Sounds like ICE's official word right now is that the guy had a gun.
But the video clearly indicates that they all tackled him to the ground and were wrestling him maybe 4 vs 1, before they all shot him together. I'm not quite sure how a gun can have come out of this. Maybe the guy while struggling on the ground happened to reach in the direction of someone's gun while getting curbstomped, I dunno.
What I'm most worried about is that Pam Bondi / Department of Justice refuses to investigate these or properly prosecute these cases. IE: The Renee Good case has a ton of FBI agents resigning because they've been told to focus on Good's "misbehavior" rather than the ICE Agent's aggression.
It will be up to the Minnesota police and justice system to investigate. We cannot expect anything from the DoJ/FBI here. As such, the prosecution case will be gimped, and I fear we will have nothing resembling justice in this case (or Renee Good's case either).
> At a news conference, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the man who was shot was a 37-year-old white man with no serious criminal history and a record that showed some parking tickets. Law enforcement sources said Saturday their records show Pretti had no serious criminal history.
> O'Hara said the man was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit. Records show that Pretti attended the University of Minnesota. State records show Pretti was issued a nursing license in 2021, and it remains active through March 2026.
> Q: Do I have to disclose to a peace officer that I am a permit holder and carrying a firearm?
> A: Yes, upon request of a peace officer, a permit holder must disclose to the officer whether or not the permit holder is currently carrying a firearm.
So a U.S. citizen who is a legal, permitted gun owner with no outstanding criminal charges, legally carrying in public, who complies with the law and informs a DHS officer that they are legally carrying, is effectively subject to summary execution without due process. (The penalty for permitted carrying without possessing the physical permit card is $25 for a first offense and forfeiture of the weapon; it would've been his first offense per Minneapolis police.)
If ever there was a 2A violation, it's a federal officer shooting and killing a legal gun owner solely for possessing a gun in their presence.
Possessing a fire arm and having an encounter with law enforcement in the united states has long been a death sentence. You can find a multitude of videos online of cops doing stuff like getting the wrong address and beating on someones door and when that person opens the door with a gun in their hand and then the cops open fire, happens all the time.
The bargain with law enforcement has always been that ostensibly if you comply, they will take you in peacefully. For obvious reasons, this is highly advantageous to both parties.
It seems like a foolish choice for them to reneg on this. They are essentially signaling that you are a trapped rat with no way out.
> So a U.S. citizen who is a legal, permitted gun owner with no outstanding criminal charges, legally carrying in public, who complies with the law and informs a DHS officer that they are legally carrying, is effectively subject to summary execution without due process.... a federal officer shooting and killing a legal gun owner solely for possessing a gun in their presence.
> "The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming."
And then, from the DHS:
> ...when a federal agent feared for his life, "an agent fired defensive shots." ... Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino said that the officer involved in the shooting "has extensive training," and that "the situation is evolving." Bovino added that the incident would be investigated.
(TFA includes the claim of self-defense.)
"Summary execution" and "without due process" is emotionally manipulative phrasing. It falsely implies that LEO use of lethal force is about punishment. It is not about punishment. It is about responding to perceived threat.
All this stuff about permit cards, the victim's lack of criminal history, etc. is irrelevant. It is not connected to the motivation for the shooting. There is nothing to establish that the shooting was "solely for" that possession, and LEO denies that claim. There is no plausible universe in which the officer says "please show me the permit for that weapon", Pretti says "I don't have it", and the officer shoots. But that's the narrative you appear to be trying to push.
Someone captured the beginning of the shooting victim’s interaction with ICE. It certainly doesn’t look as though the person is aggressive or brandishing a weapon.
The DHS public statement that the victim was going to “do maximize damage and massacre law enforcement” is outrageous…
ICE has regularly attacked protesters and bystanders who are simply recording, walking away and so on.
Even people just driving through their neighborhood have been dragged out of their vehicles and apprehended. Citizen or otherwise doesn’t seem to matter.
They aren’t professionals and operate with neither the training, nor the will to obey the law.
Much of the time they seem to believe trying to bait folks into an encounter
In my area all the non white folks don’t come to the bus stop anymore to pickup their kids. Their kids are instructed to race home after school. The schools now have lockdown protocols for ICE. Family businesses opened for decades closed because employees are afraid to come to work.
Pam Bondi's Department of Justice will be worse. They're the ones who are in charge of investigating this. I expect the FBI under her to support ICE and defend them with all their might.
The checks and balances at the federal level are all captured. Support Minnesota in this troubling time.
Hmm... well maybe I need to explain my fear better.
Because Pam Bondi/DoJ refuses to prosecute these cases, this will _keep happening_ for the foreseeable future. There's no reason for ICE to stop this behavior.
Its not today's crime that scares me most. Its the easily predicted future where this gets worse by next month.
The converse is the rise of the far-left. We're already seeing Black Panther patrol with long-guns rise up in these times in response to this. I expect more guns and more deadly force, and no one is doing anything to put a stop to it.
--------
The left is losing faith in strictly peaceful protest. At least some of them (ie: the Black Panthers forming patrol militia).
The right refuses to prosecute murders. This is the worse problem.
Where does this lead? Is it too late to stop? Its easily stopped if Pam Bondi simply did an investigation into the use of deadly force. That's the saddest part of all of this.
the DOJ won't and that's why it happened again only a few days after Renee Good, and will continue to happen.
It's not just that the DOJ won't investigate. It's actively preventing the state from investigating either.
if this continues, it's going to explode, and I think that's part of the plan, to provide cover for invoking the Insurrection Act and imposing martial law
Law enforcement is one thing but when Washington sends war-fighters into a state against the will of the state's leadership, somebody has got to be prepared to take some casualties if there is any resistance.
The greater the force and amount of armament, the worse it can end up becoming.
It wasn't good when it happened in the 19th century either.
It's always been strange to me that Americans are allowed to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights...until they get killed by police. Then they should've known not to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.
Everything makes much more sense when you realize that the conservative project is not about universal application of rights. It is a system of hierarchies. They have rights. We do not. They can carry firearms. We are violent maniacs trying to massacre cops (according to Bovino) and deserve what's coming.
The 2nd amendment was more about suppressing slave revolts than liberating slaves.
The group of Americans who are the loudest at cheering for the 2nd Amendment rights are cheering for ICE these days. To them, "the security of a free State" means that it has a caste system with the "good guys" at the top, and when ICE goons execute Minnesotans, they see brave armed citizens fighting back against the tyranny of wokeness.
What I've observed is that Americans like to put themselves higher than other cultures due to their second amendment rights (and first, but that's neither here nor there), but when push comes to shove there's actually no real positive outcomes that come from having a country with it's citizens armed to the extent that Americans are.
That ship has sailed so long ago it's beyond the horizon at this point. Of course the right is going to defend this. We know exactly how this will play out. They will respond just like they have to every other assault and murder committed by ICE in the past year.
The top people in govt all the way down will completely lie about the victim and situation, despite plenty of video evidence that shows them as liars. Absolutely nothing will happen to these scumbag murderers, and another murder just like this will happen again soon.
Many people will be horrified but conservatives will continue cheering this on. This is the country we live in now.
All the blathering about "freedom", "democracy", and "constitutional rights" is just propaganda you've been spoon-fed since you were a child. The USA has spent the last 80 years riding the wave of contributing to the victory in WWII and therefore being the "Good Guys", and most of the Western world happily played along as their political goals aligned with it.
Meanwhile the USA hasn't addressed its deeply-rooted internal issues which have been festering for well over a century, and the results are now obvious to everyone. It only took Trump a year to make the US an international laughing stock, start a bunch of wars, get rid of the free press, and begin rounding up people he doesn't like.
If the USA you were taught to believe in truly existed, the current situation would not have been possible.
They had him pinned on the ground, then someone takes a gun away from him, and AFTER THAT they put him on his knees and executed him.
Additionally, there are many other videos of the agents, taking phones away from the nearby witnesses who recorded all of this.
But the most disturbing thing is that the claims made by DHS, Trump, and Noem about what happened were completely made up. They are simply inventing a story and getting it out there as quickly as possible to refute any other competing story. It does not matter to them that this is a lie. The idea is to muddy the waters.
Well it looks like it's time to say bye-bye to the 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms in the US, right?
NRA and all that notwithstanding it seems if you're bearing arms you will be shot. Interesting times.
It's hard to argue the guy was even bearing arms. He just kneeled and stoically accepted his execution. And then the people surrounding him asked the feds to please not do that.
Even if they guy had a gun, it's left to see what actually transpired here. Whether the guy owned the gun, had firearm permit and even if he had a public and/or concealed gun permit.
That's already been revealed by Minnesota Police (thank goodness we at least have some degree of independent investigations going on right now).
1. Only had parking tickets on his criminal record. No other criminal activity.
2. Owned a gun with firearms permit.
3. 36 Years Old, male. EDIT: I misremembered. Its apparently 37 year old male.
Minnesota Police only have jurisdiction inside of Minnesota however. So those four+ ICE shooters just need to leave the state and they're safe. The FBI is required to pursue across state lines.
From a purely theoretical standpoint, what should the family victims do then, in a country where rule of law is not being applied anymore?
If these deaths will go unpunished - and Alex Pretti's is already well documented and clear EXECUTION - what are the direct consequence as a society with a 2nd amendment?
> The video clearly shows him resisting arrest and reaching for something.
The video clearly shows the grey-masked (EDIT: Grey-hat, green mask) ICE Agent taking the gun and running away with it before everyone else shoots him.
Also, I'm inclined to believe the "arrest" was an illegal arrest to begin with. I had a big post about how police procedure and due process is supposed to work but I know no one gives a crap about due process anymore, so forget it.
>"The video clearly shows him resisting arrest and reaching for something."
Tell me the EXACT time in the video you see this happen.
In the video, there are 4 ICE agents on him and there's not ONE frame where the tackled protester reaches for ANYTHING with his arm/hand. There is, however, a gray-masked ICE agent consistently reaching for what appears to be the protestor's sidearm. And at 0:17, the ICE agent that shoots first reached for his own sidearm, and the ICE agent next to him retrieves what appears to be the protestor's concealed firearm at the same time, and walks away from the pile with it BEFORE shots are even fired. The "threat" - the protestor's right to bear arms - was eliminated before a shot.
There is not a single indication that ICE agents were in danger from anyone besides each other. If he was shot dead for possession, there's your answer for 2A, right there. They're shooting people like dogs in broad daylight for recording police interactions (1A) and possessing a firearm (2A), the tree of liberty needs replenishment.
And when you're unlawfully murdered, you have no recourse. They do not care what you tell them, and if you don't resist, you're potentially dead anyway. They have arrested lawful immigrants and citizens, and held them illegally, in some cases for weeks or months.
"Comply and you might get lucky and survive" is not a life safety strategy. I'm unsure where this idea to not resist someone who is very likely to kill you without cause (based on all of the evidence and observations to date) is coming from to be frank.
Thank you for this. As far as I understand it, the victim was filming the ICE agent(s). I'm sure you'll agree that counts as resisting arrest and even putting the agent(s) lives at risk.
Regarding just the headline, at this point it's not really about immigration, this has evolved into a soft civil conflict being waged for political reasons. The two people who have been killed so far were themselves citizens and at best were political dissidents. They were not themselves subject to detainment due to immigration status.
> this has evolved into a soft civil conflict being waged for political reasons.
The more quickly Americans come to terms with this reality, the better. I’m not in Minneapolis, but from what I’ve been reading and hearing, people there already understand that their city is being occupied by a hostile force and that this is indeed a civil conflict. Everyone else needs to catch up now.
I don’t think it’s ever about what Trump claims. It’s just one crisis after another where they hope to distract and divide people to get themselves power / support and anyone killed along the way, they don’t care.
Some of trumps big donors have been caught hiring large number of illegal folks by design and they don’t care.
> But the other woman tried to flee and run over a cop. So that particular shooting was entirely justified
She didn't try to run over anyone, you can watch multiple videos of this. It's also my understanding that they had no basis for detaining her, as there was no reason to believe she was illegally in the United States.
Even if that wasn't so the use of lethal force is far beyond what would have been necessary.
On the flip side: where did the idea that it’s illegal to obstruct a belligerent person who does not clearly identify themselves as a law enforcement officer come from?
Killing someone is the ultimate punishment. They stop existing. Are you arguing that obstructing federal law enforcement officers mean they are allowed to kill you as punishment without the legal system being involved?
It clearly shows that Alex Pretti never drew a weapon, and his (legally owned and carried) CCW was removed by one of the agents from its holster seconds prior to other agents shooting Alex in the back. Agents are visibly using pepper spray, pistol whipping his head, and even though it’s 5+ vs one, don’t even appear to be attempting to handcuff or properly restrain.
That's the most clear murder I've ever seen, zero question about intent or anything else. After the four agents have thrown the guy to the ground and are pinning him down you can see the fed on the left pull out his gun and shoot the defenseless man in the back, and then the others jump back and join in.
This is truly unreal. Even more unreal that we know nobody will get prosecuted for this murder and we'll see another one just like it within a few days.
But the MAGA cult will find yet another explanation that this man magically hurt the 4 ICE agents and they all ended up in a hospital somehow, or that carrying weapons with a permit is unacceptable if you vote democrat
This angle is even worse than the prior videos and makes it absolutely, 100% clear that this was an execution. The individual in question was a US citizen, lawfully carrying a firearm and was a registered nurse. Every single ICE agent involved should be locked away for life at bare minimum.
The guy was filming ice, they started pushing some other person so he got in between them. They threw him to the ground, where three men pinned his hands down. Another pulled out his pepper spray can, then started beating the victim in the face repeatedly.
At the same time, a fifth agent pats him down. He finds a gun (legally purchased and the MN police have said he was permitted to carry). They remove the firearm and walk away.
