The toxic culture that killed Alex Pretti | Will Bunch Newsletter

Dan McQuade had such a way with words that it’s almost impossible to find the right ones to contemplate a Philadelphia without Dan writing about all the bat-guano crazy things we do here. Dan, who wrote for a variety of sites including glory-days Deadspin and Defector, died from cancer last week. He’d just turned 43 — way too young. We started blogging at the same time in the mid-2000s and I was blessed to know him from that long-lost scene. He leaves behind his wife, a 2-year-old son, and a remarkable body of work — like essential coverage of the Wildwood T-shirt scene, or his analysis of Sylvester Stallone’s absurd 30-mile run in Rocky II — that people will still be reading and talking about for many years to come.

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The fear was palpable even before the ink had dried on what Donald Trump called his “Big Beautiful Bill” — the 2025 legislation that funneled a whopping $170 billion toward immigration enforcement, including doubling the number of agents in the field from 10,000 to 20,000.

Many warned the surge of inexperienced rookies — indeed, their training was slashed from 90 days to just 47 (or 48) days to race the new agents out into the streets — could lead to acts of police brutality, or worse, as an alphabet soup of Homeland Security agencies donned masks and went after immigrants in agitated urban neighborhoods.

Those whispers became a scream as Americans watched the horrific videos of a masked federal agent walking in front of the family SUV driven by a Minneapolis mom, Renee Good, and then firing three shots that killed her. Seventeen days later, one of the officers in a scrum beating up observer Alex Pretti — apparently not seeing that Pretti had already been stripped of his legal handgun — fired the first blast of what became a volley of 10 shots that killed the 37-year-old Minneapolis intensive care nurse.

On Sunday, the ProPublica newsroom revealed what the U.S. government had successfully kept secret for more than a week: the names of the two agents — both from South Texas — who fired the fusillade of shots that killed Pretti on a busy Minneapolis street.

They were not rookies.

Border Patrol officer Jesus “Jesse” Ochoa, 43 — who, according to his ex-wife, is also a gun enthusiast with 25 pistols, rifles, and shotguns — had his heart set on joining the federal force after earning his criminal justice degree from the University of Texas-Pan American and finally got his wish eight years ago, ProPublica wrote.

The site reported that the other shooter, Raymundo Gutierrez, joined Customs and Border Protection in 2014 and works for its Office of Field Operations, where he is assigned to a kind of agency SWAT team, involved in high-risk operations.

The men who gunned down Pretti were well-trained and experienced, as was Jonathan Ross, the ICE and former Border Patrol officer who shot and killed Good during their Jan. 7 encounter. Their involvement in the killings that shocked America suggest that moderates calling for reforms at ICE, but not for a radical reworking of immigration enforcement, are failing to understand the much deeper problems.

Garrett M. Graff, a journalist and best-selling author who’s been tracking Border Patrol and its brother agencies since their expansion in the 2000s told me on Monday he was not at all surprised that the three officers firing the deadly shots were highly experienced.

“I do think it’s enormously relevant that the shooters all have CBP backgrounds,” Graff said. “It’s an agency that routinely uses deadly force outside of the norms of law enforcement in the U.S. and it’s not a surprise to me that in both cases we see agents quick to resort to deadly force.”

Graff added that said Ross’ fatal shooting of Good mirrored problems that have existed in he agency for years. He said it “jibes with a 2013 internal report that criticized CBP agents and officers for putting themselves in danger by stepping into the path of vehicles, and firing their guns out of ‘frustration’ rather than fear."

I reached out to Graff, who was a Pulitzer finalist for his history of the Watergate scandal, because just two days before the ProPublica report, he offered some extraordinary history and background about CPB in testimony before an Illinois state commission that’s looking into misconduct during the 2025 immigration raids there.

Graff’s statement went viral on social media because it detailed a toxic culture at CPB that’s highlighted by shocking levels of criminality among its agents, from on-the-job brutality to off-duty thuggery, as well as domestic violence.

Finding that at least 4,913 Border Patrol agents and CPB officers were arrested over a 20-year period, Graff testified: “Indeed, for much of the 2010s and likely before and since, it appears the crime rate of CBP agents and officers was higher per capita than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States.”

Ironic, huh? But why has this happened?

A lot of the problem, Graff testified, lies in the rapid surge of Border Patrol from around 9,200 agents at the time of the 2001 terror attacks to roughly 21,000 by the Obama administration. Those new hires, he said, were hastily recruited with limited background checks, rushed into the field with minimal training, and lacked the arrest powers of more rigorous federal agencies like the FBI.

On the job, this new cadre bonded over a culture that simmered in misogyny and racism and then boiled over in backing an authoritarian like Donald Trump. “Agents developed a strong tradition of frontier-style justice; its agency motto, “Honor first,” is as much a statement of machismo as it is about integrity," Graff testified.

This culture has proved lethal long before the frigid streets of Minneapolis. Graff said that CBP agents have been involved in at least 72 deadly shootings or use of force incidents since 2010, making it “perhaps the nation’s deadliest law enforcement agency.”

He’s not the only one to suggest that Border Patrol’s problem is its warped culture, not a lack of training or body cams. Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent who became a whistleblower, has described CBP as plagued by abusive officers and a pervasive rape culture. In her memoir, she calls Border Patrol “a criminal organization disguised as a federal law enforcement agency.”

