Congress Must Act Now
More constitutional outrage in Minnesota.
It’s more than a crime now.
It’s a violent reign of lawlessness against Minnesota, perpetrated by the federal government.
We are again madly analyzing a kaleidoscope of images through a smokescreen of ICE lies. So, I’ll attach the prosecutorial asterisk and say my immediate impressions — strong and disgusted as they are — aren’t designed to substitute for the constitutionally required, beyond-a-reasonable doubt, final take on what’s happened. We have to hope that far more information brings the focus into crystal clarity, even as it looks as if the feds are taking action to prevent it.
But, from what we have in only the immediate hours after the horrific episode, the murder of Alex Pretti replicates the worst, most lawless features of the Renee Good killing — less than three weeks ago.
Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and American citizen, is holding a phone, with which he is recording the scene. Filming in public spaces, including the actions of law enforcement officers, is generally protected by the First Amendment, even though it seems to infuriate immigration agents on the ground.
An agent roughly shoves a protester to the ground, and Pretti helps lift her up. Four or five officers surround Pretti. They pepper spray him twice and wrestle him to the ground, on his back. Although he has a gun and a license to carry it under Minnesota law, he never takes it out (though agents will later publish a picture of it with the false impression that he was threatening them). It looks, in fact, as if they take it away, and he is disarmed on the ground.
One of the officers suddenly fires a shot, and, after a brief pause, fractions of a second, nine more shots, apparently from multiple agents, ring out in quick succession: 1 1-2-3 1 1-2-3 1-2.
It looks like nothing so much as a mob execution.
The feds, up to and including the president, not simply officials on the ground, immediately circled the wagons and proffer a series of lies.
The Department of Homeland Security attributed the killing to “defensive shots” after Pretti “violently resisted” attempts to disarm him.
Presidential adviser Stephen Miller branded Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and would-be “assassin.” Vice President JD Vance blamed public officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti “approached officers with a handgun. The officers attempted to disarm but the armed subject reacted violently.”
President Donald Trump immediately posted to social media praising ICE officials as “patriots” and blaming Gov. Tim Walz and other Minnesota officials for “inciting insurrection.”
Border Patrol’s Greg Bovino, quickly shaping up as the comic-book-character evil face of the whole operation, said, “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Whatever one’s views of the circumstances that ICE agents confront, the gravity of these reflexive official lies to the American people can’t be overstated. The highest federal official immediately jumped in to defame and disparage the victim of an ICE killing. That is exactly how totalitarian governments react. It’s the sort of official dishonesty that can and should bring down governments, as with the Dreyfus affair in France.
Next in the familiar template, federal officials banded together to forcibly keep local law enforcement from investigating the crime scene. Their bullying of state counterparts extends to the raw refusal to honor a state-issued judicial warrant. On Sunday, a federal judge ordered the feds to preserve all evidence.
The whole terrible episode, not simply the shooting but also the aftermath, screams out contempt for the Constitution and the American people.
There are dozens of critical details that require immediate attention on the part of dozens of different actors in Minnesota, Washington, and around the country. These include, most exigently, the preservation of the crime scene and the strongest countermeasures to prevent ICE and the feds — the suspects here in a homicide and cover-up — from interfering with the ability to fully investigate and prosecute.
I and many commentators will speak concurrently to those exigencies in coming days. But there is something more urgent that this latest abomination calls for immediately.
Congress has to act now to cut off all funding to ICE.
That means voting to block funding for ICE in the current DHS appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026. Beyond that immediate step, it means amending the budget to substantially reduce ICE funding in general. And it means thereafter taking up legislation to remove ICE’s authority and dismantle its law enforcement function, which should be transferred to another agency altogether.
There were signs of an immediate break in the dam Saturday night as Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to the heads of ICE and Customs and Border Protection demanding their prompt testimony.
Again, whatever one’s views of immigration — and all indications are that the people caught in the dragnet of the Trump surge have overwhelmingly committed no offense other than possibly immigration violation — they pale in comparison to the shredding of the Constitution and the vicious tactics of federal law enforcement, cheered on by the highest government officials.
Members of Congress, every one of them, need to assess with the highest sobriety where they want to be now and what they want the United States to represent and portray to the world.
As a country, we’ve endured some searing examples of law-enforcement overreach, from Reconstruction to the Red Scares to segregation to anti-war protests and the Kent State killings to the war on terror.
None of these painful episodes, most of which historians and Americans view today as tragic and avoidable, included the pernicious features of this federal war on Minnesota.
Many responses to the Pretti killing will come from many quarters. But above all, and unavoidably, it’s the immediate responsibility of Congress, which has done so much to enable and encourage Trump’s historic abuses, to step up to its official constitutional role as the people’s representative and check on the other branches.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s mind-boggling letter to Walz apparently offering to withdraw ICE in return for, among other things, information about Minnesota’s voter rolls suggests that the administration (and not Bondi, most likely Miller) — are looking for a way out.
It is now a clarion call of a generation. Congress must answer it, swiftly, fully, and fearlessly.
Talk to you later.
Harry Litman is a former U.S. attorney and deputy assistant attorney general. His Talking Feds podcast is available on Substack and YouTube.
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Yes, "it’s the immediate responsibility of Congress, which has done so much to enable and encourage Trump’s historic abuses, to step up to its official constitutional role as the people’s representative and check on the other branches." In this morning's interview on "Face the Nation", Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara said the feds were preventing any other department to investigate the shooting. He also said the murdered man had a license to carry and that the gun was never drawn/used. What is really horrible is the people who choose NOT to believe what they see because they cannot admit they elected the real criminal.
The main problem of all those fascists at the top seems to be their equating the entire US population to their so very ignorant maga base.
The robber barons, of course, have their own agenda and will continue to support the fascists.
George Orwell, wherever he is, is thinking, "I never thought the state would actually expect their citizens to believe what they are told, rather than what they see with their own eyes, in real lfe."