ICE Kills Another Minnesotan: MAGAReport 1/24/26

On the 2nd amendment, ideological consistency, and celebrations of death

ICE agents in Minneapolis shot and killed another protester today: Alex Pretti, an American citizen (cw: graphic video is embedded in the linked AP story). DHS tweeted that he was shot after an armed confrontation, but video very clearly shows this is not the case (cw: graphic video). Video appears to show an ICE officer removing a gun from Pretti’s holster and walking away with it before the first shot is fired.

Carrying a gun is legal in Minnesota, yet his possession of a gun is being used to justify his killing. How will the hard core MAGAs - notoriously pro-gun and anti-gun control - handle this news?

Allow me to back up a few days to add some context. There was another video going around this week of a man protecting his neighborhood from ICE by standing on the corner with an openly carried weapon - again, something that is legal in Minnesota.

The MAGA spaces I follow are generally Second Amendment absolutists. It has been a challenge for them to reconcile that video of the man on the corner, who is legally and responsibly bearing arms, with their pro-protester views. They responded with a fit of arguments that boiled down to accusations that, by standing there with a gun, he was obstructing law enforcement.

So we already had some cognitive dissonance over guns coming into today. Then today’s shooting happens. A man who happened to be carrying a gun - that he never went for, let alone aimed at ICE agents - is blamed for his own death because of it. What would MAGA say?

First, they have a thread with a screen grab of the man shortly before the shooting, titled “The faggot that got shot was playing traffic cop”. Comments include:

• ICE agents are Pretti Good shots...

  ...I’m here all week.

  • 😂

• He looks very Jewish.

• Pretti dead...

On the main discussion of the video, a lot of it is just ignoring the issue of whether this shooting was justified:

• The blood is on the hands of democrats encouraging agitation and obstruction.

  • Yep, Walz, Frey, Klobachar... the blood is on their hands and they know it.

    • Ilhan omar too. The traitorous bitch

      • I think we need a different word than “traitor”. In order for that to qualify, she would have been actually loyal to the US at one point.

        • She’s just an evil cunt, her head needs to be separated from the rest of her body.

        • Dude right. Simply a foreign funded enemy combatant on US soil. The answer is military tribunals.

      • Omar is the worst. She and her people are the reason for everything happening in Minnesota right now.

        All these protests are to distract from the massive fraud our politicians helped the Somali pirates commit in exchange for kickbacks and votes.

But some commenters do speak to it, and they put the blame on the protesters:

• It really is and its probably going to get a lot worse (for commies)

  • Seriously. Imagine being so retarded you thought there were no consequences for fighting with feds

    • Not only does ICE have the backing of the entire US gov, they have the backing of every civilian who supports what they are doing. How can you possibly win that war? Leftists aren’t very smart.

  • They can end all of this in one call

    They want the violence, they want their followers dead. Their dumb Low IQ followers are happy to point firearms at LE hoping it will get up promoted in the antifa ladder.

    Well. Boo fuckin hoo

    • Yep. I’m glad ICE is not backing down. Keep up the deportations and shoot any commies who get in the way. This is what everyone voted for in 2024

Some are celebrating:

• Does anyone really care

  • I care but only in a celebration kind of way.

    • Bingo. The majority of the American voting public VOTED for this in Nov 2024. People pearl clutching about “optics” for the midterms are shills

And some are just rolling with the official story:

• This idiot’s blood is on his own hands. Clearly see the gun. Completely justified shooting.

• if you want to live, do not interfere with ICE and DO NOT pull out a gun while you’re being detained.

A few interlopers in the forum have called this logic out. One writes, “They found the gun he was legally carrying, his own hands never went near it.” The post is downvoted and the only reply reads, “Gonna need a source for that”. The video, apparently, is not enough.

One way I often see and hear people pushing back on these MAGA arguments is by calling for consistency. How can they claim Ashli Babbitt was murdered when she was shot climbing through a broken window toward the Speaker’s Lobby in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, bemoan political violence when Charlie Kirk is shot, celebrate Kyle Rittenhouse showing up to at BLM protest with a riffle and killing protesters, and call themselves 2nd Amendment absolutists…and then claim that citizens of Minneapolis who oppose ICE and legally carry guns deserve to be killed in the street?

But a key to understanding this part of the MAGA movement is that they do not care about consistency. Many people, and especially liberals, hold ideological consistency as a core value. MAGA does not share that value. In fact, leaning into the inconsistencies is a way to troll liberals, which makes it even more enjoyable for MAGA. What they value is their side dominating the enemy. They will always celebrate their own side winning and condemn anything that appears like the other side is winning. Full stop.

I am freshly back from spending most of the last couple weeks in Minneapolis after dropping a small fortune on new winter clothes (thank you to the folks at REI who outfitted me properly for the sub-zero weather). I am home now but heading back to the Twin Cities next week. Based on my time there, I am not the slightest bit surprised that ICE shot another U.S. citizen who was protesting. The situation on the ground is not like anything I have seen, and that includes clashes between police and protesters in L.A. and Chicago over the last year. There are twice as many ICE officers in the city as there are local police. They are everywhere. In residential neighborhoods, people stand out on the corners waiting for ICE to pull up so they can sound the alert. A well-organized system deploys chase vehicles to follow ICE in cars through the city. The feds are using pepper spray, pepper balls, and tear gas on anyone that irritates them, often at point blank range, even when they do not pose a threat. You cannot move through Minneapolis without feeling the operation that is underway.

You also cannot help but see how committed the Minnesotans are to opposing ICE. No matter how cold it got - and it was well below 0º F a lot of the time I was there - people were outside demonstrating and standing guard. This is not something that the feds are going to win by wearing the locals down.

If you’d like to see some of the photos I shot for the Associated Press in Minnesota over the last couple weeks, you can find some on my Instagram and the rest in the AP Newsroom.

Also, thanks to all of you for supporting the MAGAReport, and extra thanks to my paid subscribers. I’m finding ways to cover some of my costs on these trips, but not all of them. Your support for the newsletter really helps*.

*And it helps an extra lot this month because, the day before I got my shoe spikes in Minneapolis, I slipped and utterly smashed my camera. This, my friends, is $4,000 of damage -$1,300 to fix the camera and a totaling of the lens which needs to be replaced. Fortunately, the nice people at Sony PRO Support sent me loaner gear to use as I await new parts, but jeez…it’s been an expensive month!