The Family of a Martyr
By 
Since the Trump administration and its ICE shock troops can kill with impunity, it’s worth remembering just how horrible this is for the family members of the martyrs for justice, as this story on Alex Pretti’s mom discusses:
It’s been six months since Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents conducting ICE operations in Minneapolis—and still, his mother says, no one has been held accountable for the injustice.
“Six-months of pain, a roller coaster of trauma over and over,” Susan Pretti wrote in a devastating open letter on Instagram. “Every time another a death, another mention, a picture, a tribute, a sorrow so deep.”
Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen employed by the Department of Veteran Affairs. He’d been filming protesters blowing whistles around masked border patrol agents in January when he saw one of them pushed by an officer. Videos of the event show him intervening, whereafter he was tackled by five more agents, one of whom repeatedly hit his head with a metal object. In footage, captured from various angles, federal agents appear to remove a gun from his waistband, with someone warning also “he’s got a gun”—though Pretti never actually appears to reach for it. After being hit with multiple shots, Pretti was killed on January 24, 2026. Per documents reviewed by ProPublica, the two agents that fired the shots were identified in government records as Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez.
“No-one has been held accountable, no apologies, not a single phone call from any governmental official, hospital personnel, or the Mpls police dept,” Pretti’s mother writes in her letter. “Will I ever be able to enjoy life again? How does one living knowing that I have no power to change what has happened?”
It’s worth noting that the idea that we can just get out there and protest and demand accountability and that accountability will happen is a complete and absolute myth.
Moreover, even if Democrats take the entirety of the federal government, not a single architect of this is ever going to serve a day in jail and everyone needs to get their heads around that because it’s just a fact. I don’t even think it would be good politics to do that much to try–the average idiot who decides American elections are going to see that as “persecution” and also “what about the price of eggs.”
I say none of this as a good thing. But it is a thing.