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 once again madly analyzing a kaleidoscope of images through a smoke screen 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 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 hours after the horrific episode, the latest fatal shooting of Alex Pretti replicates the worst, most lawless features of the Renee Good killing.

Pretti, a 37-year old ICU nurse and American citizen, is holding a phone, with which he is recording the scene. Filming public spaces, including the actions of law enforcement officers, is generally protected by the First Amendment, much as it seems to infuriate ICE officers 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 officers 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 officers, 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 circle the wagons and proffer a series of lies.

DHS attributed the killing to “defensive shots” after Pretti “violently resisted” attempts to disarm him.

Stephen Miller branded Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin.” Vice President JD Vance issued a statement blaming public officials.

Trump immediately posted to social media praising ICE officials as “patriots,” blaming Governor Tim Walz and other Minnesota officials for “inciting insurrection.”

Greg Bovino, quickly shaping up as the comic-book-character evil face of the whole operation, claimed that Pretti approached officers with a drawn handgun. Bovino continued, “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 band 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.

Taken together—the shooting itself and the federal response afterward—the episode screams out profound contempt for both the Constitution and the public it exists to serve.

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 new funding for ICE in the current DHS appropriations bill for FY 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.

Again, whatever one’s views of the costs to the country of illegal immigration—and all indications are that the people caught in the dragnet of the Trump surge have overwhelmingly committed no offense other than possible immigration violations—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, combine the pernicious features of this federal war on Minnesota.

There are many responses to the Pretti killing to undertake from many quarters. But above all, and unavoidably, it’s the immediate responsibility of Congress, which has done so much to enable and encourage the historic abuse of Donald Trump, to step up to its official constitutional role as the people’s representative.

It is now a clarion call of a generation. Congress must answer it, swiftly, fully, and fearlessly.

Talk to you later.