Then one of the officers yells "he has a gun" and shoots him point blank. Then another officer fires, which looks to kill him and he drops face-down and the officers back away. Finally, one more pulls out his firearm and puts 9 into the back of the victim's corpse - guaranteeing he can't be saved
The lead up also does NOT show the victim threatening these agents in any way, with the gun or otherwise. Instead, they pushed a woman down and this guy tries to shield her and that's when they target him.
It looks to me like the guy who disarmed him ND'd[] (or maybe another officer, but I see the disarmer jolt his arm in an axis parallel to the barrel at time of shot) and they all started shooting.
This has happened before. Once one shot goes off they all shoot at the suspect.
There is another angle from that side of the street now. A single agent unholstered and started unloading into the guy with first show square in his back. This is while the other agents where right there holding him and they all looked quite shocked. Looks like this one individual went off the reservation and sparked all the shooting.
> By definition we know that dems and their publications are only going to show one angle
Umm, are you just being purposefully blind? Every angle is being pushed across social media and everyone has seen them. They're all bad. There isn't some large conspiracy to make these agents look bad, what they did is bad and disgusting. I've edited my comment with another angle to make you feel better.
> But somehow resisting arrest while having a gun on you isn't threatening?
Reaching for a gun is threatening, brandishing a gun is threatening, resisting while possessing a gun is not, no. Regardless, the video shows he was disarmed so why did they mag dump him?
> Or did the ICE agents disarm him without having seen the gun first?
What? That sentence doesn't make sense. I believe they saw it holstered on his waistband after they had tackled him and the one agent came in and took it.
The fact that you're even trying to find a shred of justification after what everyone just watched is also disgusting.
Americans, where will you realize that the longer you wait, the worse it will get ? The whole country should be in the streets now. You guys are fast tracking your way into a dictatorship, and unfortunately you may drag the entire Western world with you.
The videos from this are numerous and very clear about what happened. And yet, all the officials are telling that a guy is a domestic terrorist and approached ICE officers with a gun, with intent to kill them. How crazy is that ? And if they do this in cases where everything is filmed, you can only imagine what's happening behind the scenes.
The unfortunate truth I think is that no matter how many people might be with this idea of just "rising up" and taking back the country, america is is fucking massive and many cities and towns there is no noticeable ice or border patrol presence. So even if you can get people out and protesting at some common meaningless locations its going to be symbolic at best.
If you want out-of-band change in the U.S. it will at minimum take some combination of three things:
- sustained weeks or months long protests in D.C.
- extreme social pressure on congress representatives no matter where they may be.
- state governments in rebellion or threatening it against the federal government.
I don't think we're particular close on any of these.
Otherwise tough luck, wait for the probably manipulated elections.
Street protests are useless because they don't actually hurt. They only work if they can shame the other side, but the other side isn't actually ashamed of what they are doing.
The kind of protest that is needed is the kind that is actually disruptive. Nationwide strikes, for instance.
In Minnesota they've striked recently and it sounds like they're being successful. If lots of people across the country striked maybe it would matter (fat chance in the USA I know but it's something)
There are voting anomalies in electronic voting records in key states. There's an org looking into this, filing lawsuits for more records from counties and states. The trend is, "the more voters that voted in a polling place, the more that polling place's machine-counted votes skewed towards Trump." These trends are not present in the hand counts.
They have a YouTube channel too. If the charts in isolation don't make sense to you (they don't to me), watch any of their interviews on the channel to get a walk-through of the charts and their meanings.
That's right. What you don't understand is that we must and can only move in resonance with our understanding and with the mass and momentum we are capable of. It's painfully slow, I know. Please be encouraging. We are being harassed by the "commander" of the (formerly) most powerful military in the world. He is a psychopath nobody can deny.
We MUST find our power and our power is NOT violence. But our power is MORE POWERFUL THAN VIOLENCE.
And when as you find it I hope you will see it in you and your people and realize that you too had it all along.
This was an execution, plain and simple. There is no way around it. There are videos from multiple angles and there was an eyewitness (the lady in the pink jacket) literally two feet away.
I am hoping against hope that people regardless of political association, will demand accountability. America, our democracy and the rule of the law will be on trial in the coming days. Let's see how we fare.
This is probably a good day to take time away from social media. Doom scrolling won’t do anything
Instead there’s DHS funding going through Congress which could give Congress leverage to restrict ICE. To be clear ICE will still operate past the funding deadline. But Congress can create limits like mandating allowing states to investigate these crimes. Restrict who can carry firearms.
Write your senators and ask them to block DHS funding
They passed the DHS funding. The day ICE executes a man in broad daylight by blowing his brains out from point-blank, they get an extra $10,000,000,000 in funding.
IANAA: what legal powers does the city/state have to expel ICE agents? Especially as they are operating in, at best, increasingly shady legality.
I always understood that the USA is built on a delicate balance of power between the federal and state governments. But here the federal government is sending thugs who, masked or unmasked, are brazenly killing people in bizzare circumstances. And the best the state can do is PTFO?
> what legal powers does the city/state have to expel ICE agents?
What makes you believe ICE is going to follow a judge's orders? They are already routinely violating it when it comes to deporting people.
Or, if you want to be even more pessimistic: what makes you believe the current Supreme Court is going to rule based on law, instead of based on political affiliation?
The USA's balance of power is horribly broken. To give just one simple example related to the previous: having the Supreme Court be nominated by the President and confirmed by a simple majority in the Senate? That's just asking for trouble. It'd be far better to have judges nominated by a politically-independent organisation (like the currently-sitting judges, or a national bar association) and confirmed by a two-thirds majority in the House/Senate (preventing anyone controversial, so you get boring, professional, and by-the-book judges - like they are supposed to be).
Regardless of judicial rulings of any sort, who will enforce them? Seemingly all of the enforcement apparatus in the US has been co-opted.
The individual state governments aren't meaningfully resisting. Their law enforcement isn't arresting "federal agents" to put them through state legal system. These perps should be jailed and forced to appeal before a judge for a bail hearing, possibly held without bail as they are clearly threats, and then put on trial in a state court.
Without this, where is the enforcement?
The classic question: who watches the watchmen? Right now, no one.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us. For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury
>IANAA: what legal powers does the city/state have to expel ICE agents? Especially as they are operating in, at best, increasingly shady legality.
If ICE weren't acting like brown shirts, not much. It'd be Federal tasking happening according to due process;probably after the State informed the Feds they would not delegate local LEO to their task.
Now, seeing as ICE are acting like brown shirts; things are kinda complicated.
Technically, charges can be brought against specific agents breaking the laws of the State. If those agents happen to be Minnesotan, it may be something that stays internal to the States courts. However, if they are from out-of-state, things get complicated, because then you start dealing with nasty things like Federal jurisdiction, and the fact the Federal government isn't going to be terribly motivated to do anything other than paper over things in the most convenient way they can.
Now as to whether Minnesota could just outright expel ICE; it'd be something that hasn't been tested since the Civil War. Typically, when you start doing things like that, the Feds escalate quickly. This type of thing has previously been avoided through attempts at maintaining some degree of professional conduct amongst Federal agents, and getting buy-in from the locals.
> things are kinda complicated. Technically, charges can be brought against specific agents breaking the laws of the State
Yes, and the complicated part is federal supremacy[0]. The federal government can "convert" the case against the agent into a federal one and essentially just turn a blind eye which means no justice. No doubt that this administration would protect agents executing citizens by saying it was "part of their duty" to be there and doing that.
Make it illegal to enable any commercial transactions within the state supporting federal agents. No food sales, no fuel sales, no hotel stays, no medical care, no rental cars. Make them drag their supply chain in like the Middle East.
Make it illegal to enable any commercial transactions within the state supporting federal agents. No food sales, no fuel sales, no hotel stays, no medical care, no rental cars. Make them drag their supply chain in like the Middle East.
In state economic deplatforming.
You're gonna prosecute Minnesotans for accepting cash?
I’ve cut my NYT consumption down to maybe 5 minutes a week, and somehow today it still managed to wreck my headspace. I’m not a historian, but my memory reached into that rarely-used middle school history drawer and pulled up this:
Why is this being hidden off of the main HN pages? There are clearly enough points for it to be significantly up weighted. I don’t understand the censorship.
As I understand it, HN has a controversial submission detection system of sorts. The exact details elude me, but if a submission gets a lot of comments quickly relative to upvotes, it'll fall off the main page.
Best indicator I've seen is if comments/points ~> 0.9 or so.
It's my understanding mods can undo this "controversial" flag, so that select threads get back onto the main page.
This site has always been easy to co-opt to fascism with their supposedly apolitical outlook. Flagging from unknown accounts easily kills stories of importance, even where they have relation to the supposed interests of the site. Such as the AI altered image being posted by the White House this week.
The idea we have to treat arguments in good faith like the other user in this story excusing fascist death squads show how well this moderation approach aligns with the Thiel-ite sympathies.
In the eyes of some in leadership, tech workers should be apolitical worker drones. Weighing in on politics is for people like David Sacks, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk.
You are downvoting what is the evidence in front of your eyes. Downvoting the observation does not change the ranking anomaly. If you want trust, you can’t run the front page like this.
I understand why HN doesn't want to devolve into a political forum—but at it's spirit, HN is supposed to cover topics that "...are of interest to those working in the tech community". The upvotes on a thread like this demonstrates that these are topics that are indeed of interest—so I wish that there was more of an appetite to allow these discussions to play out. Maybe having a limit on the number of posts per day or per week that could make it to the frontpage could give everyone a bit more of what they want.
Personally, the political threads on HN are the ones in which I learn the most by and large. There simply isn't another community on the web that elicits such thought provoking discussion around these types of issues—reddit doesn't even come close. I hope the policy will change in the future; especially during these tumultuous times, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Most HN members are also well-educated enough to understand the implications of this scenario are more serious than the typical political article. Employment may start being affected, for example. The career decisions you make are already certainly affected if you choose to / choose not toto work somewhere that facilitates this federal agency.
We still have space for discussions about the specific flaws of Microsoft's BitLocker implementation on the front page when the much-more salient "wrench attack" ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) is stronger very day.
This execution has more significant implications than the combined heft of the chipper clip, or of EARN IT, SOPA, or the myriad of other bad bills introduced to the US Congress over the years.
Tech libertarianism was a frontier for the means to the ends of our personal liberties, and not a goal in itself. I refuse to believe the people on this site don't see that it's all connected.
(edit: clarification; "this" refers to the execution, not the Bitlocker thing.)
You know how the second amendment is about protecting Americans from tyrannical governments, and how a few dozen schools being shot ip each year is a small price to pay?
2A is a historical relic of the settler colonial era when communities had to create their own security forces. It's strongest proponents today are those who want to create their own laws and have private militias to enforce it, in obvious contravention of state and federal laws which are decided through a democratic process with checks and balances (elections, legislatures and independent judiciaries).
The present federal government has co-opted the militia strategy and filled its ranks with the 2A absolutists, and given them a budget that rivals most countries' militaries.
Even more of a relic: those militias weren't just bands of yeoman farmers. They were veterans of the recent French-and-Indian war. Often who had served with the commanders of the British forces arrayed against them. George Howe brother of William who ultimately became CiC of British forces in America died in the arms of Israel Putnam, one of the continental army's first generals at the battle of Ticonderoga. They thought so highly of him, the Massachusetts assembly allocated funds for a memorial to Howe at Westminster. George Howe (unlike ICE, lol) often had a hard time bringing ultimate force to bear as he didn't really see the colonials as "enemy".
I'd submit it's a violation of the 2A to allow the Nat Guard (essentially the continuation of those militias) to be forcibly nationalized (it took quite a bit of negotiating to get them all to join the fledgling continental army)
ICE thugs have been recruited largely from white nationalist rallies and forums. Literally, not as some kind of metaphor. DHS executives post white nationalist propaganda hourly on Twitter. Stephen Miller, an out-of-the-closet Nazi, is the acting president of the United States. Their goal is to start a race war that they believe they can win by murdering 100 million Americans.
Lots of Department of Corrections officers have been recruited as well. There's going to be so many lawsuits after these guys go back to running the Federal prisons with this new attitude.
I don't think we can just blame white people for this. A lot of the ICE agents are non-white and many non-whites voted for Trump. In fact, most of the pro-immigrant people I meet are white!
Extreme violence has been normalized among American LEOs for a long time now.
Look up "killology" for some more on this. If you're in US, check if your local PD or sheriff's office signed up its agents for a Dave Grossman seminar or training course; you might be unpleasantly surprised.
And now that ICE job ads are essentially an open invitation to come be violent for a "righteous cause", it's exactly those types of people that end up there in even larger concentrations. But make no mistake, none of this is new in any way other than the sheer scale of it.
Kasparov as usually exaggerates. As a Russian, I can think of only 2 cases he may refer to: 2002 riot after world cup match, when a crowd watched Russia team lose to Japan, then went to destroy displays and cars in Moscow center. It was followed by wrenching the mass rallies laws. Some publicists later, in the '10s, suggested it was orchestrated, but the whole theory forgets that Russian team could have won. You don't create a plan where your pretexts may not take place at all.
The other case he may think of is May 2012 protest, where a bottleneck created stampede, and a fight with police ensued. Random protesters got persecuted for whatever reasons. But the crackdown was already under way with the new state Duma passing ever tougher law amendments.
Sociologically, it's nonsense to make a pretext by attacking the other side, because you don't know what how they react: maybe the opponents just hide, or go around. To make a crackdown, you stage the attack on yourself, and then react, and crack down. E.g. Hitler staged the opposition putting Reichstag on fire, and then reacted. In Trumps case, brutal attacks are a step too far, because people may react differently -- what if nothing happens? or if republicans change their mind and impeach him?
