Alex Pretti’s ICE murder is beyond politics. This is about good vs. evil

In the waning days of the worst January any of us can remember, I desperately wanted to tell a good story about America, and then on Friday, I watched one unfold in frozen Minnesota with an abiding love and white-hot intensity that seemed to melt the subzero air.

The sight of as many as 50,000 people packing the downtown streets on a minus-9-degree day to demand that federal immigration raiders leave Minneapolis was a high watermark for a pro-democracy movement that refuses to obey the autocracy of Donald Trump.

I was especially moved by the images of a polyglot of clergy from all across the nation — priests, rabbis, imams — leading the protests as they blocked traffic at the Minneapolis airport before marching on the headquarters of the giant retailer Target, pleading for an end to any cooperation with ICE. The group included as many as a half-dozen rabbis, Unitarian minsters, and other faith leaders from the Philadelphia area.

Saturday morning, I reached out to one of them: Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, a professor emeritus at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote. We talked about how — in a moment when pollsters and pundits fret about the steep decline in religiosity in American life — members of the clergy are providing a moral leadership that so many crave.

Kreimer told me about the instant bond in Minneapolis between the many rabbis there — the ICE raids “had a magnetic quality to them because of the echoes of the Gestapo," she said — and other faith leaders like Black clergy, who were reminded of 19th-century slave patrols, and white Protestant ministers ashamed over a rising tide of white Christian nationalism in the Republican Party.

“People see coming out of the government — from out of the president specifically — such cruelty, such contempt, such dehumanizing language and just crudeness and awful meanness,“ the rabbi said. ”But yes, actually people are looking for a different kind of culture of kindness. And yes, they can find it perhaps in a spiritual setting."

While we were on the phone, one of the lowest and most immoral acts in America’s 250-year history was taking place on the same snow-covered Minneapolis streets that had just been overflowing Friday with a vast sea of righteousness.

At 9:05 a.m. Central Time, a 37-year-old community volunteer and nurse named Alex Pretti stepped between a half-dozen masked federal agents and a female volunteer they were attacking with pepper spray, documenting the moment on his phone. In a split second, the goon squad had thrown Pretti to the ground, punching and kicking him in a brutal scene that looked like a documentary about the rise of Nazi Germany, or maybe an outtake from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

Then, shockingly, a shot rang out. Then a volley of as many as 10 more. Pretti had been summarily executed in public by agents of the U.S. government, in a scene that was captured on multiple phone cameras from every angle and will haunt the American soul for generations to come.

In the first 24 days of 2026, there have been three homicides in the city of Minneapolis. Two of them have been committed by agents from ICE or the U.S. Border Patrol. And the similarities between Saturday’s murder and the Jan. 7 fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good go beyond the sad fact that both victims were 37-year-old millennials who’d moved to Minneapolis in hopes the progressive enclave could offer them a better life, only to see their dreams cut short by a repressive regime.

Both Good and Pretti came under a vicious second attack before their families had even been notified — falsely slandered as “terrorists” by their own government that lacks even the tiniest shred of human decency. As with Good’s murder, the Trump regime asked Americans to believe a ridiculously fabricated version of what went down on Nicollet Avenue instead of their own eyes and ears.

This time, the Department of Homeland Security raced out the lies that Pretti — who was legally carrying a licensed, holstered handgun — had brandished his weapon at the Border Patrol officers, when videos show the nurse only holding his phone, and also when the gun was safely pulled away by an agent before the shooting began. DHS spun a fantasy that Pretti was there to kill officers when he was just protecting his neighbors.

» READ MORE: ion Gift Share Minneapolis ICE murder is Trump’s Waterloo in America’s war for the truth

“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting,” the victim’s heartbroken parents, Michael and Susan Pretti, said in a statement late Saturday, adding: “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”

When Good was slain less than three weeks ago, I wrote that her death might mark a turning point in the war for objective truth that requires combatting the Orwellian Big Lies at the core of the Trump regime’s tyrannical rule. Both in Friday’s massive protests and Saturday’s aftermath to Pretti’s murder, you see how America is already changing, for good.

Even online message boards about the most non-political topics — like cats — were cluttered Saturday with posts expressing outrage or denouncing ICE and the Trump regime. A pundit for the ultimate dude-bro, anti-“woke” site Barstool Sports wrote that “Pretti was murdered by ICE with zero justification for deadly force,” while NBA All-Star Tyrese Haliburton tweeted in agreement: “Alex Pretti was murdered.”

Most importantly, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, with the ability to stop most legislation with a filibuster by 41 of the chamber’s 47 Democrats, announced Saturday he will work to block a new appropriations bill for DHS that’s due by the end of the month as long as ICE occupies Minneapolis and keeps abusing people. The time is right. A fight over funding ICE could be the decisive battle of the Trump years, and it’s clear that many Americans are ready for this fight.

The tired conventional wisdom of politics that has cowed the likes of Schumer for so long also died in that hail of gunfire on Saturday. This thing is way beyond politics now. The brute force and absurd lies of a would-be American dictatorship have finally made people realize this is no longer left vs. right, but good vs. evil.

“My father warned us, ‘When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind,’” Bernice King, the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., wrote of Pretti’s murder. “What we are witnessing now (masked raids, people taken without due process, vigilante, Gestapo, and slave patrol-like tactics, normalized under the color of law) is a moral crisis.”

That moral fight has come full circle. In 1965, the televised images of Alabama state troopers clubbing peaceful voting-rights marchers in Selma led hundreds of clergy from across America to fly south to join King in a march on the state capital of Montgomery. One of those ministers, Rev. James Reeb of Boston, was murdered by racist thugs. That historic effort inspired today’s faith leaders who descended on Minneapolis.

“People are searching for values,” Kreimer said after returning from her sessions with Minnesota activists, who trained her on how to organize people when ICE inevitably descends on Philadelphia. She added that they are “saying, ‘I am repelled by this. What is it about this? It’s not OK. What is it in the way that I live my life that I need to do about this?’”

There’s no disputing that church attendance is nowhere near what it was in 1965, or that organized religion has the same kind of public trust issues as other institutions. But the unthinkable scenes of thuggery on once placid American streets, and the blatant lies from our leaders, clearly has people asking questions about the arc of a moral universe that have been suppressed for far too long.

It’s been too easy to become jaded about the word “evil” and its meaning when that term has been abused by cynical politicians to justify their pointless wars.

But it’s become impossible to watch the courage of whistle-blowing everyday citizens putting their lives on the line to fight for the neighbors they don’t even know, or to see the utter depravity of top government officials slandering innocent murder victims while their bodies are still warm, and not conclude: Yes, there is good and evil in this world.

The church pews might be empty, but millions of Americans are still desperate to affirm that they love thy neighbor. In the shock and sorrow over the Minneapolis murders, this is something we can all cling to.

I don’t know what lies ahead on this bumpy road, or how many more Alex Prettis or Renee Goods will have to die before the positive moral force that finally awoke in Minneapolis can fully reclaim America. It’s tough to think about right now. But what’s clear is this: The time for choosing is today. Which side are you on?