America’s response to the 9/11 attacks — the birth of the Department of Homeland Security and the dramatic expansion of Border Patrol as well as the creation of ICE in 2003 — launched a monster that has now blown back against America’s own citizens, in Minnesota and elsewhere.

This fundamental notion — that ICE, CPB and Border Patrol are rotten way past the point of tinkering around the margins — is what needs to be driving the debate on Capitol Hill. The incremental reforms that some top Democrats are pushing such as body cams or requiring arrest warrants are fine as stop-gap measures, but they would not have saved the lives of Pretti or Good.

The only fix that makes sense is abolishing ICE and all the other post-2001 excesses and returning to just the essential functions that are actually needed: airport security, arresting the relatively small number of violent criminals who enter America, humanely securing the border and processing people seeking refuge from their violent homelands.

Abolishing ICE and radically reforming the rest of a broken system won’t bring back Good or Pretti either, but it would be the most fitting and appropriate memorial to America’s slain martyrs of 2026.

Question: Was the Minnesota general strike successful? And what are the prospects of a true national strike? — @exlibrophilly.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: The answer to your first question would have to be a “yes.” It was telling that 60 Minnesota corporations felt compelled to issue a statement (albeit one that I viewed as milquetoast) and that the Trump regime started making some partial concessions after thousands of Minnesotans skipped work to take to the streets. On the second part, I noticed there was chatter about a national general strike last Friday, and very little came of it. That’s because a successful nationwide shutdown — something that has never happened before — would require weeks, not days, of planning and committed, full-throated support from the top labor unions and other key organizations like the Democratic Party. Given that the real power in America seems to be economic, I would urge these power brokers to join with regular folks and make it happen.

Newsletter readers feel strongly that — while there’s nothing wrong with proposed reforms such as unmasking, visible badges, marked vehicles and the proper use of arrest warrants — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be abolished and immigration enforcement should be totally overhauled. Wrote Daniel Hoffman: “Any of the reforms, controls and procedures that the Democrats are likely to impose on ICE are useless as long as Donald Trump is president and he has stooges to carry out his campaigns of vengeance and nationalist bigotry.” Thomas Ceresini agreed: “Dems *should* demand that ICE be abolished immediately, and that CBP be reorganized from top to bottom, purging all the fascists from its ranks.”

📮 This week’s question: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has been all over the news lately with the release of his new book and a controversial passage about the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign. But his stock for president in 2028 seems to be falling. Would you like to see him run for president, or vice president, or neither? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Shapiro 2028” in the subject line.

Tulsi Gabbard was in the news a lot in the first couple of shocking months after Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, and for good reason. The 47th president’s stunning pick of the former leftist as his director of national intelligence (DNI) barely made it out of the Senate on a 52-48 vote, with Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren calling Gabbard a likely if perhaps unwitting Russian asset because of her history of statements that aligned with the Vladimir Putin regime.

But then something even stranger happened: Gabbard largely disappeared from sight. Most notably, the nation’s intelligence chief was not heard from during the U.S. attack on Venezuela that captured and deposed its strongman leader Nicolás Maduro and reportedly was excluded from its planning — likely because in her Democratic past she had vehemently opposed American intervention there. But it was even more jarring when and how Gabbard resurfaced last week: Overseeing an FBI raid at the Fulton County, Georgia election hub that the president has long insisted — in a Big Lie with zero evidence — was the epicenter of some type of fraud that prevented his reelection in 2020.

Gabbard’s appearance in Georgia raised many questions, especially since the spy agencies that she oversees as DNI are supposed to watch for foreign intelligence threats — not get involved in domestic policy. On Monday, Gabbard sent a letter to key Democratic lawmakers who’d demanded answers, explaining that she monitored the raid because Trump has asked her to be there and insisting that election security is one of her duties because of the possibility of foreign interference.

The Georgia raid, and Gabbard’s involvement, has sent off all kinds of alarm bells that the Trump regime is planning to gin up a voter fraud case — even though thorough recounts proved that Joe Biden narrowly won Georgia in 2020 — as an excuse for an unprecedented federal intervention in November’s midterm election. We also learned this week that while she was in Atlanta, Gabbard even facilitated a phone call between Trump and several FBI agents involved on the raid, a stunning breach of protocol. On Monday, Trump went on a podcast with his former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting” in 15 unspecified key states. Such a move would mean the end of American democracy as we’ve known it.

Meanwhile, Gabbard is back on the radar in a big way. Also on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the DNI is the subject of an explosive whistleblower complaint that, according to the whistleblower’s attorney, the White House has listed as highly classified and is refusing to share with Congress. Leaders on Capitol Hill need to fight to get this secret information by any means necessary. In the increasingly fraught fight to save the American Experiment, we need to know who Gabbard is really working for.

Remember affirmative action? Four years ago the Supreme Court was still considering the legal challenge to the use of race as a factor in college admissions, which it did strike down later that year, in a foreshadowing of the Trump regime’s much wider war against diversity. On Feb. 3, 2022, I wrote that while the threat to affirmative action was indeed alarming, the existing rules were already failing African American college applicants. I wrote: “In a nation where the Black-white wealth ratio is 20-1, recruiting Black kids was a low priority. These self-inflicted wounds had little to do with the legal status of affirmative action.” Read the rest: “Supreme Court affirmative action case pretends we haven’t already wrecked Black college access.”

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