While it’s impossible to know what Renee Good or Alex Pretti were thinking when they were shot in January by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, what is known is that their deaths could have been avoided if triggering events had not occurred.
And what is equally certain is that, in seeking political gain, Democrats such as the now-disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell suggested ICE officers picked innocent bystanders from a crowd to execute them “in cold blood.”
A similarly incendiary depiction was again extended to ICE agents deployed to assist TSA officers at airports, when Hakeem Jeffries absurdly said that doing so 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,” to liken ICE agents more to Ted Bundy than to those protecting Americans from the “worst of the worst” illegal immigrants.
But that rhetoric stems not from any 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 from federal arrest 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 their 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.
Undeniably, 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 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.
Thus, with millions of poorly vetted and often violent immigrants crossing our borders, sanctuary cities shielding them from deportation, and rioting triggered by branding ICE agents as Nazi goons, it’s unsurprising that even seasoned officers making split-second decisions might, in hindsight, overreact.
Democrat claims notwithstanding, the regrettable response of federal agents to a crisis entirely created and amplified by progressives doesn’t make them murderers. On the contrary, their predictable reactions to seemingly imminent threats make them guilty of only one thing, and that is being predictably human.
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