Let’s call Trump’s rampaging federal agents what they are: Secret police. Some of them may have badges saying “ICE” or “Border Patrol” on their bulletproof vests; the camo and olive drab uniforms of others are marked simply “Police.” But none have badges with their names or other identifying information on them, and all of their faces are concealed by masks. They are unnamed and unaccountable.

All of these masked men are armed with semi-automatic pistols and/or fully-automatic AR-style assault rifles.

Let’s remember from just the last few weeks in Minneapolis what they are empowered to do. They have guns, and they used them to kill two United States citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. As of today, no one has been charged for these murders. Trump’s secret police have asserted the right to enter private homes without judicial warrants. That means tomorrow, a gaggle of these helmeted and masked jackboot thugs could show up on your doorstep, and as they have done in Minneapolis and Chicago, use battering rams to break your front door and enter your home without providing you with a warrant signed by a judge, without showing you identification, without showing their faces, without so much as saying, “Hello, we’re from the government and we are here to search your house and take you away.”

Think about that for a moment. Break-ins and arrests by masked and anonymous Border Patrol and ICE agents have happened in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Memphis and Nashville, in New Orleans, in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in Charlotte, in Las Vegas, in Brownsville and Dallas and Fort Worth, in Newark, in Detroit, in Boston, in Dallas, and in Indianapolis. Most of the people whose homes were invaded and who were arrested were alleged to be in this country without proper immigration documents, but some of them in Minneapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere have been American citizens who were required to provide proof of citizenship before they were released.

This is the nightmare that the authors of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution foresaw and forbade. Here is what the Fourth Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That is about as specific as anyone could imagine.

Agents of the federal, state, and local governments are not permitted under law to enter your home, automobile, hotel room, motor home, or any other place where you are without a warrant showing probable cause that you or others in your presence, in your home, or other domicile are engaged in or have committed a crime, and that warrant must be signed by a judge or magistrate.

Federal agents from the FBI recently showed up at the homes of James Comey and John Bolton. The agents were not secret police. They identified themselves with badges and presented legally obtained warrants before they entered the homes of the two former government officials. That’s the way it is supposed to be done. That is not the way agents affiliated with the Department of Homeland Security are operating.

The Fourth Amendment is being violated on a wholesale basis by Donald Trump’s jackbooted thugs overseen by Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff who has no connection to law enforcement. At least we know the names of Trump’s so-called immigration enforcement leaders. We do not know the names of practically everyone under them. The name of Gregory Bovino became known because he is a showoff who enjoyed having his picture taken and posting his exploits on social media. But everyone else in every photo of Bovino has been unidentified. The men standing around Bovino on the streets of Minneapolis in recent weeks could have been his college roommates or poker buddies, for all we know. They had no name tags. No identifying badges other than “Police.” But they were armed, every one of them, with guns and tear gas and cannisters of pepper spray.

What is the reason for the anonymity of these men? We are told they must be anonymous because they might be “doxed.” That means, if someone learns their name, their home address and other identifying information could be published, and they could – allegedly – be subject to harassment.

So what? Every police officer in every city I cited above is required to wear his or her badge that displays their name and identifying number at all times. If a person who is, for example, stopped for a traffic violation by one of these officers, that person can put up a social media post with the officer’s name and the circumstances of the traffic stop, if the person feels the stop was wrongful. The person can report the officer to his or her higher ups in the police force. A person wrongfully stopped or arrested by a police officer can get a lawyer and file a lawsuit against that officer for wrongful arrest or harassment.

That is the way the system works or is supposed to work. As citizens, we pay the taxes that provide the money to pay the salaries of law enforcement officers to whom we grant the authority and great power to take away the freedom of us or our fellow citizens if crimes have been committed. We give them the authority, if a citizen is caught in the commission of a crime, to detain that citizen, to search his or her person and car or domicile for evidence of the commission of a crime.

We don’t pay our taxes so that masked thugs in pretend military costumes can detain us on the street, throw us to the ground, hit and kick us, and in the recent cases in Minneapolis, kill us because we got in their way or pissed them off by yelling at them or using our cell phones to videotape or take photos of them.

All of us grew up in this country learning in school and college about foreign nations with secret police forces. We learned about Nazi Germany’s Gestapo; the Soviet Union’s KGB; East Germany’s Stazi; Iran’s SAVAK; North Korea’s State Security Department and China’s Ministry of State Security. We read in the news about Chile under Pinochet and Argentina with their secret police “disappearing” people, many of whom were never found or accounted for after decades of looking. In all these countries and in Iraq and Egypt and Cuba and, we learned that secret police were everywhere and could seize people off the streets or out of their homes and spirit them away to secret prisons and keep them behind bars or in cages without warrants, without charges, and without trials.

This is exactly what is being done in this country right this very minute. It was announced by ICE today that on Sunday, 956 people were arrested for immigration offenses. NBC News reported later that the real number was closer to 1,200 arrests, and of that number, NBC discovered that only 613 “were considered criminal arrests,” which probably means the arrestees had criminal records. On Monday, ICE made 1,179 arrests.

I think it is logical to assume that none of those arrested on Sunday or Monday were shown criminal warrants or could learn the identity of the masked agents arresting them. We do not know the names of the prisons or concentration camps where these arrestees are being held. We do know that most ICE arrestees are not granted access to lawyers until deportation proceedings begin against them. They are held in the meantime without knowing the specific immigration offense they are accused of.

Can you imagine being arrested at gunpoint by a masked man and spirited away in an unmarked car and not knowing where you are going, and further, not knowing where you are when you get there? We saw last week an American citizen of Laotian descent arrested by masked and armed men and taken away in an unmarked car wearing nothing but his undershorts and a child’s blanket. After his citizenship was determined hours later, he was returned to his home without explanation or apology. His door had been broken down and his home ransacked by the masked agents. They did not offer to fix the door, straighten up his home, or give him the money to have the door repaired.

This is what the president of the United States has ordered and what the Congress is countenancing every day. Without so much as a vote in Congress, or the presentation of anything more than a bogus “executive order” signed by Trump, we now have the same kind of secret police force that terrorized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Cuba and North Korea and the rest of the dictatorships and authoritarian regimes we once thought we were better than.

No longer. We now have secret police paid by our tax dollars committing crimes against the Constitution on a daily basis. We have seen the enemy, and he is us.

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The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for over 15 years, and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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Every week, Rachel Maddow devotes a rather large part of her show to talking about protests against the regime in different parts of the country. Small groups in small towns. Large groups in big cities. Blue dots in red states who are angry at the regime. Red dots in red states who are angry at the regime. Young protesters. Old protesters. Protesters who have been holding signs for years. Protesters who have never held a sign in their lives.

Maddow does this each and every week, and I didn’t get it for the first month or two of 2025 when she started this. But then it clicked. Duh. Courage is contagious, as it always is. She wasn’t just talking about these people to fill airtime. She was building a permission structure for other people to step outside and protest. Nothing changes if the public doesn’t push back.

Taking my cue from the infinitely smarter Maddow, I have been posting and talking and writing about accountability over and over again. Both because I see the demand for it seething under the surface in a way it NEVER has before and because I fucking want it. I fucking want it so bad I will manifest it into existence if I have to type my goddamn fingers to bloody stumps to get it.

Nothing happens unless we can imagine it. The people who want us to “move on” and “look forward” and “heal the nation” are lying to you. The people who are telling you “nothing will change” and “no one will ever go to jail” are deceiving you. They are working to maintain the status quo. They are trying to limit your imagination.

If you cannot close your eyes and picture ICE and CBP erased from existence and every agent charged with kidnapping and assault and murder, it cannot happen. If you cannot see a future where the regime and its enablers and its footsoldiers face tribunals and life in prison, it cannot happen. If you cannot see in your mind’s eye Stephen Miller being led to the gallows to hang for ordering the construction of concentration camps and the murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings, it cannot happen.

The justice we deserve is what the people trying to limit your imagination are seeking to prevent. It doesn’t matter if they’re doing it from a place of cynicism or fear. Cynicism because we have never held racist white men accountable for their crimes in America. Fear because holding racist white men accountable would change the very fabric of this nation. Whatever their reason, they are attempting to hold you back. Attempting to hold all of us back.

The more we talk about Nuremberg trials and tribunals and mass prosecutions and hunting them down like the Nazis they are, the more real it becomes. This is how language works. This is why the right spreads hate. They normalize it, and then they make it policy. We can play that game, too.

Our job is to normalize accountability for racist white men. We must make the idea of putting Nazis in prison forever seem so inevitable that anyone arguing against it will seem insane. Who would ever argue against gravity? Who would ever argue against the Earth revolving around the Sun? Who would argue against #NurembergThemAll? We have to make consequences for the regime and its enablers so ingrained in our language and consciousness that it can’t NOT happen.

To that end, we need less “no one will ever see a day in jail!” and more of this:

[Philadelphia District Attorney Larry] Krasner vowed that “there will be accountability now, there will be accountability in the future, there will be accountability after Trump is out of office” — and he didn’t mince words as he closed out his remarks.

“If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities, we will find you, we will achieve justice, and we will do so under the constitution and the laws of the United States.”

Fuck yes. I don’t care if it takes decades. If I’m on my deathbed 25-30 years from now and I’m still watching the trial of former ICE agents who have been on the run for decades, I’ll die with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. I’m fucking petty like that.1

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I want them to live in fear for the rest of their lives. If they’re not rotting in prison, I want them to wake up every morning terrified that this is the day justice comes for them. Every time they step foot outside, I want them to wonder if this will be the time a dozen armed men tackle them to the ground and tell them they’re under arrest for the murder of helpless immigrants in overcrowded cells. Or the “disappearance” of immigrant children. Or the rape of immigrant women. Or the kidnapping and torture of American citizens. Or attacking children with chemical weapons. Or hiding mass graves. Or or or or.

This time will be different because we, as a people, are so very done coddling racist white men. And because the racist white men, still living in the past where there are no consequences, believe they can still do anything, maim, rape, and murder, with impunity.

The racist white men do not understand that they have crossed a line. They have dropped the pretense of being our fellow Americans. They no longer pretend to even be human. They have outed themselves as an irredeemable, violent death cult, and there’s no unringing that bell. They have declared open war on all of us and now we view them as the enemy.

Their confusion as we mobilize against them is perfectly understandable in this context. It has been generations since racist white men faced a nation hostile to them. And never before has that nation openly demanded punishment. An end to the depravity of racist white men? Yes. But consequences afterwards? Never.

When the regime falls, and it will, the racist white men and their enablers are going to wish they had stayed in the shadows where it was safe. Keep saying it. Speak it into existence. Will it to be. Believe it can happen, and it will. We’re already halfway there. People are already demanding it. Accountability. Consequences. Justice. Make them pay for what they’ve done and make the price so steep they’ll never try again. We can fucking do this.

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There are only 277 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

The search for scapegoats in Minneapolis is under way once again, even as White House policy over deportation tactics was beginning to show cracks on several fronts.

The insistence on finding someone else to blame for the most recent fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis led yesterday to an extraordinary federal court hearing in which a judge was being asked to at least temporarily halt the deportation crackdown, and, in turn, demanded reasons from the government for the deployment of so many federal agents to Minneapolis.

Separately local authorities were asking the courts also were being asked by local authorities to order the feds to preserve evidence in the case, something that would happen if more recognizable procedures were being followed.

And Donald Trump talked with the Minnesota governor for the first time, asserting that they were “on the same wavelength” about finding criminals – although they did not describe the call the same way. Trump sent border czar Tom Homan to the city as if Homan might be more judicious in speech than Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino. News reports said Bovino was being pulled from Minnesota, though it was unclear whether this was a leadership change or the start of a more complete turnabout on numbers or tactics.   The White House had to own up to launching three investigations, all internal, and perhaps allowing the state to run its own.

Republican voices were questioning whether a pullback is necessary, and Democrats in Congress were promising a budget fight that could lead to a government shutdown.

Taken together, the question was building as to whether this the start of a Trump turnabout on a key policy objective, whether in Minnesota or more broadly.

Backing Trump’s Army

Still, the White House, Noem and supportive right-leaning media were out to find ICE’s shooting victims, Democrats and ever-nefarious “left wing radicals,” even totally unrelated welfare fraud scandals or voter information rolls somehow responsible for the unrestrained tactics of the federal deportation army in Minneapolis.

The cited reasons vary, but what remains are two things: Democrats and citizen protesters who oppose random migrant grabs and who show up to shame agents are bad people, and that repeating that idea over and over somehow will prompt the circumstances of fatal shootings and the overuse of chemical irritants against citizens to go away.

We’ve heard repeated attempts by Trump, Noem, Bovino and more insiders blame the shooting victims as “impeding” federal officers, despite what bystander videos show. It still doesn’t explain why Homeland Security resists investigation by any agency not its own.  We’ve seen Attorney General Pam Bondi’s letter somehow tying shootings and violence to a failure of the state to stand idly by and to fraud information that may involve migrants and voter information that explains nothing about ICE tactics.

The leap in logic apparently is not even working within the Department of Homeland Security, where a significant number of employees are pushing back on the narratives coming from the top, according to insider reports.

Blaming the Victim

The lead story on Fox’s website yesterday said the “skirmish that led to Saturday’s fatal shooting of an agitator” by border agents was driven by a complex network of far-left organizations, a Fox News Digital investigation found.

“Over the following hours, a national network of socialist, communist and Marxist-Leninist cells in the United States leveraged the tragic fatality into a nationwide protest operation.” The piece tracks the rise of social media posts to notify like-minded people “using short sensational video clips and emojis as weapons of propaganda” to show disciplined logistics, messaging and coordination of far-left warriors fomenting insurgency-like confrontation with authorities.”

The piece offers nothing to show viewers are “socialist, community and Marxist-Leninist.” Most who saw posts or television news were simply angry.

This Fox finding follows Vice President JD Vance’s post on X that said, “This level of engineered chaos is unique to Minneapolis. It is the direct consequence of far-left agitators, working with local authorities.”  Noem said, “It looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement. Border Patrol Commander  Bovino said, “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

Resistant to Information

Maybe this White House is so insular that it believes what it puts out as covering propaganda – just as it did about killing survivors in a drug-boat attack or in justifying deployment of National Guardsmen to city streets altogether.

The New York Times noted that even as videos emerged that contradicted the government’s account, “the White House was moving to control the narrative” around Saturday’s killing of Alex Pretti, a nurse with no criminal record who was pinned down when agents killed him with 10 bullets. This rush to blame Pretti and exonerate the agents without evidence deviates from how law enforcement investigations handle such incidents and underscore a pattern in justification for an increasingly violent crackdown.

Shortly after Pretti was shot, officials at DHS and the White House were in contact about how to respond to the incident, according to a government source. The statement claimed that Pretti “approached” officers with handgun and the “armed suspect violently resisted” when officials tried to disarm him, neither supported by videos.

In a post to X late Sunday, Fox congressional correspondent Bill Melugin cited “more than half a dozen federal sources involved in immigration enforcement” reported deep internal skepticism about DHS’s handling of the shooting.

Eventually, we need to ask what the gain of all this for the White House is. Polling shows Trump is not winning political support for his deportation tactics.  Citizen resistance is only strengthening as the feds now move to Maine to start random deportations there in strength. The investigation of fraud in Minnesota social services already is ongoing and getting hold of state voter registration records appears to have nothing to do with immigration enforcement.  Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Trump opponent, has stood down from reelection.

If this is about rooting out migrants with criminal backgrounds, it’s a weird way of making the argument.

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The post Is ICE Beginning to Crack? appeared first on DCReport.org.

Although I do not know each and every one of you, dear readers, I know enough about you by now to realize that you don’t need any more evidence that our scattered, childlike president is losing his shit. But like it or not, here is the incredible news of the day: Only 48 hours after an American citizen was gunned down in cold blood by agents acting in his name, Donald Trump took the time to go on his Truth Social account this morning and post a diatribe about his bloody fucking ballroom.

He spent some time yesterday speaking on the phone with a reporter for the Wall Street Journal trying to figure out how he’s going to get himself out of the disastrous corner he’s backed himself into with the obsessive retribution he thought he would wreak on the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis for some unnamed reason – that they didn’t vote for him in even one of his presidential elections; that his nemesis Ilhan Omar is from there and represents a district with a large Somali population; that some half-wit with a cell phone camera convinced him that tens of billions of welfare fraud was being committed there, as if he would even take the good time out of his day to care about it.

Who knows why he dispatched his makeshift army of Bass Pro Shop camo goons to Minneapolis? It was clear by yesterday that he was starting to rethink the whole thing, because faced with copious video evidence that a murder had taken place, Republicans of multiple-MAGA stripes were beginning to back away from him and his policy of turning loose a totally untrained brigade of pretend-warriors on an American city with orders to break whatever norms and laws necessary to come up with a bunch of immigration numbers he could brag about.

By Saturday, he was losing his support on managing immigration, too, with several polls showing some minor slippage even among Republicans, but a major loss of popularity among People Who Evidently Matter To Him, which would be independents and the youth vote that lost its mind and backed him in 2024.

It’s not just the incredibly deteriorating situation in Minneapolis that should be on his mind, even if none of the following probably is. He has taken on a job that he has sworn for more than 20 years he would never touch – the running and rebuilding of a foreign nation. That would be Venezuela, after he kidnapped its leader and replaced that incredibly corrupt regime with the same corrupt regime with a new figurehead “president” whom he swears is under his control, but if history has taught us anything, is not and never will be.

He’s got what he calls an “armada” in the waters near Iran, threatening the regime with retribution because they killed their own citizens during recent protests. With two of his own citizens having been killed by his administration and his obvious, outrageous hypocrisy aired around the clock on social media, cable news, and on newspaper editorial pages around the country, Trump now faces an angry, embittered Iranian regime that today threatened “a regret-inducing response” to any new “aggression from the United States and the Zionist regime,” which would of course be Israel and its murderous leader, Trump’s pal Bibi Netanyahu.

Late update: Trump tells Axios this afternoon that Iran “wants to make a deal.” R-i-i-i-ght. That line of shit and $5.45 will get you an iced something-or-another at Starbucks.

He totally and completely lost his insane bid to “take over” Greenland, arriving in Davos last week with his surrender papers scrolling down a teleprompter so he could reassure the many, many billionaire pals who were clearly ready to threaten him with a gigantic loss of payoffs if he didn’t come to heel on his stupid Greenland demands. So, he took the hit. He caved into a slight modification of a 1951 treaty with Denmark on Greenland, tucked his tail between the cheeks of his considerable ass, and struggled up the stairs to Air Force One and went home.

He is continuing his full-fledged campaign of murder on the high seas by shooting yet another alleged “drug boat” out of the water on Friday, flaunting international criminal law, the Law of the Sea, and any normal person’s sense of morality, which Trump has twisted for his own ends by announcing a week or so ago that he “doesn’t need international law,” and all he needs to rely on is “my own morality and mind,” wherever they are currently located.

He is continuing his insane tariff regime that is driving up costs of everything from chocolate chip cookies to the chips he needs Taiwan to make so his billionaire buddies can continue to build massive data centers that are pissing off people – read: voters – everywhere from Virginia to Texas. He doesn’t know what to do about that, either. How is he going to manage the split between pleasing the Tech Bros and pleasing voters who are tired of their surging electric bills and turning on taps that only trickle water because some fucking data center needs groundwater to cool its hothouse filled with computers and servers and God only knows what else? And what’s he going to do about the growing realization among regular people out there that their privacy is being utterly destroyed by the AI that all those data centers make possible?

I could go on. Suffice to say that Donald Trump, no stranger to midday napping sitting up straight in his chair in the Oval Office, has more on his proverbial presidential plate than most presidents who came before him. And yet, what does he do this morning? Here, give him a listen:

“I’m building, on top of everything else that I am doing, one of the greatest and most beautiful Ballrooms anywhere in the World, with more than 300 Million Dollars of Great American Patriots’ money, and working closely with, right from the beginning, the United States Military and Secret Service. This is a GIFT (ZERO taxpayer funding!) to the United States of America, of 300 to 400 Million Dollars (depending on the scope and quality of interior finishes!), for a desperately needed space, sought for over 150 years by previous Presidents and Administrations, so that the White House would no longer be forced to use a cheap and unsafe “tent,” for big and important STATE EVENTS, Dinners, Meetings, Conferences, and already scheduled future INAUGURATIONS (for safety, security, and capacity purposes!), on a very wet, and subject to weather, White House lawn. Making such a large gift to the U.S.A. was thought to be, by almost everyone, “A WONDERFUL THING TO DO” — But no, as usual, I got sued, this time by the Radical Left National (No!)Trust for Historic Preservation, a group that couldn’t care less about our Country!”

He goes on to explain, an inadequate word if there ever was one, that he has already ordered everything necessary for the ballroom, all the steel and bulletproof glass and marble, and on and on, so there can be only one conclusion to be drawn: “IT IS TOO LATE” to stop his precious ballroom.

This is obviously the infantile ranting of a spoiled brat who has spent every waking hour of every day he has been alive in abject avoidance of the merest possibility of being told “no” about anything in his life. He didn’t want to be told “no” by women, so he grabbed their pussies and raped them. He didn’t want to be told “no” by the voters, so he tried to cancel their votes and steal the 2020 election.

What kind of blithering egomaniacal monster, facing the exploding scandal of two American citizens murdered by his own thugs in the space of a couple of weeks, spends the morning following the second murder obsessing about his fucking ballroom?

Our president, that’s who.

I beseech you: Don’t pull the pillow over your heads and hope it all goes away. The blood of our fellow citizens is in the street. We are being called on to act, if all we can do is throw open our windows and blow whistles and scream that we’ve had enough and we’re not going to take it anymore. Be of good heart. Our votes are out there waiting for us to cast them. The deaths of Good and Pretti will not be in vain. We are going to win this thing for them, for ourselves, for our country.

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They are arranged next to each other in the Constitution – the First Amendment and its guarantee of free speech and religion, and the Second Amendment, as currently interpreted, with its guarantee of the right to bear arms. Neither right is absolute. The First Amendment does not protect a right to slander someone, or in the classic example, to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. The Second Amendment does not automatically convey the right to everyone to buy or carry firearms. Gun laws limit sales of all guns to those over 18, and the sale of some guns only to those over 21. Various gun laws place limits on where you can carry firearms – not within businesses which ban guns, for example, not on the grounds of schools or universities which ban guns, not within churches that gun bans, and perhaps most interestingly, privately owned guns must be licensed on military bases and cannot be publicly carried even by the soldiers or sailors stationed there.

So, what happens when you combine the two rights? Did Alex Pretti have a Second Amendment right to carry a firearm while he exercised his First Amendment right to protest in the streets of Minneapolis? Not according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her designated Gestapo leader, Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who before even a minute had been devoted to investigating the shooting of Pretti, accused him of being bent on inflicting “maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” simply because he was carrying a legally licensed semiautomatic pistol and “two magazines.”

What we have from Trump, Noem, Attorney General Bondi, and Bovino is an anti-Second Amendment presumption that anyone who chooses to legally carry a handgun at a demonstration is doing so with ill intent. And yet the Second Amendment makes no demand of intent on gun owners or gun carriers. The Second Amendment Right to “keep and bear arms” is not abridged by a requirement that one’s heart be pure and one’s behavior be unblemished. Gun rights advocates have gone into court repeatedly to argue that people who have been convicted of crimes such as domestic abuse should still have the right to own guns under the Second Amendment. Insurrectionists convicted of violent January 6 crimes such as beating police officers had their gun rights restricted after felony convictions. And yet Trump restored those gun rights with his pardons of violent felons convicted of January 6 crimes.

Let’s examine the case of Alex Pretti. There are numerous photographs of Pretti with his cell phone, confronting ICE or Border Patrol officers on the street in Minneapolis. We now know that when those photos were taken, he had his firearm with him, a 9-mm Sig Sauer pistol. There is no evidence that he had drawn his gun while he took cell phone videos of the action on the street. Nor is there evidence that once he was assaulted by federal agents, that he reached for his gun and “brandished” it, as he was charged with doing by at least one Trump administration official.

As ICE agents were pinning him to the ground and hitting him repeatedly – one agent was hitting him with the butt of a can of pepper spray – when his gun was discovered and removed from him, an agent called out “Gun!” and agents began shooting at him. He died from those gunshot wounds.

By the evidence as seen in cell phone videos, and according to the analysis done by the New York Times and CNN, Alex Pretti was killed because he was carrying a firearm. No agents pulled their weapons while they were attempting to pin him to the ground facedown. They didn’t pull their guns when they were shooting pepper spray at him. They didn’t pull their guns as Pretti struggled to get back to his feet.

They pulled their guns and fired them only after Pretti’s firearm had been taken away from him by one of the federal agents.

So, what are we to conclude from the circumstances surrounding Pretti’s killing? What the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice apparently want us to conclude is that it is legal for ICE and Border Patrol agents to carry guns, but it is not legal for civilians on the streets of Minneapolis to carry guns.

But that is not true. The NRA and other gun rights groups have been screaming for years that citizens should have what amounts to an unfettered right to publicly carry all manner of firearms, from semiautomatic pistols to AR-15 style assault rifles. Gun rights groups want people to have the right to carry concealed weapons and openly displayed weapons. They want that right to be absolute, without the requirement for a license to carry. In some states, gun rights advocates have been successful in getting laws passed allowing exactly that – no license, no training, no safety inspection, nothing is required for people to have open or concealed carry firearms.

What has happened in this country is that the advocates for Second Amendment rights have outstripped any and all practical considerations when it comes to enforcing the law. There is, in fact, no doctrine to deal with free-for-all gun ownership by American citizens. The gun advocate slogan, “The solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” has been shown to be patently ridiculous.

Who was the “good guy” in Minneapolis yesterday? Law abiding Alex Pretti, who obtained a license to publicly carry a firearm? Or ICE agents who were authorized by federal law to carry firearms in the carrying out of their duties?

It is becoming obvious that the federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis have not received adequate training. They don’t know what the law is. They violate common law enforcement practices every day. With the shooting deaths of two civilians in the space of two weeks, it is clear that their “use of force” training was either poor or non-existent.

By the evidence, I don’t think it’s possible to adequately train someone to deal with the wild west we have created with the Second Amendment madness of unrestrained gun ownership and public display of firearms. Military training is different. Soldiers are trained to understand that in warfare, they will face an armed enemy who is trying to stop them and kill them. Still, soldiers have use of force training. In Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers were trained that that they could not shoot at a civilian simply because they suspected him or her of being armed or outfitted with a suicide vest. Some action indicating that they were about to shoot or detonate a bomb had to be taken before soldiers could shoot at them.

ICE and Border Patrol agents appear to have gotten their use of force training from watching TV shows. On cop shows, when an officer shouts “Gun!” everyone starts shooting. But that is not the way it works on the ground with well-trained law enforcement officers. Officers don’t have to wait until they have been fired at to shoot back at a suspect, but if a suspect has a gun that is visible, the suspect must show an intent to fire at officers in order for them to discharge their firearms to prevent the suspect from shooting.

None of these circumstances were present with Alex Pretti.

There are many, many problems with the thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents who are on the streets of Minneapolis. But the biggest problem appears to be that they are being given free dispensation by the Trump administration at every level to use violence against protesters even when the protesters are not using violence against them. The assumption by Donald Trump and those who work for him is that everyone in Minneapolis, especially protesters in the street, is the enemy, and they should be treated accordingly.

The descriptions of Alex Pretti by Trump and Noem and Bovino are of an enemy in a war. They regularly describe what is going on in the streets as an “insurrection,” and protesters as “insurrectionists.”

In the case of Renee Good, who did not have a gun, Trump administration officials have tried to describe her car as a weapon she was wielding against ICE agents. In the case of Alex Pretti, when they discovered that he had a gun, they used that fact as a justification for killing him, even after his guy had been taken away from him.

But you can’t have it both ways: You can’t have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun that applies only to ICE and Border Patrol agents, but not to a civilian who is abiding by Minnesota gun laws. Gun rights are not just for one side but not the other. Trump, however, does not want even the First Amendment to apply to everyone. He wants the right to slander people and tell lies in public and on Truth Social, but when news organizations report negatively about him, or publish polls that he doesn’t like, Trump wants laws passed to make both forms of speech illegal.

The right wing has met its match with the Second Amendment. That’s why they’re fighting so hard to control the investigation of the killing of Alex Pretti. The right wing knows it’s going to blow up all their fantasies about gun rights and all their lies about protests in the streets of Minneapolis. The turning point we’ve reached is larger than we thought. The First and Second Amendments must apply to everyone, or they have no meaning at all.

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This is an image of the Minnesota National Guard moving into Minneapolis to assist local police in enforcing the law. Governor Walz has activated the Guard and announced that National Guard troops will wear high visibility vests over their olive drab and camouflage battle fatigues, and they will not be masked — all of this to distinguish them from ICE and Border Patrol agents who are on the streets of the city and have killed, arrested and pepper sprayed citizens.

What this means is that the people of Minneapolis, the city police, and the Minnesota National Guard will be on one side of the struggle, with agents allied with Donald Trump and his authoritarian regime on the other side.

This is unprecedented in the United States of America, a governor believing that he must use his powers to call up the state national guard in order to defend and protect the citizens of his state from a federal militia that has invaded the city of Minneapolis as if its armed and masked members are an enemy army.

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