“Americans are not liking what they see,” Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said Sunday of the Saturday morning events in Minneapolis that resulted in the shooting death of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol officer.

Ya think, governor?

So what do you and your fellow Republicans plan to do about a situation that has gone so far out of control as to horrify and outrage even those who believe that the U.S. rule of law should include its laws on immigration?

During the election, as President Donald Trump insisted that this election would mean the mass deportation of the unauthorized, however deeply embedded in American society, wiser heads pointed out that this was a Sisyphean task that necessarily would involve guerilla-style urban warfare likely to cause collateral damage to both enforcement officers and members of the public, while resulting in merely performative results. Given the numbers.

This is an inevitable consequence of both political parties, fearful of their extremes, punting for years on an immigration policy that secured the borders and offered a path forward for those who have been here for years and likely now reside in families of mixed citizenship status.

Sure, mass deportations offered electoral red meat as Republicans realized most Americans were disturbed by the hundreds of thousands of people flowing across the border with impunity during the Joe Biden administration. Still, the plan for this kind of enforcement action was doomed from the start.

There were too many downsides in trying to deport people far in both geography and time from the U.S. border, people who are part of communities and institutions who enjoy the protection of American citizens who might have a variety of views on the matter of immigration in the abstract but are hardwired to protect their own friends, family members and communities.

Law enforcement officers well understand that the line between protesting peacefully and interfering is one that requires well-trained police officers to, well, police. Yet many states, including Illinois and Minnesota, already had laws specifically preventing local police from cooperating with immigration enforcement and thus being present at their clashes.

People have genuine disagreements about so-called sanctuary city laws, but the existence of those laws should have been no surprise. They were why Minneapolis cops were not present when Renee Nicole Good blocked the trajectory of ICE officers (and who might have persuaded her to move away without killing or even harming her), or when the armed and impassioned Alex Pretti showed up to protest alongside many of his peers.

Instead of a de-escalation of a situation, Pretti was killed. And while there are always as many views on these actions as camera angles, we know of no nonpartisan witness who has watched those images and come to the reasonable conclusion that the killing was inevitable. Or even justified.

We are familiar with what happens when stressed or otherwise unhinged officers with guns suddenly lose their minds under extreme pressure and their difficult professional job becomes a battle with a mortal enemy who must be eradicated. We watched what happened when Laquan McDonald was murdered by a police officer in Chicago in 2014. This felt to us like we were watching it all over again, just a few hundred miles to our north.

And let’s remember that Good and Pretti were U.S. citizens, thus outside the remit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. Instead, the Trump administration now finds itself in an escalating war with its own people, including many of its prior supporters.

Clearly, Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino learned nothing from Chicago where he encountered similar neighborhood opposition that should have been predictive for his White House bosses. By the time the Border Patrol reached the much smaller city of Minneapolis, the opposition had hardened, and, by Saturday, already was angrily protesting what it saw as the unjustified killing of an ordinary citizen. All of this should have been anticipated and avoided. What is the job of a president if not to protect the lives of Americans?

Minneapolis is not some great center of illegal immigration. The Trump administration spends far too much time online, and the immigration enforcement surge to our north surely was driven by its anger over the massive welfare fraud scandal, which received so much focus online, with its emphasis on the many perpetrators who claimed the African nation of Somalia as their country of origin.

That welfare fraud was real, as the number of convictions attest, and its scale is a stunner and an indictment of the state’s officials, asleep at the wheel. But this was always a fraud issue, not an immigration issue, and the White House wrongly assumed that the perps mostly were in the U.S. without legal permission; on the contrary, most of them were and are U.S. citizens or permanent residents or legal refugees.

But instead of cooperative layers of law enforcement rooting out the criminality, which is the way it should have been, the White House unleashed its paramilitary Border Patrol, thus conflating national origin with legality of immigration status, which is about as un-American as it gets. That gave even more moral conviction to those hell-bent on stopping the enforcement actions.

We called for an independent investigation, a joint effort of federal, state and local forces, into the death of Good, and we do so today again into the death of Pretti. We’ve said from the start that the intemperate words of some (not all) left-leaning politicians have encouraged ordinary citizens to put themselves in danger, and we’ve not changed that view even as we respect the right to protest with every fiber of one’s being.

We are glad to hear that the lightning rod that is Bovino is leaving Minneapolis. If only his bosses were truly rethinking their plans for the rest of the country. We can’t abide more deaths.

___

©2026 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.