans immediately began examining whether they could separate the homeland security funding from the rest of the package and preserve the bulk of what had been a bipartisan deal to fund a large chunk of the government. The measure also funds the Pentagon and State Department, as well as health, education, labor and transportation programs.

UPDATE: The New York Times’s M. Gessen says state terror has now arrived:

After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.

….The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive. Even in brutally repressive regimes, including those of the Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, one knew where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lay. Open protest would get one arrested; kitchen conversation would not. Writing subversive essays or novels or editing underground journals would get one arrested; reading these banned works and quietly passing them on to friends probably would not. A regime based on terror, on the other hand, deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.

When we think of the terror regimes of the past, it is tempting to superimpose a logical narrative on them, as though totalitarian leaders had an extermination to-do list and worked their way through it methodically. This, I think, is how most people understand Martin Niemöller’s classic poem “First They Came.” In reality, though, the people living under those regimes never knew which group of people would be designated an enemy of the state next.

In Niemöller’s day, terror was carried out by the secret police and the paramilitary forces — especially the SA, more commonly known as the Brownshirts — whose job it was to instill fear in the population. In 1934, Adolf Hitler had an estimated 150 to 200 members of the SA’s own leadership arrested and its top generals executed in the ultimate demonstration that no one was immune from the state’s deadly violence. Stalin regularly carried out similar purges. Terror itself was not the end goal of those regimes, but nothing that followed would have been possible without it.

Apart from the killing itself, the most shock aspect of this story is a)how quickly the government put out a report on the shooting and immediately gave a version that painted the dead man as a terrorist b)how social media and news reports steadily undercut the government version of events.

Here’s a cross section of some of the many tweets about the event: