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Hey Bulwark fam. It’s easy to feel unmoored at this moment. The killing of 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti for the crime of coming to the aid of a woman being attacked by Border Patrol officers has left us shocked. Pretti was an ICU nurse who worked with veterans. He was a literal boy scout, who sang in the Green Bay Boy Choir and loved his recently departed Catahoula Leopard dog. He did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to become a hero or a martyr or a spark for political action. But his killing may do just that. Already, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called for Senate Democrats not to advance the funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security.
This latest edition of Huddled Masses was reported in Minneapolis before Pretti’s killing. It is about other people standing up to ICE: from the everyday citizen helping his or her community to the business owner fighting to survive the onslaught. I hope you’ll check it out. And I’ll leave you with words from Alex Pretti. They come from a video shared on Facebook by a man who says Pretti aided his father, a veteran, during his final hours. Then, after the veteran’s death, Pretti led the brief “final salute” honoring him, as shown in the video.
“Today we remember that freedom is not free,” Pretti says. “We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it. . . . We grant him our honor and our gratitude.”
–Adrian
P.S. – Two programming notes: (1) I will be joining Bill Kristol and Sam Stein live at 9:00 a.m. EST this morning for Bulwark on Sunday. (This is a few hours earlier than originally planned.) (2) And last night, we put out an emergency edition of our Illegal News podcast, with Sarah Longwell and guest Andrew Weissmann discussing the killing of Alex Pretti. Check it out right here.
Portraits of the Minneapolis Resistance
Tens of thousands of Minnesotans hit the streets for a general strike on Friday. Here are a few of those fighting back against the ICE occupation.
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Minneapolis, Minnesota
EVEN BEFORE THE KILLING OF Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, by Border Patrol officers on Saturday, Minneapolis’s social fabric was being torn apart. Over the course of several days in the city, I met activists, protesters, ‘ICE watch’ volunteers, and community leaders deeply angry and disillusioned about what was happening to their way of life. There was Carolina Ortiz, an immigrant advocate whom I tagged along with as she and others moved swiftly to respond to ICE sightings and organize help for those in danger. There were the thousands of people who hit the streets in -20 degree weather—yes negative—to protest the actions of ICE in their hometown. There were the local lawmakers forced to grapple with what happens when your own federal government is now targeting you, and the everyday citizens standing up for their neighbors and community in ways they never thought would be asked of them. This newsletter is dedicated to telling their stories in an effort to underscore the myriad ways in which the Trump administration has harmed a great American city.
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Noah Levy, 53, drummer
The day before Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent, Noah Levy was also watching ICE agents as an observer. He told me that he and his wife were following the agents around town, and in turn ICE went to his house and used his wife’s first name. The message was clear: they’re watching him.
Because of ICE’s aggressive tactics and unrelenting harassment of the citizens of Minneapolis, Levy took part in “ICE out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom,” a protest on Friday that involved a blackout on all work, school, and shopping. He connected with 35 other drummers to put on a raucous publicity stunt on the Stone Arch Bridge in downtown Minneapolis. His goal was to draw eyes to the work important advocacy groups like COPAL are doing to help the community.
“All of us musicians in town are looking at each other like, what can we do? We can throw together shows but people are stuck in their homes, they need rides. We’ve heard horror stories of people who need medical care because ICE is coming to hospitals so they’re not getting help. Well, we can do something visually arresting, but we also want to scream out into the void on the coldest day in 10 years.”
So why the hell did he put his bodily safety (the high was around -9 degrees on Friday) on the line after ICE killed a white observer just like him?
“I’m still involved because I care about my neighbors,” he told me. “I was just talking to my friend who is moving back here because of the sense of community. This is why they’re cracking down on our cities, because of what we stand for. St Paul, Minneapolis—if we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t exist. We’re all looking each other in the eyes. It’s personal, it’s deeply personal.”