Putin made a crackdown on media and civic liberties in a soft and gradual way: the media was taken down by stakeholders loyal to him, or maybe by a made-up bankruptcy case. Mass protests were made very hard to do, and needed a permission. But if any happened, the police wouldn't start a street fight, but would instead arrest and charge the organizers next day.
What Kasparov usually writes is a big exaggeration. In 2015 he wrote a comment on social media, that Russia needs a pro-democratic dictatorship to fix it. I think this is exactly what technocrats and oligarchs thought when they supported Putin coming in 1999 -- that he was authoritarian, but would lead Russia away from communistic revenge.
Man, I hate that they "both sides" this. "DHS says he approached with a handgun, NYT says the video shows a phone" makes it seem like just an unlucky misunderstanding. But the DHS quote clearly is a straight up lie based on video evidence, and this doesn't convey how it was a straight up execution and that all the escalation was done by the officers.
From my reading of the evidence so far it seems there was a misunderstanding. Looks like one of the ICE guys said he has a gun, took the gun but the others didn't realise the gun had been taken.
ICE working as intended. US citizens need to fear ICE, how else could it be used to deter voting? Certainly ICE will be placed strategically come the next elections
From a semi-corrupt country, ie being somewhere between Africa and the developed world, I can only suggest to fellow USians courage and patience three more years. Times will come good again. A corrupt leader is very difficult to change and things seem grim because he has captured all three forms of power.
A civilised country can not be destroyed by one king, nor saved by a new leader.
America has checks and balances, and they have failed. There’s no “wait 3 years”, that’s over, as America will always be one election away from anarchy or worse.
The only way out is the Republican Party impeaching him and spending the next 10 years undoing the damage at the top and next 40 year rebuilding civil society.
> America has checks and balances, and they have failed.
America pretended to have checks and balances. Everyone just turned a blind eye to the massive holes in them and pretended things were going to be fiiiiine.
Never in the past an irreversible decline of a hundred long empire has started in one year. Abrupt crisis end abruptly. Never any political party has impeached it's winning leader. Nowadays the country needs a Dem President, whoever they are. The new billionaires will have different priorities, again not friendly but more peaceful. You just have to wait, as we do in my country every now and then.
Why do you think things will change in 3 years? All indications are that this is just the way the country is trending and, at any rate, it's prone to making 180 degree turns every 4 years anyway.
The current situation is enforced by a temporary coup and is incompatible with the average American citizen base. Although a sizable share idiotically supports the crimes, the rest awaits its turn. We experience that back and forth in Greece for two hundred years.
A different party, in that case the Democrats, if it is elected, will immediately deactivate the core of the current governing billionaires, starting from Musk and Thiel, and replace them with new ones, most probably from Wall Street and Academia. Do you think Jamie Dimon will do the same?
> An I.C.U. nurse shot by federal agents was an American citizen with no criminal record, the city police chief said. A New York Times video analysis shows he was holding a phone, not a gun.
Anyway, the video shows that we've unequivocally entered open-air brownshirt executions.
This person was pinned to the ground by three people while another was just wailing against their head from above. Hard to tell what object they're using as a cudgel to their face.
Then the subsequent mag dumping just to be extra sure they're dead.
We really need that lady in the back to release her video.
It's absolutely inexcusable, even moreso than the murder of Renee Good. Though I fully expect the usual suspects to show up and claim it was justified because he was resisting arrest, which seems to be the popular modus operandi for justifying execution by the state.
What unlimited terms? It seems like they can kill whoever they want whenever they want. And I don't think there are enough of them to fight a civil war.
Based on seeing the video, it seems an officer standing in front of the decedent is the one who drew/disarmed the weapon from the decedent's holster. This was under the arching body of another agent who was holding the decedent down. The man who shot him was standing behind him.
Despite all the outraged rhetoric on here, it does not seem reasonable to assume that the officer simply decided to murder the man out of anger, spite, bloodlust, and perceived immunity.
Rather, a dispassionate analysis of the scenario might suggest that the shooter only saw the weapon be drawn by an unknown hand, and not discerning that it was one of his fellow officers disarming the struggling man, instead believed that the struggling man had managed to draw his own weapon and was preparing to fire.
Given the facing of the struggling man and the shooting officer, it seems unlikely that his first fear was for his own life but rather for the lives of his comrades, and so he fired his weapon to remove the perceived threat to his fellow officers lives.
This explains exactly why he fired almost immediately after he saw the gun drawn. Not an extrajudicial execution as some are recklessly calling it, but a tragic example of having to make life and death decisions with an imperfect view of the ... battlefield for lack of a better term ... and the foolishness of getting in the way of armed men.
I tell my kids they have the right of way at the crosswalk but right of way is not going to save their life if the car doesn't see them, so look both ways and make sure cars are slowing down.
The same sense of caution should be used when deciding to get in the way of men, even good and lawful men, with guns.
It made sense to protest the Vietnam war or Iraq or Afghanistan in America, not in the war zone.
We have freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, but do that from the sidewalk, in court, or before Congress, not in the line of fire of a police action. And I don't believe we have the right to block roads, scream in the faces of law enforcement or military personnel, or impede them in the fulfillment of their lawful duties which these immigration enforcement actions are.
He wasn’t impeding. He was filming which until recently was a 1A right in America.
The officer walked up to him and the woman with the backpack and started an altercation.
Using your right of way analogy the officer drove up on the sidewalk to take out your kids, no crosswalk involved.
If you’re going to defend this with a “well look at what she was wearing” type defense then you’re just ok with government agents executing citizens whenever they feel like it.
Can you imagine if other people hadn't been around filming what happened here and the murder of Renee Good? The Gov would completely cover it up, make the victims look like domestic terrorists, and we'd never be able to show the truth.
That's why Good and Pretti doing what they were doing -- observing and filming -- is so damn important, and why ICE will literally murder people, with the full backing of the Trump Administration, to stop it.
At the rate things are going, I wonder if America can hold together until the midterm. The Trump regime is acting like it wants a civil war.
If anyone told me in 2024 that America may see its own Tiananmen, I'd have laughed, but I'm not so sure now. I can totally see something similar at a smaller scale, and millions of Americans defending it with "it was necessary to keep law and order."
In the U.S. Civil War several states joined together to break from the nation. I'm not seeing anything like that here.
I am seeing a cold civil war with Pacific states banding together for health initiatives. And states gerrymandering their districts prompting other states to then gerrymander theirs in response. That kind of cold civil war.
Minnesota now calling up their state's national guard is the first sign I see of the cold civil war warming up.
Today, when Trump's goons kill a man you see it on the news.
When it becomes a war, your side will drop bombs, burn houses, and kill people every day. And you will cheer them on. Because the alternative is defeat and death.
War is a terrible thing, and Trump is steering America toward it.
the guy in charge isn't thinking straight, and he saw that Ukraine had no elections during the war, and he saw that Russia had rigged elections during the war, and I don't know what other countries, but he might think America can skip elections during a war, if he starts enough wars, and he might be right.
Why is the focus on Minneapolis? Is it really the training ground for ICE?
Edit: "Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the US, according to NBC. The community has been subject to widespread criticism from Mr Trump, who has called them "garbage"."
Retribution. There are millions of undocumented immigrants in Texas and Florida, but notice aggressive ICE activities primarily in blue states.
It is an attempt to demonstrate unchecked force against their political opponents under the guise of immigration enforcement. Self defense (when warranted) is the only remaining option, because a bully will only escalate to see how far they can go. Restraint by aggressors will not be forthcoming.
They believe that an urban area containing significant immigrant communities but surrounded on all sides by ultra-right-wing exurban and rural people, 99% of whom are white, will be easy to subjugate.
It looks like the agent that picked up the disarmed gun had his finger on it and ND'd the initial shot. He jolts his arm right as the first shot goes off. Then all the other officer panic and fire.
This doesn't hold to scrutiny. The ICE agent that was first to shoot was the same agent to fire the most shots, I'm led to believe he was the ONLY one that fired shots.
Over, and over, and over again, until ICE is disbanded and those involved are held accountable. When that happens (and how high the casualty number gets) is up to the American people.
In a few short years some of these ICE workers will be brought up on charges and sentences for their crimes. Just because no one has the gaul to arrest them today doesn't mean they won't in the future. No statute of limitations here.
I would like to believe this, but I think we need new leadership in dem leadership to make this happen.
Trump staged a coup to invalidate an election and install himself as president. Dem leadership thought that slow rolling his prosecution was the right idea. I believe that there is serious risk that the dems just say "well, let's try to put all that behind us" if they win in 2026 and 2028.
You are terribly optimistic. I think they will face no consequences and the violence will escalate even more. I _could_ be overreacting, but I'm afraid we're on the cusp of something horrible.
Personal gun ownership scares me for this reason. The potential for an incorrect assumption of one of the parties who also has a gun.
I’d like to see the people who pull the trigger “accidentally” prosecuted in most cases.
It's the playbook already seen in Argentina, the Middle East and many other countries. But especially Argentina.
The military always has in the back of their mind the idea that they are above people, and this goes from the most deviant and incompetent soldier who still has a 6pack and fighting abilities and thinks all the guys in his small town are wussies all the way up to the highest ranked general who begrudgingly has to meet Senators and Representatives but still think they are nothing but wussies.
A common thread is that they think that society doesn't reward them with enough power for their valuable skills and instead it gives such power to undeserving people and their undeserving skills, for example a mayor who is able to cry on command to empathize with the population when some tragedy happens or the same mayor who got elected by being able to identify people's worries and lie that they'll fix them just to get power.
And if even the smallest doubt begins to enter the mind of the population , the doubt that yes maybe it could be better if the military ran things, the cold execution, the lack of emotion would bring us efficiency....it's already over.... the military dictatorship in effect already in place as there is no way to stop it after the seed of the doubt begins to emerge in the collective minds of the population.
If a malignant actor can convince the military that he can deliver the status in society that they really deserve they'll be willing to kill for that man. And if that malignant actor can also plant a small seed in the collective minds of the population....well get ready to kneel before your new dictator America
Really? Why they accepted to execute the kidnapping of Maduro then? Or the droning made famous by Snowden, or Abu Graib or all the grim stuff that happened in the Middle East ever since 2001?
The Military thinks it's better than everyone and as a personality type they want to be involved in unprecedented stuff to 'leave their mark on the world'
You can never tell the breaking point of fascism but this certainly looks like it. I'm happy I don't work for a US company because I no longer think it's ethical to do so.
Most people I know, including some on the right disagree with these tactics which seem designed more to intimidate and silence opposition. Of course you’re free to work with whomever you choose but it seems like a pretty empty virtue signal to avoid all companies in a huge, diverse country
The leader of that huge, diverse country controls the most powerful military in the world and is threatening to invade my country and is showing maps where it’s part of the US.
I have a 2 year old daughter.
With every fibre of my being I’m not spending a cent on any US business, person, company.
It might be empty but if enough people do this and put pressure on the US economy it might make a difference. It's unfortunate but many people won't care until it starts effecting them personally.
Statement from Michael and Susan Pretti
Parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti
"We are heartbroken but also very angry.
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.
I do not throw around the 'hero' term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. 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.
Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank You.
I feel like open armed conflict between anti-fascist groups and these federal goons is inevitable at this point. When it happens it will be used as pretext for a wider more brutal occupation and will be used as extenuating circumstances to 'bend the rules' come election time.
The winning move here is continued nonviolent opposition, but it only takes one spark to start a fire then who knows what happens
I don't know why people are still wasting time with protests and filming. The murderous Nazis won't learn until the people of Minneapolis deal with them the way Afghans dealt with imperialist invaders in Afghanistan. There is another three-letter acronym starting with I that comes to mind.
Think about why the administration and its backers lie so frequently: they know they’re lying, and they know that evidence will come out showing that they’re lying, but they’re gambling on a lot of people being busy and not following the story closely enough to realize how misleading the initial claims were.
They do that because their policies are unpopular and they would lose power if most people voted. That’s why these videos matter: it’s probably not going to convince the MAGA diehards to recant but they’re shocking enough that anyone more patriotic than that might realize that this is far more than normal politics.
Trump-voting but not dedicated-to-evil relatives I know (I have others who are dedicated to evil, they're beyond hope—incidentally, this is a whole thing in Republican circles, folks who haven't been around actual red-state Republicans since the '90s or so have no idea how common some really shocking views about the validity of state violence on people who annoy or politically oppose them are, they outright like this stuff and there are minimum 50 million people like that in this country) are mostly doing the "well both sides say different things and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle" thing about all of this stuff, and refusing to watch the videos that would quickly show them that no, only one side is saying anything at all connected to the truth.
People are not busy; they're willfully blind to the truth. These people hang out on Facebook which will never surface the truth to them, only misinformation.
First they came for the Immigrants
And I did not speak out
Because they were not Immigrants (hell they were stealing jobs so fck them)
Then they came for the US citizens who were Socialist/Leftists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist/Leftists (hell they dare protest the government so fck them)
You can never tell the breaking point of fascism but this certainly looks like it. I'm happy I don't work for a US company because I no longer think it's ethical to do so.
quick reminder that out of the 8 author of the seminal paper that arguably started the whole LLM thing (attention is all you need) only one is American.
all the other are foreign born, studied and worked abroad and only then were recruited by US FAANGs.
I hate to say it, but once again, Trump wins. All of my MAGA family is talking about what's going on in Minneapolis, with pretty predictable reactions. But guess what they're not talking about: Jeffrey Epstein - that's old news, time to move on, Dems are the only ones bringing it up, etc.
It Turkey a current popular meme is an old tweet that says “I'm so fed up with politics that I say, 'Let me just focus on this instead,' and whatever that is, they'll come and fuck that up too. You won't even be able to breathe”.
That’s what you will get by not talking politics. US is on the fast track to be like Turkey.
Some of those ICE agents will kill some AI engineer’s father or mother who has the wrong accents, wrong color or doesn’t speak “American”, it will go viral in India or China and US companies will start paying warzone premiums to hire any talent.
> > That’s what you will get by not talking politics. US is on the fast track to be like Turkey.
On the contrary, if everybody is so focused on the National Politics contests as we've been ever since 2015 , it's only natural that the winner of that popularity contest becomes a demi God with unlimited powers (on top of what were already granted him by the very generous Constitution).
It's only logic, the more followed the contest, the more popular/emboldened will the winner of the contest be.
It's true for beauty paegents, boxing matches, movie and music prizes and yes even Presidential elections.
The answer is in local politics , attention there because that's where stuff has to be applied on the territory.
> "flagged" always means that users flagged it, not moderator action. And there are a lot of readers who will flag all submissions about US politics, no matter the polarity of the article.
The thing is that dang has generally not unflagged any posts about topics like these in the past, so there's little reason to think the flagging is only a result of temporary inaction by the moderation team. Rather it is a consistent pattern permitted to exist by said team.
unless you alays have your email open on your device, its a tiny PITA to fire it up, login, remember your issue, and compose a proper message.
so when you [@user] tag a user rather than email its kinda like a rhetorical question, your not expecting a reply, but if someone just happens to pass by and notice your tag, they might answer.
also @user might mean wasted desire to some, but other users here might see a previously agreed upon heuristic is in play, and act in that context.
for example if someone from a very small subset of usernames that i recognize, were to @rolph me, i might SMS them at a previously agreed mobile number, if i see the signal in a reasonable time.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Pardon me, but summary executions in the United States taking place in broad daylight, with seeming impunity, is very much a new and novel phenomenon, and incredibly interesting to many of us.
I second this question, @dang. I would like some explanation of the moderation policy here to at least understand the reasoning.
With posts such as "Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S." and "Trump wins presidency for second time" being allowed (just to pick the top two Trump submissions), there is a clear precedent that big events in American politics are considered suitable for the front page.
I can see only two stances justifying removal here
(1) someone winning the presidency is considered an important event, but that same president then organizing a paramilitary force of lackeys to unlawfully execute protesters in "enemy states" without any repercussion is not considered as an important event but simply normal politics (which is not an apolitical position but rather a radical and controversial political opinion enforced by the moderation team)
(2) the topic is expected to cause anger, and only well-mannered and jovial discussions are suitable for the front page. This completely disregards that sometimes the rational and constructive response to these kinds of developments are anger, and a discussion about how to direct and act on such anger within the tech community should happen.
Everything is politics. And enforcing (or not correcting) mandatory silence on certain political topics is a political decision by the moderation team, colored by their priorities and their word view.
I also want to re-iterate and highlight the excellent summary made by lynndotpy:
> For anyone wondering why this is relevant to HackerNews:
> - There are tech companies and workers in companies outside California,
> - A government deploying a militarized police force to execute people in the streets is bad for the economy,
> - That government is the United States, and so this is bad for the world economy,
> - A lot of the people in our industry are immigrants from outside the United States,
> - If you're a HackerNews user in the United States, you can be shot and killed just like this.
People say there are users who don't want politics on their frontpage, but I think it's just simpler: we have a nontrivial minority of users who are pro-MAGA and like what's going on, so they downvote anything that makes Trump's action look bad. :/
And some HN users are being paid a lot of money to write software that facilitates the actions of this administration and/or further destabilizes democracy.
As for the existence of "censors" that don't "allow" you to see anything. That's not how this site works, and your lack of carefulness stating that leads me to downvote that.
As much as I hate that anything regarding the rise of fascism in the US get's insta-flagged (by a community, not a "censor"), it's still very easy to find such posts, for example on an aggregator [1] and on the /active subpage you just mentioned.
It will also be broadly shared on regular (social) media, which is an oft stated reason this kind of stories get flagged by the community, although I think there are many other reasons.
>@dang and other mods - when ICE abduct your kids on the way home from school, kick in your door and shoot people in your street will you feel proud of your cowardly behaviour here?
It won't happen to them because their boss (Garry Tan) is associated with the power behind the thrown (Peter Thiel).
What authority did they have to arrest him? He wasn’t an immigrant covered by a warrant, impeding whatever legitimate tasks they were doing, they chose to walk over to him, chose to initiate physical violence against the first person, chose to escalate when he tried to help the first person the agents assaulted, and the video showed that he was disarmed and subdued before they shot him.
ah, because the two choices the government agents have are "do nothing" and "mag dump a guy after you had 5-6 guys pepper spraying and beating him on the ground"
How do you look at this video and conclude it’s the protestors fault?
What dystopia do you live in where a shoving match, resulting in someone getting restrained, should turn into execution of the restrained person in broad daylight?
I'm saying the administration is aiming to provoke violence from the citizenry so they can declare martial law, and that they were hoping to achieve their aim sooner. It is astonishing that no real violence has yet been inflicted upon an ICE thug, in Minneapolis or anywhere else. I never concluded that the protestor is at fault.
Related, six days ago. Since then, the FBI agent who indicated a civil rights investigation into the shooting of Renee Good was warranted, has resigned.
> We'll see if suspect ends up having had a gun on him.
Will we? None of the ICE goons are wearing body cams, there will be no court case over this. The pink lady’s video might show something, but that’s it.
In America we have the second amendment and open carry laws. Legally speaking, people openly carrying a weapon should not in itself be considered illegal.
Sounds like ICE's official word right now is that the guy had a gun.
But the video clearly indicates that they all tackled him to the ground and were wrestling him maybe 4 vs 1, before they all shot him together. I'm not quite sure how a gun can have come out of this. Maybe the guy while struggling on the ground happened to reach in the direction of someone's gun while getting curbstomped, I dunno.
What I'm most worried about is that Pam Bondi / Department of Justice refuses to investigate these or properly prosecute these cases. IE: The Renee Good case has a ton of FBI agents resigning because they've been told to focus on Good's "misbehavior" rather than the ICE Agent's aggression.
It will be up to the Minnesota police and justice system to investigate. We cannot expect anything from the DoJ/FBI here. As such, the prosecution case will be gimped, and I fear we will have nothing resembling justice in this case (or Renee Good's case either).
> At a news conference, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the man who was shot was a 37-year-old white man with no serious criminal history and a record that showed some parking tickets. Law enforcement sources said Saturday their records show Pretti had no serious criminal history.
> O'Hara said the man was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit. Records show that Pretti attended the University of Minnesota. State records show Pretti was issued a nursing license in 2021, and it remains active through March 2026.
Minnesota permit-to-carry requirements: https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/bca/public-services-bca/firearm...
> Q: Do I have to disclose to a peace officer that I am a permit holder and carrying a firearm?
> A: Yes, upon request of a peace officer, a permit holder must disclose to the officer whether or not the permit holder is currently carrying a firearm.
So a U.S. citizen who is a legal, permitted gun owner with no outstanding criminal charges, legally carrying in public, who complies with the law and informs a DHS officer that they are legally carrying, is effectively subject to summary execution without due process. (The penalty for permitted carrying without possessing the physical permit card is $25 for a first offense and forfeiture of the weapon; it would've been his first offense per Minneapolis police.)
If ever there was a 2A violation, it's a federal officer shooting and killing a legal gun owner solely for possessing a gun in their presence.
Possessing a fire arm and having an encounter with law enforcement in the united states has long been a death sentence. You can find a multitude of videos online of cops doing stuff like getting the wrong address and beating on someones door and when that person opens the door with a gun in their hand and then the cops open fire, happens all the time.
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The bargain with law enforcement has always been that ostensibly if you comply, they will take you in peacefully. For obvious reasons, this is highly advantageous to both parties.
It seems like a foolish choice for them to reneg on this. They are essentially signaling that you are a trapped rat with no way out.
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> peace officer
What’s it called when you name something the complete opposite of what it is?
Not an oxymoron, because that’s about the concepts in the words.
the link returns 404 now
[flagged]
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> So a U.S. citizen who is a legal, permitted gun owner with no outstanding criminal charges, legally carrying in public, who complies with the law and informs a DHS officer that they are legally carrying, is effectively subject to summary execution without due process.... a federal officer shooting and killing a legal gun owner solely for possessing a gun in their presence.
This completely misrepresents what happened.
Another source (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/man-tackled-by-ice-in-chao...) gives another claim from the same police chief:
> "The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming."
And then, from the DHS:
> ...when a federal agent feared for his life, "an agent fired defensive shots." ... Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino said that the officer involved in the shooting "has extensive training," and that "the situation is evolving." Bovino added that the incident would be investigated.
(TFA includes the claim of self-defense.)
"Summary execution" and "without due process" is emotionally manipulative phrasing. It falsely implies that LEO use of lethal force is about punishment. It is not about punishment. It is about responding to perceived threat.
All this stuff about permit cards, the victim's lack of criminal history, etc. is irrelevant. It is not connected to the motivation for the shooting. There is nothing to establish that the shooting was "solely for" that possession, and LEO denies that claim. There is no plausible universe in which the officer says "please show me the permit for that weapon", Pretti says "I don't have it", and the officer shoots. But that's the narrative you appear to be trying to push.
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Someone captured the beginning of the shooting victim’s interaction with ICE. It certainly doesn’t look as though the person is aggressive or brandishing a weapon.
The DHS public statement that the victim was going to “do maximize damage and massacre law enforcement” is outrageous…
https://x.com/David_J_Bier/status/2015125221938770324
ICE has regularly attacked protesters and bystanders who are simply recording, walking away and so on.
Even people just driving through their neighborhood have been dragged out of their vehicles and apprehended. Citizen or otherwise doesn’t seem to matter.
They aren’t professionals and operate with neither the training, nor the will to obey the law.
Much of the time they seem to believe trying to bait folks into an encounter
https://www.reddit.com/r/ICE_Raids/comments/1q7u4kz/ice_agen...
https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1q7y43s/cbp_poin...
In my area all the non white folks don’t come to the bus stop anymore to pickup their kids. Their kids are instructed to race home after school. The schools now have lockdown protocols for ICE. Family businesses opened for decades closed because employees are afraid to come to work.
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Pam Bondi's Department of Justice will be worse. They're the ones who are in charge of investigating this. I expect the FBI under her to support ICE and defend them with all their might.
The checks and balances at the federal level are all captured. Support Minnesota in this troubling time.
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Yeah but you shoulda seen the look on his face after the government killed him and edited the image!
> What I'm most worried about is that Pam Bondi / Department of Justice refuses to investigate these or properly prosecute these cases.
There’s a lot to be worried here, but I’m surprised that’s what you are more worried about
There is no doubt in my mind that the the current DOJ won’t lift a finger against any of the agents involved
Hmm... well maybe I need to explain my fear better.
Because Pam Bondi/DoJ refuses to prosecute these cases, this will _keep happening_ for the foreseeable future. There's no reason for ICE to stop this behavior.
Its not today's crime that scares me most. Its the easily predicted future where this gets worse by next month.
The converse is the rise of the far-left. We're already seeing Black Panther patrol with long-guns rise up in these times in response to this. I expect more guns and more deadly force, and no one is doing anything to put a stop to it.
--------
The left is losing faith in strictly peaceful protest. At least some of them (ie: the Black Panthers forming patrol militia).
The right refuses to prosecute murders. This is the worse problem.
Where does this lead? Is it too late to stop? Its easily stopped if Pam Bondi simply did an investigation into the use of deadly force. That's the saddest part of all of this.
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the DOJ won't and that's why it happened again only a few days after Renee Good, and will continue to happen.
It's not just that the DOJ won't investigate. It's actively preventing the state from investigating either.
if this continues, it's going to explode, and I think that's part of the plan, to provide cover for invoking the Insurrection Act and imposing martial law
> What I'm most worried about is that Pam Bondi / Department of Justice refuses to investigate these or properly prosecute these cases.
Law enforcement above accountability is a hallmark sign of “too far gone”.
Law enforcement is one thing but when Washington sends war-fighters into a state against the will of the state's leadership, somebody has got to be prepared to take some casualties if there is any resistance.
The greater the force and amount of armament, the worse it can end up becoming.
It wasn't good when it happened in the 19th century either.
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It's always been strange to me that Americans are allowed to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights...until they get killed by police. Then they should've known not to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.
Everything makes much more sense when you realize that the conservative project is not about universal application of rights. It is a system of hierarchies. They have rights. We do not. They can carry firearms. We are violent maniacs trying to massacre cops (according to Bovino) and deserve what's coming.
The 2nd amendment was more about suppressing slave revolts than liberating slaves.
Yeah, it's almost like people walking around with guns is a bad idea.
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The group of Americans who are the loudest at cheering for the 2nd Amendment rights are cheering for ICE these days. To them, "the security of a free State" means that it has a caste system with the "good guys" at the top, and when ICE goons execute Minnesotans, they see brave armed citizens fighting back against the tyranny of wokeness.
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What I've observed is that Americans like to put themselves higher than other cultures due to their second amendment rights (and first, but that's neither here nor there), but when push comes to shove there's actually no real positive outcomes that come from having a country with it's citizens armed to the extent that Americans are.
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>> Sounds like ICE's official word right now is that the guy had a gun.
Look at the gray agent taking the victim weapon, that had just been pepper sprayed. He was disarmed before being killed.
"Footage of the grey coat officer retrieving the gun" - https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlvpbr/footage_of_the...
https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qm2vi0/heres_your_pro...
What's important to understand is you can do everything lawful, and they will still lie about you and kill you.
If the Right does end up defending this, I don't see how they are compatible with the USA that I was taught to believe in my whole life.
Ironically, all the major gun rights orgs have registered disapproval.
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That ship has sailed so long ago it's beyond the horizon at this point. Of course the right is going to defend this. We know exactly how this will play out. They will respond just like they have to every other assault and murder committed by ICE in the past year.
The top people in govt all the way down will completely lie about the victim and situation, despite plenty of video evidence that shows them as liars. Absolutely nothing will happen to these scumbag murderers, and another murder just like this will happen again soon.
Many people will be horrified but conservatives will continue cheering this on. This is the country we live in now.
Isn't it obvious? You were taught a lie.
All the blathering about "freedom", "democracy", and "constitutional rights" is just propaganda you've been spoon-fed since you were a child. The USA has spent the last 80 years riding the wave of contributing to the victory in WWII and therefore being the "Good Guys", and most of the Western world happily played along as their political goals aligned with it.
Meanwhile the USA hasn't addressed its deeply-rooted internal issues which have been festering for well over a century, and the results are now obvious to everyone. It only took Trump a year to make the US an international laughing stock, start a bunch of wars, get rid of the free press, and begin rounding up people he doesn't like.
If the USA you were taught to believe in truly existed, the current situation would not have been possible.
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Here’s a post analyzing each part of the video and showing the evidence:
https://xcancel.com/adamscochran/status/2015119306086900170
They had him pinned on the ground, then someone takes a gun away from him, and AFTER THAT they put him on his knees and executed him.
Additionally, there are many other videos of the agents, taking phones away from the nearby witnesses who recorded all of this.
But the most disturbing thing is that the claims made by DHS, Trump, and Noem about what happened were completely made up. They are simply inventing a story and getting it out there as quickly as possible to refute any other competing story. It does not matter to them that this is a lie. The idea is to muddy the waters.
It’s like that old Bill Hicks routine, except the US is now doing it to itself instead of (only) other countries.
“You all saw him, he had a gun”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdf8UvkjUbc
It won’t be up to the Minnesota police to investigate. A Minnesota judge gave them a warrant and feds still denied them access.
Well it looks like it's time to say bye-bye to the 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms in the US, right? NRA and all that notwithstanding it seems if you're bearing arms you will be shot. Interesting times.
It's hard to argue the guy was even bearing arms. He just kneeled and stoically accepted his execution. And then the people surrounding him asked the feds to please not do that.
The Whiskey Rebellion, was bearing arms.
Even if they guy had a gun, it's left to see what actually transpired here. Whether the guy owned the gun, had firearm permit and even if he had a public and/or concealed gun permit.
That's already been revealed by Minnesota Police (thank goodness we at least have some degree of independent investigations going on right now).
1. Only had parking tickets on his criminal record. No other criminal activity.
2. Owned a gun with firearms permit.
3. 36 Years Old, male. EDIT: I misremembered. Its apparently 37 year old male.
Minnesota Police only have jurisdiction inside of Minnesota however. So those four+ ICE shooters just need to leave the state and they're safe. The FBI is required to pursue across state lines.
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From a purely theoretical standpoint, what should the family victims do then, in a country where rule of law is not being applied anymore? If these deaths will go unpunished - and Alex Pretti's is already well documented and clear EXECUTION - what are the direct consequence as a society with a 2nd amendment?
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Watch the video from all angles. There is no way to defend your position if you watch the actual footage of what happened.
If the Right does end up defending this, I don't see how they are compatible with the USA that I was taught to believe in my whole life.
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You have the right to carry. Period end. Full stop. Exercising your constitutional right is not "looking for trouble."
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> The video clearly shows him resisting arrest and reaching for something.
The video clearly shows the grey-masked (EDIT: Grey-hat, green mask) ICE Agent taking the gun and running away with it before everyone else shoots him.
Also, I'm inclined to believe the "arrest" was an illegal arrest to begin with. I had a big post about how police procedure and due process is supposed to work but I know no one gives a crap about due process anymore, so forget it.
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>"The video clearly shows him resisting arrest and reaching for something."
Tell me the EXACT time in the video you see this happen.
In the video, there are 4 ICE agents on him and there's not ONE frame where the tackled protester reaches for ANYTHING with his arm/hand. There is, however, a gray-masked ICE agent consistently reaching for what appears to be the protestor's sidearm. And at 0:17, the ICE agent that shoots first reached for his own sidearm, and the ICE agent next to him retrieves what appears to be the protestor's concealed firearm at the same time, and walks away from the pile with it BEFORE shots are even fired. The "threat" - the protestor's right to bear arms - was eliminated before a shot.
There is not a single indication that ICE agents were in danger from anyone besides each other. If he was shot dead for possession, there's your answer for 2A, right there. They're shooting people like dogs in broad daylight for recording police interactions (1A) and possessing a firearm (2A), the tree of liberty needs replenishment.
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1. The are not going to investigate it. Totally legit right?
2. This regime likes to post deepfakes (even president himself).
Why do you have urge to defend these pedophiles?
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And when you're unlawfully murdered, you have no recourse. They do not care what you tell them, and if you don't resist, you're potentially dead anyway. They have arrested lawful immigrants and citizens, and held them illegally, in some cases for weeks or months.
"Comply and you might get lucky and survive" is not a life safety strategy. I'm unsure where this idea to not resist someone who is very likely to kill you without cause (based on all of the evidence and observations to date) is coming from to be frank.
Why ICE Can Kill With Impunity - https://www.wired.com/story/why-ice-can-kill-with-impunity/ | https://archive.today/gMFRS - January 15th, 2026 ("Over the past decade, US immigration agents have shot and killed more than two dozen people. Not a single agent appears to have faced criminal charges.")
(own firearms, have taken firearm training, still aware never to trust law enforcement)
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Thank you for this. As far as I understand it, the victim was filming the ICE agent(s). I'm sure you'll agree that counts as resisting arrest and even putting the agent(s) lives at risk.
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Regarding just the headline, at this point it's not really about immigration, this has evolved into a soft civil conflict being waged for political reasons. The two people who have been killed so far were themselves citizens and at best were political dissidents. They were not themselves subject to detainment due to immigration status.
> this has evolved into a soft civil conflict being waged for political reasons.
The more quickly Americans come to terms with this reality, the better. I’m not in Minneapolis, but from what I’ve been reading and hearing, people there already understand that their city is being occupied by a hostile force and that this is indeed a civil conflict. Everyone else needs to catch up now.
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I don’t think it’s ever about what Trump claims. It’s just one crisis after another where they hope to distract and divide people to get themselves power / support and anyone killed along the way, they don’t care.
Some of trumps big donors have been caught hiring large number of illegal folks by design and they don’t care.
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> But the other woman tried to flee and run over a cop. So that particular shooting was entirely justified
She didn't try to run over anyone, you can watch multiple videos of this. It's also my understanding that they had no basis for detaining her, as there was no reason to believe she was illegally in the United States.
Even if that wasn't so the use of lethal force is far beyond what would have been necessary.
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On the flip side: where did the idea that it’s illegal to obstruct a belligerent person who does not clearly identify themselves as a law enforcement officer come from?
Killing someone is the ultimate punishment. They stop existing. Are you arguing that obstructing federal law enforcement officers mean they are allowed to kill you as punishment without the legal system being involved?
Bro is like, “can we please stop talking about this extra judicial politically motivated murder and please focus on the semantics of my argument?”
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Watch the video of what led to this. He was standing there filming with his phone, ICE ran up to him and started yelling/pushing.
Are you suggesting that him filming was obstructing ICE?
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This links to a synchronized amalgamation of multiple video angles: https://streamable.com/udofq5
It clearly shows that Alex Pretti never drew a weapon, and his (legally owned and carried) CCW was removed by one of the agents from its holster seconds prior to other agents shooting Alex in the back. Agents are visibly using pepper spray, pistol whipping his head, and even though it’s 5+ vs one, don’t even appear to be attempting to handcuff or properly restrain.
Another video from a VFX editor showing position of hands during the incident: https://www.reddit.com/user/AriFeblowitzVFX/comments/1qmf89x...
No longer available.
Alternative angle from the lady in pink
NSFW
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlux63/altern...
Edit mirror
https://imgur.com/a/UTDrKz0
That's the most clear murder I've ever seen, zero question about intent or anything else. After the four agents have thrown the guy to the ground and are pinning him down you can see the fed on the left pull out his gun and shoot the defenseless man in the back, and then the others jump back and join in.
This is truly unreal. Even more unreal that we know nobody will get prosecuted for this murder and we'll see another one just like it within a few days.
But the MAGA cult will find yet another explanation that this man magically hurt the 4 ICE agents and they all ended up in a hospital somehow, or that carrying weapons with a permit is unacceptable if you vote democrat
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[original video](https://files.catbox.moe/i14o7q.mp4)
[mirror](https://imgur.com/a/bohAwpX)
[reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlpzu8/anothe...)
[pink coat ladys video](https://files.catbox.moe/v3iwkl.mp4)
[Mirror](https://imgur.com/a/XiY904L)
mirror https://bsky.app/profile/alexip718.com/post/3md6uyjftvc2f
I do not comprehend why all these platforms act as if they are doing a favor with the censorship.
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This angle is even worse than the prior videos and makes it absolutely, 100% clear that this was an execution. The individual in question was a US citizen, lawfully carrying a firearm and was a registered nurse. Every single ICE agent involved should be locked away for life at bare minimum.
Here's a multi angle link that's being updated regularly as new video comes in.
https://eyesupapp.com/video/89d854e9-424c-47ea-a585-f3c72351...
Well, that’s an execution. Good lord.
They deleted it. Have a mirror? Thank you!
If Minneapolis and the rest of the US can't understand what's happening.
The Last Jew in Vinnitsa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Jew_in_Vinnitsa https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/Th...
Who shoot exactly ? i don't understand anything (not sarcasm, i'm in the airport and can't make sense of the vid)
The guy was filming ice, they started pushing some other person so he got in between them. They threw him to the ground, where three men pinned his hands down. Another pulled out his pepper spray can, then started beating the victim in the face repeatedly.
At the same time, a fifth agent pats him down. He finds a gun (legally purchased and the MN police have said he was permitted to carry). They remove the firearm and walk away.
Then one of the officers yells "he has a gun" and shoots him point blank. Then another officer fires, which looks to kill him and he drops face-down and the officers back away. Finally, one more pulls out his firearm and puts 9 into the back of the victim's corpse - guaranteeing he can't be saved
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very valuable video but it’s been deleted
Video of a federal agent disarming the victim before the others shot him: https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlvpbr/footage_of_the...
The lead up also does NOT show the victim threatening these agents in any way, with the gun or otherwise. Instead, they pushed a woman down and this guy tries to shield her and that's when they target him.
EDIT: another angle showing the run up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leakednews/comments/1qlvt7t/video_f...
It looks to me like the guy who disarmed him ND'd[] (or maybe another officer, but I see the disarmer jolt his arm in an axis parallel to the barrel at time of shot) and they all started shooting.
This has happened before. Once one shot goes off they all shoot at the suspect.
[] https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2015145197965881786
There is another angle from that side of the street now. A single agent unholstered and started unloading into the guy with first show square in his back. This is while the other agents where right there holding him and they all looked quite shocked. Looks like this one individual went off the reservation and sparked all the shooting.
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> By definition we know that dems and their publications are only going to show one angle
Umm, are you just being purposefully blind? Every angle is being pushed across social media and everyone has seen them. They're all bad. There isn't some large conspiracy to make these agents look bad, what they did is bad and disgusting. I've edited my comment with another angle to make you feel better.
> But somehow resisting arrest while having a gun on you isn't threatening?
Reaching for a gun is threatening, brandishing a gun is threatening, resisting while possessing a gun is not, no. Regardless, the video shows he was disarmed so why did they mag dump him?
> Or did the ICE agents disarm him without having seen the gun first?
What? That sentence doesn't make sense. I believe they saw it holstered on his waistband after they had tackled him and the one agent came in and took it.
The fact that you're even trying to find a shred of justification after what everyone just watched is also disgusting.
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Americans, where will you realize that the longer you wait, the worse it will get ? The whole country should be in the streets now. You guys are fast tracking your way into a dictatorship, and unfortunately you may drag the entire Western world with you.
The videos from this are numerous and very clear about what happened. And yet, all the officials are telling that a guy is a domestic terrorist and approached ICE officers with a gun, with intent to kill them. How crazy is that ? And if they do this in cases where everything is filmed, you can only imagine what's happening behind the scenes.
The unfortunate truth I think is that no matter how many people might be with this idea of just "rising up" and taking back the country, america is is fucking massive and many cities and towns there is no noticeable ice or border patrol presence. So even if you can get people out and protesting at some common meaningless locations its going to be symbolic at best.
If you want out-of-band change in the U.S. it will at minimum take some combination of three things:
- sustained weeks or months long protests in D.C.
- extreme social pressure on congress representatives no matter where they may be.
- state governments in rebellion or threatening it against the federal government.
I don't think we're particular close on any of these.
Otherwise tough luck, wait for the probably manipulated elections.
Street protests are useless because they don't actually hurt. They only work if they can shame the other side, but the other side isn't actually ashamed of what they are doing.
The kind of protest that is needed is the kind that is actually disruptive. Nationwide strikes, for instance.
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In Minnesota they've striked recently and it sounds like they're being successful. If lots of people across the country striked maybe it would matter (fat chance in the USA I know but it's something)
All the towns where there's nothing happening don't need to be rising up though, surely, it only needs to happen in the major population centres.
More excuses.
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I can't help but think there is some kind of agenda here...
Trouble is they elected this lot. Trump ran saying he'd deport millions. Maybe in subsequent elections that will change?
See this from 2024 "Trump explains his militaristic plan to deport 15-20 million people" https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigratio...
There are voting anomalies in electronic voting records in key states. There's an org looking into this, filing lawsuits for more records from counties and states. The trend is, "the more voters that voted in a polling place, the more that polling place's machine-counted votes skewed towards Trump." These trends are not present in the hand counts.
They have a YouTube channel too. If the charts in isolation don't make sense to you (they don't to me), watch any of their interviews on the channel to get a walk-through of the charts and their meanings.
Their findings for Minnesota: https://electiontruthalliance.org/analysis/minnesota-hand-ve...
Roughly half of us did.
That's right. What you don't understand is that we must and can only move in resonance with our understanding and with the mass and momentum we are capable of. It's painfully slow, I know. Please be encouraging. We are being harassed by the "commander" of the (formerly) most powerful military in the world. He is a psychopath nobody can deny.
We MUST find our power and our power is NOT violence. But our power is MORE POWERFUL THAN VIOLENCE.
And when as you find it I hope you will see it in you and your people and realize that you too had it all along.
This was an execution, plain and simple. There is no way around it. There are videos from multiple angles and there was an eyewitness (the lady in the pink jacket) literally two feet away.
I am hoping against hope that people regardless of political association, will demand accountability. America, our democracy and the rule of the law will be on trial in the coming days. Let's see how we fare.
You realize that anyone can see your comment history and quickly see that you’re an Indian supporting Hamas, right?
This is probably a good day to take time away from social media. Doom scrolling won’t do anything
Instead there’s DHS funding going through Congress which could give Congress leverage to restrict ICE. To be clear ICE will still operate past the funding deadline. But Congress can create limits like mandating allowing states to investigate these crimes. Restrict who can carry firearms.
Write your senators and ask them to block DHS funding
I completely forgot about the potential government shutdown this week, and how this killing would affect it....
How about no masks. If you are a police officer, of the state, wear your face with pride.
They should definitely not be allowed to wear masks.
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They passed the DHS funding. The day ICE executes a man in broad daylight by blowing his brains out from point-blank, they get an extra $10,000,000,000 in funding.
America is a failed nation.
Did the Senate pass it? I think just the House did.
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The title calling it an “immigration crackdown” is propaganda.
Texas and Florida have WAY more illegals than Minnesota [1], why are ICE not terrorizing citizens there?
This federal violence and murder is not about illegals. Anyone that thinks it is is not paying attention.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1l8o8mu/percentage...
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Wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhWrol1kc44&t=64s
IANAA: what legal powers does the city/state have to expel ICE agents? Especially as they are operating in, at best, increasingly shady legality.
I always understood that the USA is built on a delicate balance of power between the federal and state governments. But here the federal government is sending thugs who, masked or unmasked, are brazenly killing people in bizzare circumstances. And the best the state can do is PTFO?
> what legal powers does the city/state have to expel ICE agents?
What makes you believe ICE is going to follow a judge's orders? They are already routinely violating it when it comes to deporting people.
Or, if you want to be even more pessimistic: what makes you believe the current Supreme Court is going to rule based on law, instead of based on political affiliation?
The USA's balance of power is horribly broken. To give just one simple example related to the previous: having the Supreme Court be nominated by the President and confirmed by a simple majority in the Senate? That's just asking for trouble. It'd be far better to have judges nominated by a politically-independent organisation (like the currently-sitting judges, or a national bar association) and confirmed by a two-thirds majority in the House/Senate (preventing anyone controversial, so you get boring, professional, and by-the-book judges - like they are supposed to be).
Regardless of judicial rulings of any sort, who will enforce them? Seemingly all of the enforcement apparatus in the US has been co-opted.
The individual state governments aren't meaningfully resisting. Their law enforcement isn't arresting "federal agents" to put them through state legal system. These perps should be jailed and forced to appeal before a judge for a bail hearing, possibly held without bail as they are clearly threats, and then put on trial in a state court.
Without this, where is the enforcement?
The classic question: who watches the watchmen? Right now, no one.
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Does an ICE officer have any more rights than any other random non-ICE murderer? Can the police put them in prison for murdering?
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He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us. For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury
>IANAA: what legal powers does the city/state have to expel ICE agents? Especially as they are operating in, at best, increasingly shady legality.
If ICE weren't acting like brown shirts, not much. It'd be Federal tasking happening according to due process;probably after the State informed the Feds they would not delegate local LEO to their task.
Now, seeing as ICE are acting like brown shirts; things are kinda complicated. Technically, charges can be brought against specific agents breaking the laws of the State. If those agents happen to be Minnesotan, it may be something that stays internal to the States courts. However, if they are from out-of-state, things get complicated, because then you start dealing with nasty things like Federal jurisdiction, and the fact the Federal government isn't going to be terribly motivated to do anything other than paper over things in the most convenient way they can.
Now as to whether Minnesota could just outright expel ICE; it'd be something that hasn't been tested since the Civil War. Typically, when you start doing things like that, the Feds escalate quickly. This type of thing has previously been avoided through attempts at maintaining some degree of professional conduct amongst Federal agents, and getting buy-in from the locals.
We are now firmly in interesting times.
> things are kinda complicated. Technically, charges can be brought against specific agents breaking the laws of the State
Yes, and the complicated part is federal supremacy[0]. The federal government can "convert" the case against the agent into a federal one and essentially just turn a blind eye which means no justice. No doubt that this administration would protect agents executing citizens by saying it was "part of their duty" to be there and doing that.
Relevant: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11213
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause
Make it illegal to enable any commercial transactions within the state supporting federal agents. No food sales, no fuel sales, no hotel stays, no medical care, no rental cars. Make them drag their supply chain in like the Middle East.
In state economic deplatforming.
Crazy I never thought the Third Amendment would be needed in my lifetime but I think you nailed it with this.
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Make it illegal to enable any commercial transactions within the state supporting federal agents. No food sales, no fuel sales, no hotel stays, no medical care, no rental cars. Make them drag their supply chain in like the Middle East.
In state economic deplatforming.
You're gonna prosecute Minnesotans for accepting cash?
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Legal eagle has more in-depth analysis of this. But in summary, there's basically no recourse.
They have the same recourse the colonists had to eject King George's men. And the same duty.
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They can prosecute federal agents but the bar is VERY high from what I understand.
I’ve cut my NYT consumption down to maybe 5 minutes a week, and somehow today it still managed to wreck my headspace. I’m not a historian, but my memory reached into that rarely-used middle school history drawer and pulled up this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo
Also this idea too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
Why is this being hidden off of the main HN pages? There are clearly enough points for it to be significantly up weighted. I don’t understand the censorship.
As I understand it, HN has a controversial submission detection system of sorts. The exact details elude me, but if a submission gets a lot of comments quickly relative to upvotes, it'll fall off the main page.
Best indicator I've seen is if comments/points ~> 0.9 or so.
It's my understanding mods can undo this "controversial" flag, so that select threads get back onto the main page.
The censorship is cranked up on every site now, presumably due to fear of retaliation from this admin.
They are hyper online, and threaten any companies business deals if they feel slighted.
Its why you can get banned on reddit now for quoting the president.
Yep, I got a three day ban from Reddit for directly quoting JFK (and nothing else) in my comment.
I even attributed it.
This site has always been easy to co-opt to fascism with their supposedly apolitical outlook. Flagging from unknown accounts easily kills stories of importance, even where they have relation to the supposed interests of the site. Such as the AI altered image being posted by the White House this week.
The idea we have to treat arguments in good faith like the other user in this story excusing fascist death squads show how well this moderation approach aligns with the Thiel-ite sympathies.
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Because many HN readers flag anything that they deem to be “politics”
I would say "wrong politics". Atrocities committed by other regimes have no problems staying on top page.
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Unless it has computer!
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In the eyes of some in leadership, tech workers should be apolitical worker drones. Weighing in on politics is for people like David Sacks, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk.
It is at the top of best stories here.
Some naive people here, still think the HN page listing is based on points and comments...
You are downvoting what is the evidence in front of your eyes. Downvoting the observation does not change the ranking anomaly. If you want trust, you can’t run the front page like this.
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I understand why HN doesn't want to devolve into a political forum—but at it's spirit, HN is supposed to cover topics that "...are of interest to those working in the tech community". The upvotes on a thread like this demonstrates that these are topics that are indeed of interest—so I wish that there was more of an appetite to allow these discussions to play out. Maybe having a limit on the number of posts per day or per week that could make it to the frontpage could give everyone a bit more of what they want.
Personally, the political threads on HN are the ones in which I learn the most by and large. There simply isn't another community on the web that elicits such thought provoking discussion around these types of issues—reddit doesn't even come close. I hope the policy will change in the future; especially during these tumultuous times, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Most HN members are also well-educated enough to understand the implications of this scenario are more serious than the typical political article. Employment may start being affected, for example. The career decisions you make are already certainly affected if you choose to / choose not toto work somewhere that facilitates this federal agency.
Not to mention the biggest supporters of this are the SV techbros
Tim Cook is having dinner and a movie with the man most responsible for this mess tonight
"The Queen of England Dies" and "Donald Trump elected president" both happily sat at #1.
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That's a summary execution in broad daylight. I have no words.
We still have space for discussions about the specific flaws of Microsoft's BitLocker implementation on the front page when the much-more salient "wrench attack" ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) is stronger very day.
This execution has more significant implications than the combined heft of the chipper clip, or of EARN IT, SOPA, or the myriad of other bad bills introduced to the US Congress over the years.
Tech libertarianism was a frontier for the means to the ends of our personal liberties, and not a goal in itself. I refuse to believe the people on this site don't see that it's all connected.
(edit: clarification; "this" refers to the execution, not the Bitlocker thing.)
You are exactly right. People on this site complaining how these topics are not tech related are absolute fools.
Well, or at least extreme incompetence across the board. Systematic failure from POTUS downwards.
It's a statistical game. Arm people, don't train them well enough, give them a mission. Given enough altercations, some will turn out like this.
Try these words: Broken arrow.
Question is, now that the most dangerous apparatus in the world has been coopted, what are people feeling like doing about it?
You know how the second amendment is about protecting Americans from tyrannical governments, and how a few dozen schools being shot ip each year is a small price to pay?
Funny how it doesn’t work in reality.
2A is a historical relic of the settler colonial era when communities had to create their own security forces. It's strongest proponents today are those who want to create their own laws and have private militias to enforce it, in obvious contravention of state and federal laws which are decided through a democratic process with checks and balances (elections, legislatures and independent judiciaries).
The present federal government has co-opted the militia strategy and filled its ranks with the 2A absolutists, and given them a budget that rivals most countries' militaries.
Even more of a relic: those militias weren't just bands of yeoman farmers. They were veterans of the recent French-and-Indian war. Often who had served with the commanders of the British forces arrayed against them. George Howe brother of William who ultimately became CiC of British forces in America died in the arms of Israel Putnam, one of the continental army's first generals at the battle of Ticonderoga. They thought so highly of him, the Massachusetts assembly allocated funds for a memorial to Howe at Westminster. George Howe (unlike ICE, lol) often had a hard time bringing ultimate force to bear as he didn't really see the colonials as "enemy".
I'd submit it's a violation of the 2A to allow the Nat Guard (essentially the continuation of those militias) to be forcibly nationalized (it took quite a bit of negotiating to get them all to join the fledgling continental army)
Anyhoo, tl;dr, for sure, 2A is an anachronism
The video is horrifying: https://old.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlpzu8/anothe...
That's all I'll say.
Folks, the videos of this incident are being taken down rapidly. Please do what you can to preserve them.
I looked at the video and have no words. Why, just why?
ICE thugs have been recruited largely from white nationalist rallies and forums. Literally, not as some kind of metaphor. DHS executives post white nationalist propaganda hourly on Twitter. Stephen Miller, an out-of-the-closet Nazi, is the acting president of the United States. Their goal is to start a race war that they believe they can win by murdering 100 million Americans.
Just in case anyone thinks you are exaggerating: https://x.com/DHSgov/status/2006472108222853298
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Lots of Department of Corrections officers have been recruited as well. There's going to be so many lawsuits after these guys go back to running the Federal prisons with this new attitude.
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I don't think we can just blame white people for this. A lot of the ICE agents are non-white and many non-whites voted for Trump. In fact, most of the pro-immigrant people I meet are white!
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Is it the first video of American law enforcement shooting someone that triggered this reaction?
This is from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc.
Extreme violence has been normalized among American LEOs for a long time now.
Look up "killology" for some more on this. If you're in US, check if your local PD or sheriff's office signed up its agents for a Dave Grossman seminar or training course; you might be unpleasantly surprised.
And now that ICE job ads are essentially an open invitation to come be violent for a "righteous cause", it's exactly those types of people that end up there in even larger concentrations. But make no mistake, none of this is new in any way other than the sheer scale of it.
There was an interesting take from Garry Kasparov. Excerpts:
>what’s happening in Minnesota is method, not madness. Trump wants violence, to radicalize & divide, to create pretext for crackdowns.
>...Having lived through a similar, nationwide version of this in Trump's model, Putin's Russia, it’s not easy to fight against (https://x.com/Kasparov63/status/2015126502845587957)
I'm not American and not saying it's right or wrong but maybe?
Kasparov as usually exaggerates. As a Russian, I can think of only 2 cases he may refer to: 2002 riot after world cup match, when a crowd watched Russia team lose to Japan, then went to destroy displays and cars in Moscow center. It was followed by wrenching the mass rallies laws. Some publicists later, in the '10s, suggested it was orchestrated, but the whole theory forgets that Russian team could have won. You don't create a plan where your pretexts may not take place at all.
The other case he may think of is May 2012 protest, where a bottleneck created stampede, and a fight with police ensued. Random protesters got persecuted for whatever reasons. But the crackdown was already under way with the new state Duma passing ever tougher law amendments.
Sociologically, it's nonsense to make a pretext by attacking the other side, because you don't know what how they react: maybe the opponents just hide, or go around. To make a crackdown, you stage the attack on yourself, and then react, and crack down. E.g. Hitler staged the opposition putting Reichstag on fire, and then reacted. In Trumps case, brutal attacks are a step too far, because people may react differently -- what if nothing happens? or if republicans change their mind and impeach him?
Putin made a crackdown on media and civic liberties in a soft and gradual way: the media was taken down by stakeholders loyal to him, or maybe by a made-up bankruptcy case. Mass protests were made very hard to do, and needed a permission. But if any happened, the police wouldn't start a street fight, but would instead arrest and charge the organizers next day.
What Kasparov usually writes is a big exaggeration. In 2015 he wrote a comment on social media, that Russia needs a pro-democratic dictatorship to fix it. I think this is exactly what technocrats and oligarchs thought when they supported Putin coming in 1999 -- that he was authoritarian, but would lead Russia away from communistic revenge.
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Wikipedia has a page already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alex_Pretti
Man, I hate that they "both sides" this. "DHS says he approached with a handgun, NYT says the video shows a phone" makes it seem like just an unlucky misunderstanding. But the DHS quote clearly is a straight up lie based on video evidence, and this doesn't convey how it was a straight up execution and that all the escalation was done by the officers.
It's a current event, so things will change fast.
At the same time, the Wikipedia page for ICE itself sounds a lot like a propaganda piece, with criticism as a footnote.
From my reading of the evidence so far it seems there was a misunderstanding. Looks like one of the ICE guys said he has a gun, took the gun but the others didn't realise the gun had been taken.
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ICE working as intended. US citizens need to fear ICE, how else could it be used to deter voting? Certainly ICE will be placed strategically come the next elections
From a semi-corrupt country, ie being somewhere between Africa and the developed world, I can only suggest to fellow USians courage and patience three more years. Times will come good again. A corrupt leader is very difficult to change and things seem grim because he has captured all three forms of power.
A civilised country can not be destroyed by one king, nor saved by a new leader.
America has checks and balances, and they have failed. There’s no “wait 3 years”, that’s over, as America will always be one election away from anarchy or worse.
The only way out is the Republican Party impeaching him and spending the next 10 years undoing the damage at the top and next 40 year rebuilding civil society.
> America has checks and balances, and they have failed.
America pretended to have checks and balances. Everyone just turned a blind eye to the massive holes in them and pretended things were going to be fiiiiine.
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Never in the past an irreversible decline of a hundred long empire has started in one year. Abrupt crisis end abruptly. Never any political party has impeached it's winning leader. Nowadays the country needs a Dem President, whoever they are. The new billionaires will have different priorities, again not friendly but more peaceful. You just have to wait, as we do in my country every now and then.
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Why do you think things will change in 3 years? All indications are that this is just the way the country is trending and, at any rate, it's prone to making 180 degree turns every 4 years anyway.
The current situation is enforced by a temporary coup and is incompatible with the average American citizen base. Although a sizable share idiotically supports the crimes, the rest awaits its turn. We experience that back and forth in Greece for two hundred years.
A different party, in that case the Democrats, if it is elected, will immediately deactivate the core of the current governing billionaires, starting from Musk and Thiel, and replace them with new ones, most probably from Wall Street and Academia. Do you think Jamie Dimon will do the same?
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A plurality of Americans want this. They voted for it, knowing what was coming. There's no reason to believe they won't do so again.
> An I.C.U. nurse shot by federal agents was an American citizen with no criminal record, the city police chief said. A New York Times video analysis shows he was holding a phone, not a gun.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/us/minneapolis-shooting-ic...
Video of the incident in question [1]. This thread will likely be flag-killed instantly.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlpzu8/anothe...
edit: Additional video [2] of the victim prior to the shooting. They were a lawful observer confronted by ICE due to observing and recording them.
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlt6s2/video_showing_...
Look at them, they'#re even skipping putting them in jail first so they can be suicided.
They must have been at extreme danger of some harsh words before killing them
> this video will likely be glad just instantly
Again.
Anyway, the video shows that we've unequivocally entered open-air brownshirt executions.
This person was pinned to the ground by three people while another was just wailing against their head from above. Hard to tell what object they're using as a cudgel to their face.
Then the subsequent mag dumping just to be extra sure they're dead.
We really need that lady in the back to release her video.
For anyone wondering why this is relevant to HackerNews:
- There are tech companies and workers in companies outside California,
- A government deploying a militarized police force to execute people in the streets is bad for the economy,
- That government is the United States, and so this is bad for the world economy,
- A lot of the people in our industry are immigrants from outside the United States,
- If you're a HackerNews user in the United States, you can be shot and killed just like this.
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It's absolutely inexcusable, even moreso than the murder of Renee Good. Though I fully expect the usual suspects to show up and claim it was justified because he was resisting arrest, which seems to be the popular modus operandi for justifying execution by the state.
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So if you exercise your second amendment right and ICE goons harass you they'll freak out that you're "armed" and execute you.
And arrest the witnesses of their crime
2A only gives you the right to buy the gun, not actually use it for its intended purposes
a much higher authority imbues the right to defend ones self.
the right to defend ones own person in the face of death or debilitation is not given by any form of government, thus it can not be withdrawn by such.
DC v Heller?
It says "bear".
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Nah if you are somebody like the Bundys you can point guns at cops all day and conservatives will praise you.
Always been that way.
"I was afraid for my life!"
Things are really getting ugly there. So sad to witness it happening in “real time.”
Why don't you guys have cool news like "man with punisher t-shirt downs 10 ICE agents and threatens the organization on camera"?
That gives them the martial law and unlimited terms they're looking for.
What unlimited terms? It seems like they can kill whoever they want whenever they want. And I don't think there are enough of them to fight a civil war.
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Live feed from status coup news : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASr1zVuQlX4
Status coup & BG On The Scene are both streaming on YouTube
Status coup: https://www.youtube.com/live/ASr1zVuQlX4?si=jZzKn8DSGcIuKZ2N
BG: https://www.youtube.com/live/xYPGiIt4dDY?si=gx-kqx8jgavIsMBI
Bellingcat analysis: https://bsky.app/profile/bellingcat.com/post/3md6vleoxks2t
"A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man BEFORE THE FIRST shot was fired."
"At least 10 shots being heard in total. Most of them are fired after a brief delay, when the man is already lying motionless on the ground."
Based on seeing the video, it seems an officer standing in front of the decedent is the one who drew/disarmed the weapon from the decedent's holster. This was under the arching body of another agent who was holding the decedent down. The man who shot him was standing behind him.
Despite all the outraged rhetoric on here, it does not seem reasonable to assume that the officer simply decided to murder the man out of anger, spite, bloodlust, and perceived immunity.
Rather, a dispassionate analysis of the scenario might suggest that the shooter only saw the weapon be drawn by an unknown hand, and not discerning that it was one of his fellow officers disarming the struggling man, instead believed that the struggling man had managed to draw his own weapon and was preparing to fire.
Given the facing of the struggling man and the shooting officer, it seems unlikely that his first fear was for his own life but rather for the lives of his comrades, and so he fired his weapon to remove the perceived threat to his fellow officers lives.
This explains exactly why he fired almost immediately after he saw the gun drawn. Not an extrajudicial execution as some are recklessly calling it, but a tragic example of having to make life and death decisions with an imperfect view of the ... battlefield for lack of a better term ... and the foolishness of getting in the way of armed men.
I tell my kids they have the right of way at the crosswalk but right of way is not going to save their life if the car doesn't see them, so look both ways and make sure cars are slowing down.
The same sense of caution should be used when deciding to get in the way of men, even good and lawful men, with guns.
It made sense to protest the Vietnam war or Iraq or Afghanistan in America, not in the war zone.
We have freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, but do that from the sidewalk, in court, or before Congress, not in the line of fire of a police action. And I don't believe we have the right to block roads, scream in the faces of law enforcement or military personnel, or impede them in the fulfillment of their lawful duties which these immigration enforcement actions are.
He wasn’t impeding. He was filming which until recently was a 1A right in America.
The officer walked up to him and the woman with the backpack and started an altercation.
Using your right of way analogy the officer drove up on the sidewalk to take out your kids, no crosswalk involved.
If you’re going to defend this with a “well look at what she was wearing” type defense then you’re just ok with government agents executing citizens whenever they feel like it.
https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026...
Can you imagine if other people hadn't been around filming what happened here and the murder of Renee Good? The Gov would completely cover it up, make the victims look like domestic terrorists, and we'd never be able to show the truth.
That's why Good and Pretti doing what they were doing -- observing and filming -- is so damn important, and why ICE will literally murder people, with the full backing of the Trump Administration, to stop it.
At the rate things are going, I wonder if America can hold together until the midterm. The Trump regime is acting like it wants a civil war.
If anyone told me in 2024 that America may see its own Tiananmen, I'd have laughed, but I'm not so sure now. I can totally see something similar at a smaller scale, and millions of Americans defending it with "it was necessary to keep law and order."
They're acting like they'll never be out of power or face consequences.
Presidential pardon power is unlimited. One blanket pardon erases all accountability.
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Genuine question: is this not a civil war? If this isn't a civil war, what is the difference between this and a civil war?
In the U.S. Civil War several states joined together to break from the nation. I'm not seeing anything like that here.
I am seeing a cold civil war with Pacific states banding together for health initiatives. And states gerrymandering their districts prompting other states to then gerrymander theirs in response. That kind of cold civil war.
Minnesota now calling up their state's national guard is the first sign I see of the cold civil war warming up.
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Today, when Trump's goons kill a man you see it on the news.
When it becomes a war, your side will drop bombs, burn houses, and kill people every day. And you will cheer them on. Because the alternative is defeat and death.
War is a terrible thing, and Trump is steering America toward it.
it is
it has been one since we, collectively, failed to make trump pay the price for his insurrection attempt
You should have read project 2025 in 2024 then.
To quote the main author: the revolution will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
>The Trump regime is acting like it wants a civil war.
it's not out of the question that incitement to invoke insurrection act and then cancel the midterms is the strategy
the guy in charge isn't thinking straight, and he saw that Ukraine had no elections during the war, and he saw that Russia had rigged elections during the war, and I don't know what other countries, but he might think America can skip elections during a war, if he starts enough wars, and he might be right.
Why is the focus on Minneapolis? Is it really the training ground for ICE?
Edit: "Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the US, according to NBC. The community has been subject to widespread criticism from Mr Trump, who has called them "garbage"."
Retribution. There are millions of undocumented immigrants in Texas and Florida, but notice aggressive ICE activities primarily in blue states.
It is an attempt to demonstrate unchecked force against their political opponents under the guise of immigration enforcement. Self defense (when warranted) is the only remaining option, because a bully will only escalate to see how far they can go. Restraint by aggressors will not be forthcoming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
It’s also to get access to voter rolls.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/24/us/pam-bondi-... | https://archive.today/kYumW
> Why is the focus on Minneapolis? Is it really the training ground for ICE?
Somalis and Ilhan Omar.
Was talking to a Unitarian Universalist minister recently. He says his life is pretty much dealing with immigration issues for the past year.
He said there is considerable 'chatter' that the next significant target will be Maine because there is a large-ish Somali community there.
I have no idea how reliable that chatter is, so take it as a piece of gossip on the internet.
> the next significant target will be Maine because there is a large-ish Somali community there.
That started a few days ago.
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Also still angry about George Floyd.
They believe that an urban area containing significant immigrant communities but surrounded on all sides by ultra-right-wing exurban and rural people, 99% of whom are white, will be easy to subjugate.
could be that Trump didn't like how Walz openly mocked him during the election
It's full of enemies - well off white liberals and black immigrants.
Governor was VP candidate
Just brings the shit to his people
Watch this at the 5 secod mark[].
It looks like the agent that picked up the disarmed gun had his finger on it and ND'd the initial shot. He jolts his arm right as the first shot goes off. Then all the other officer panic and fire.
Edit: ND = negligent discharge
[] https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2015145197965881786
This doesn't hold to scrutiny. The ICE agent that was first to shoot was the same agent to fire the most shots, I'm led to believe he was the ONLY one that fired shots.
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Just say it as it is, they executed a US citizen.
Executed yet _another_ US citizen.
This is going to keep happening.
Over, and over, and over again, until ICE is disbanded and those involved are held accountable. When that happens (and how high the casualty number gets) is up to the American people.
After pistol whipping him and holding him down with five guys.
His crime? Filming them.
In a few short years some of these ICE workers will be brought up on charges and sentences for their crimes. Just because no one has the gaul to arrest them today doesn't mean they won't in the future. No statute of limitations here.
I would like to believe this, but I think we need new leadership in dem leadership to make this happen.
Trump staged a coup to invalidate an election and install himself as president. Dem leadership thought that slow rolling his prosecution was the right idea. I believe that there is serious risk that the dems just say "well, let's try to put all that behind us" if they win in 2026 and 2028.
If there are elections in 2026 or 2028.
You are terribly optimistic. I think they will face no consequences and the violence will escalate even more. I _could_ be overreacting, but I'm afraid we're on the cusp of something horrible.
So then project past the horribleness.
There will be an accounting. Seems like in history that's more often the case.
Like in the South Park episode from 28 years ago, ICE/MAGA can justify any violence by crying "It's coming right for us!".
Personal gun ownership scares me for this reason. The potential for an incorrect assumption of one of the parties who also has a gun. I’d like to see the people who pull the trigger “accidentally” prosecuted in most cases.
It's the playbook already seen in Argentina, the Middle East and many other countries. But especially Argentina.
The military always has in the back of their mind the idea that they are above people, and this goes from the most deviant and incompetent soldier who still has a 6pack and fighting abilities and thinks all the guys in his small town are wussies all the way up to the highest ranked general who begrudgingly has to meet Senators and Representatives but still think they are nothing but wussies.
