Trump’s Gestapo Thugs Murder VA ICU Nurse

Parents Denounce “Sickening Lies Told About Our Son” As Minnesota AG Calls For Nationwide Protests To Repel Ongoing Attack On Twin Cities

Alex Pretti, 37, a VA ICU nurse, was murdered by Trump’s thugs after he tried to protect a woman they were attacking. He was shot at least ten times while covered by a swarm of agents.

“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting,” Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan, said in a statement read on KARE local news Saturday night. “Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper-sprayed.”

Pretti was a licensed gun owner, but his gun on Tizly appears clearly in videos of the event in the hands of an agent moving away from a swarm of agents attacking him, a second or two before he was shot. This was clearly captured in a stop-motion analysis by Bellingcat posted on YouTube.

“After 3 shootings and 2 homicides in just 2 weeks, it’s impossible to ignore the federal oppression of Minnesota,” Minnesota AG Keith Ellison said in a Substack post. “People here are living with the fear that any encounter with federal agents could turn deadly, and state and local leaders are being openly defied. We need your help.

“Massive, ongoing protests all over the country could really ease the pressure on Minnesota by turning what’s happening here into a problem for Trump everywhere, not just in one state.”

Petri’s murder came one day after Minneapolis saw the first city-wide general strike in an American city in generations, with 700 businesses closed and solidarity actions “in at least 300 cities around the country,” according to Payday Report.

That strike was the direct result of the strikingly similar murder of Renee Good on January 7, which has dramatically eroded support for ICE. More than 80% of Americans have seen a video of her murder, according to one poll, and a majority of Americans now support ICE’s abolition. “I’m not mad at you,” she said to her murderer just moments before he shot her three times, as she steered her car away from him.

Pretti’s murder was likewise seen by millions almost immediately. Four widely-seen videos show his murder from different angles. Initially, he is seen directing traffic around the area where there are ICE and/or border patrol agents. One of them pushes a woman to the ground, and Pretti intervenes, reaching down to help her back up. As he does that, an agent shoots pepper spray into his face, after which he’s attacked by a swarm of seven agents, hitting him and wrestling him to the ground.

It’s difficult to tell precisely when an agent took the gun from Pretti’s waistband, but the gun is never seen in Pretti’s hand, and it is seen in the agent’s hand as he moves away from the swarm of officers. The same agent was visible seconds earlier with no gun in his hand, which is why we know it’s Pretti’s, not his. As he turns his back, the first shot is fired, followed by nine more. Spectators present described it as an execution. Afterwards, agents quickly dispersed, with no effort at all to preserve the crime scene.

Within minutes, administration officials appeared in front of TV cameras falsely claiming that Pretti was engaged in domestic terrorism, that he was violent, that he had attacked the officers, and that having a gun on him justified his murder.

The murders of Pretti and Good expose the not-so-hidden agenda behind Trump’s immigration crackdown—as with Jews in Hitler’s Germany, it’s a ploy to demonize an outgroup as a way of normalizing demonizing and lawlessly attacking anyone who gets in their way.

Unlike Los Angeles and Chicago before them, Minneapolis doesn’t even have a large percentage of undocumented immigrants, and of course, those it does have are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. But there have been a few high-profile fraud cases centered in the Somali community—the vast majority of whom are legal residents, if not citizens.

But once the bigotry juices get flowing, it no longer matters if the narratives make sense—as the excuses for the murders of Pretti and Good so vividly show us. And thus charges of fraud—which were already being investigated, and have even produced significant convictions—were used as a justification for mass deportation raids.

Not only is there no logical connection between the two, but they have also turned out to be diametrically opposed: When the Trump administration refused to investigate Good’s murderer, and tried to investigate Good and her widow instead, it prompted a wave of resignations among federal prosecutors—four in Washington and six in Minnesota. The most high-ranking in Minnesota, Joseph Thompson, was the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota last year and oversaw the entire federal fraud investigation.

But there’s another, even bigger, more absurd contradiction involved. As Trump and his minions go ballistic over fraud in Minnesota, Trump himself has been setting astronomical records in pardoning fraudsters, depriving victims of billions of dollars in compensation. Last June, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, released a committee staff analysis showing that Trump’s early term pardon spree not only freed 1,500 January 6 felons, it also benefited “dozens of mostly white-collar criminals” which “wiped out $1.3 billion in restitution payments and fines they owed directly to their victims and to American taxpayers.”

But that only covered Trump’s first half-year. On January 20, NBC published a more up-to-date account, finding that “Over half of Trump’s 88 individual pardons are for white-collar offenses, with money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud among the most frequent crimes the president has wiped clean.” One of those he pardoned had even been pardoned for fraud before—by Trump, in his first term.

In short, the idea that Trump cares a bit about fraud is utterly ridiculous. He’ll use fraud allegations to go after his enemies and dismiss fraud convictions for those who give him money or otherwise qualify as friends. Using fraud allegations to justify mass immigration raids is just one more example of this, but it shows the utter dishonesty of everything he says or does. The lies about Pretti and Good—both about their lives and their deaths—are just more of the same.

“We are heartbroken but also very angry,” Pretti’s parents said. “Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends, and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact.”

It’s up to all of us to ensure he didn’t die in vain.