A common thread is that they think that society doesn't reward them with enough power for their valuable skills and instead it gives such power to undeserving people and their undeserving skills, for example a mayor who is able to cry on command to empathize with the population when some tragedy happens or the same mayor who got elected by being able to identify people's worries and lie that they'll fix them just to get power.
And if even the smallest doubt begins to enter the mind of the population , the doubt that yes maybe it could be better if the military ran things, the cold execution, the lack of emotion would bring us efficiency....it's already over.... the military dictatorship in effect already in place as there is no way to stop it after the seed of the doubt begins to emerge in the collective minds of the population.
If a malignant actor can convince the military that he can deliver the status in society that they really deserve they'll be willing to kill for that man. And if that malignant actor can also plant a small seed in the collective minds of the population....well get ready to kneel before your new dictator America
This isn't the military. It's worth pointing out our military is very different than those militaries.
Really? Why they accepted to execute the kidnapping of Maduro then? Or the droning made famous by Snowden, or Abu Graib or all the grim stuff that happened in the Middle East ever since 2001?
The Military thinks it's better than everyone and as a personality type they want to be involved in unprecedented stuff to 'leave their mark on the world'
A bad actor can seize such sentiment in a whim
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You can never tell the breaking point of fascism but this certainly looks like it. I'm happy I don't work for a US company because I no longer think it's ethical to do so.
Most people I know, including some on the right disagree with these tactics which seem designed more to intimidate and silence opposition. Of course you’re free to work with whomever you choose but it seems like a pretty empty virtue signal to avoid all companies in a huge, diverse country
The leader of that huge, diverse country controls the most powerful military in the world and is threatening to invade my country and is showing maps where it’s part of the US.
I have a 2 year old daughter.
With every fibre of my being I’m not spending a cent on any US business, person, company.
It might be empty but if enough people do this and put pressure on the US economy it might make a difference. It's unfortunate but many people won't care until it starts effecting them personally.
If choosing your place of employment to align with your values is a “virtue signal,” then maybe we should all be signaling our virtues a lot more.
A country that elected Trump twice in spite of his obvious character flaws.
Also using the term "virtue signal" marks you as an idiot.
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Statement from Michael and Susan Pretti Parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti "We are heartbroken but also very angry. 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. I do not throw around the 'hero' term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. 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. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank You.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-pretti-fatally-sho...
Can ICE agents be prosecuted three years later if the party in Federal power changes?
Any chance to see the other side ? I regularly read the opposite side press, their points are basically this:
- get rid of all immigrants (illegal alients)
- get rid of everyone who is against ICE
- take Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Colombia
Thus seriously, any minimal possibility to justify actions of ICE? Scared, non trained, a very stupid agent, whatever ?
Another angle of the encounter:
https://np.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlvpgy/better_...
ICE is just US IRGC at point.
I feel like open armed conflict between anti-fascist groups and these federal goons is inevitable at this point. When it happens it will be used as pretext for a wider more brutal occupation and will be used as extenuating circumstances to 'bend the rules' come election time.
The winning move here is continued nonviolent opposition, but it only takes one spark to start a fire then who knows what happens
First they came for the illegal immigrants and I did not speak out, because I was not an illegal immigrant.
Then they came for the legal immigrants they didn't like and I did not speak out, because I was not a legal immigrant.
Then they came for their political enemies and I did not speak up, because I was not their political enemy.
Then they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak out for me.
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I am confused.
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I don't know why people are still wasting time with protests and filming. The murderous Nazis won't learn until the people of Minneapolis deal with them the way Afghans dealt with imperialist invaders in Afghanistan. There is another three-letter acronym starting with I that comes to mind.
Think about why the administration and its backers lie so frequently: they know they’re lying, and they know that evidence will come out showing that they’re lying, but they’re gambling on a lot of people being busy and not following the story closely enough to realize how misleading the initial claims were.
They do that because their policies are unpopular and they would lose power if most people voted. That’s why these videos matter: it’s probably not going to convince the MAGA diehards to recant but they’re shocking enough that anyone more patriotic than that might realize that this is far more than normal politics.
Trump-voting but not dedicated-to-evil relatives I know (I have others who are dedicated to evil, they're beyond hope—incidentally, this is a whole thing in Republican circles, folks who haven't been around actual red-state Republicans since the '90s or so have no idea how common some really shocking views about the validity of state violence on people who annoy or politically oppose them are, they outright like this stuff and there are minimum 50 million people like that in this country) are mostly doing the "well both sides say different things and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle" thing about all of this stuff, and refusing to watch the videos that would quickly show them that no, only one side is saying anything at all connected to the truth.
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People are not busy; they're willfully blind to the truth. These people hang out on Facebook which will never surface the truth to them, only misinformation.
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For how long can we keep ignoring this?
Right up until it knocks on our own door.
Maybe if Trump goes after cryptocurrency or AI they'll start to care.
Who’s ignoring it?
Everyone who flagged this submission, and now everyone that can’t see it.
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Republican senators?
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For however long flagging on HN has no downsides.
Until someone comes for them.
It is basically equivalent to "First They Came".
First they came for the Immigrants And I did not speak out Because they were not Immigrants (hell they were stealing jobs so fck them)
Then they came for the US citizens who were Socialist/Leftists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist/Leftists (hell they dare protest the government so fck them)
so and so forth..
You can never tell the breaking point of fascism but this certainly looks like it. I'm happy I don't work for a US company because I no longer think it's ethical to do so.
quick reminder that out of the 8 author of the seminal paper that arguably started the whole LLM thing (attention is all you need) only one is American. all the other are foreign born, studied and worked abroad and only then were recruited by US FAANGs.
Trump's death squads execute another dissident
If not now, when?
So fucking sad and preventable.
I hate to say it, but once again, Trump wins. All of my MAGA family is talking about what's going on in Minneapolis, with pretty predictable reactions. But guess what they're not talking about: Jeffrey Epstein - that's old news, time to move on, Dems are the only ones bringing it up, etc.
@dang Why is this flagged and removed from the front page in seconds.
It Turkey a current popular meme is an old tweet that says “I'm so fed up with politics that I say, 'Let me just focus on this instead,' and whatever that is, they'll come and fuck that up too. You won't even be able to breathe”.
That’s what you will get by not talking politics. US is on the fast track to be like Turkey.
Some of those ICE agents will kill some AI engineer’s father or mother who has the wrong accents, wrong color or doesn’t speak “American”, it will go viral in India or China and US companies will start paying warzone premiums to hire any talent.
> > That’s what you will get by not talking politics. US is on the fast track to be like Turkey.
On the contrary, if everybody is so focused on the National Politics contests as we've been ever since 2015 , it's only natural that the winner of that popularity contest becomes a demi God with unlimited powers (on top of what were already granted him by the very generous Constitution).
It's only logic, the more followed the contest, the more popular/emboldened will the winner of the contest be.
It's true for beauty paegents, boxing matches, movie and music prizes and yes even Presidential elections.
The answer is in local politics , attention there because that's where stuff has to be applied on the territory.
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Tagging users like that is not a site function. If you want to get in touch with the moderators, send email with the contact link in the page footer.
"flagged" always means that users flagged it, not moderator action.
And there are a lot of readers who will flag all submissions about US politics, no matter the polarity of the article.
> "flagged" always means that users flagged it, not moderator action. And there are a lot of readers who will flag all submissions about US politics, no matter the polarity of the article.
The thing is that dang has generally not unflagged any posts about topics like these in the past, so there's little reason to think the flagging is only a result of temporary inaction by the moderation team. Rather it is a consistent pattern permitted to exist by said team.
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unless you alays have your email open on your device, its a tiny PITA to fire it up, login, remember your issue, and compose a proper message.
so when you [@user] tag a user rather than email its kinda like a rhetorical question, your not expecting a reply, but if someone just happens to pass by and notice your tag, they might answer.
also @user might mean wasted desire to some, but other users here might see a previously agreed upon heuristic is in play, and act in that context.
for example if someone from a very small subset of usernames that i recognize, were to @rolph me, i might SMS them at a previously agreed mobile number, if i see the signal in a reasonable time.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> "interesting new phenomenon"
Pardon me, but summary executions in the United States taking place in broad daylight, with seeming impunity, is very much a new and novel phenomenon, and incredibly interesting to many of us.
These are events of historic significance.
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I second this question, @dang. I would like some explanation of the moderation policy here to at least understand the reasoning.
With posts such as "Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S." and "Trump wins presidency for second time" being allowed (just to pick the top two Trump submissions), there is a clear precedent that big events in American politics are considered suitable for the front page.
I can see only two stances justifying removal here
(1) someone winning the presidency is considered an important event, but that same president then organizing a paramilitary force of lackeys to unlawfully execute protesters in "enemy states" without any repercussion is not considered as an important event but simply normal politics (which is not an apolitical position but rather a radical and controversial political opinion enforced by the moderation team)
(2) the topic is expected to cause anger, and only well-mannered and jovial discussions are suitable for the front page. This completely disregards that sometimes the rational and constructive response to these kinds of developments are anger, and a discussion about how to direct and act on such anger within the tech community should happen.
Everything is politics. And enforcing (or not correcting) mandatory silence on certain political topics is a political decision by the moderation team, colored by their priorities and their word view.
I also want to re-iterate and highlight the excellent summary made by lynndotpy:
> For anyone wondering why this is relevant to HackerNews: > - There are tech companies and workers in companies outside California, > - A government deploying a militarized police force to execute people in the streets is bad for the economy, > - That government is the United States, and so this is bad for the world economy, > - A lot of the people in our industry are immigrants from outside the United States, > - If you're a HackerNews user in the United States, you can be shot and killed just like this.
People say there are users who don't want politics on their frontpage, but I think it's just simpler: we have a nontrivial minority of users who are pro-MAGA and like what's going on, so they downvote anything that makes Trump's action look bad. :/
And some HN users are being paid a lot of money to write software that facilitates the actions of this administration and/or further destabilizes democracy.
A reminder that /active is the actual frontpage to HN. The landing page is just what the censors allow you to see.
It should be the reverse. The fontpage ought to be "active"—add a "filtered" link the to header/banner for people that hate seeing politics.
Show dead is also your friend.
Thanks for the link to https://news.ycombinator.com/active; didn't know that one.
As for the existence of "censors" that don't "allow" you to see anything. That's not how this site works, and your lack of carefulness stating that leads me to downvote that.
As much as I hate that anything regarding the rise of fascism in the US get's insta-flagged (by a community, not a "censor"), it's still very easy to find such posts, for example on an aggregator [1] and on the /active subpage you just mentioned.
It will also be broadly shared on regular (social) media, which is an oft stated reason this kind of stories get flagged by the community, although I think there are many other reasons.
[1] https://hckrnews.com
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Because people flagged it?
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>@dang and other mods - when ICE abduct your kids on the way home from school, kick in your door and shoot people in your street will you feel proud of your cowardly behaviour here?
It won't happen to them because their boss (Garry Tan) is associated with the power behind the thrown (Peter Thiel).
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Fascist autocracy is unwieldy. Freedom is the natural state. It will win in the end. How long that takes is up to the people.
Judging by history, the natural state appears to be feudalism
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> athletic men
Surprisingly, many of them are fat.
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At least half of the flags are probably from off the books bots used by HN to filter dissent. I’m not kidding.
pg doesn't support this, so I don't buy these conspiracy theories.
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Don't comply in advance.
You are spouting authoritarian philosophy. In America, you are supposed to have rights vis a vis law enforcement. They do not have dominion over you.
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What authority did they have to arrest him? He wasn’t an immigrant covered by a warrant, impeding whatever legitimate tasks they were doing, they chose to walk over to him, chose to initiate physical violence against the first person, chose to escalate when he tried to help the first person the agents assaulted, and the video showed that he was disarmed and subdued before they shot him.
Did you come to that conclusion after watching the videos, or just after reading statements from DHS?
Dont bother replying to Palantir bots...
ah, because the two choices the government agents have are "do nothing" and "mag dump a guy after you had 5-6 guys pepper spraying and beating him on the ground"
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How do you look at this video and conclude it’s the protestors fault?
What dystopia do you live in where a shoving match, resulting in someone getting restrained, should turn into execution of the restrained person in broad daylight?
I'm saying the administration is aiming to provoke violence from the citizenry so they can declare martial law, and that they were hoping to achieve their aim sooner. It is astonishing that no real violence has yet been inflicted upon an ICE thug, in Minneapolis or anywhere else. I never concluded that the protestor is at fault.
Let's not.
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Looks like the citizen was disarmed by an agent, then executed by an agent, then a different agent emptied a clip into the corpse.
https://bsky.app/profile/bradmossesq.bsky.social/post/3md6pi...
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Related, six days ago. Since then, the FBI agent who indicated a civil rights investigation into the shooting of Renee Good was warranted, has resigned.
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mcpk34cyu22p
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> We'll see if suspect ends up having had a gun on him.
Will we? None of the ICE goons are wearing body cams, there will be no court case over this. The pink lady’s video might show something, but that’s it.
A video floating around: I counted ten shots.
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In America we have the second amendment and open carry laws. Legally speaking, people openly carrying a weapon should not in itself be considered illegal.
I said "resist arrest while being armed and reaching for a gun"
I didn't say "have a legal firearm".
There's some key points in there.
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Stop repeating the lies of the administration.
Minnesota's DOC chief corrects the record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXcAqhjVXoU
The ICU nurse with no criminal record? Get out of here with your both side nonsense
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I think you need to watch the video. I encourage you to think ahead of time what you would define as "intimidating", though.
The Gestapo, too, was just law enforcement officers doing their job.
Sometimes the law and its agents are armed thugs terrorizing the populace.
They are not protecting "ICE the agency". They are protesting "ICE the paramilitary force".