Eleven days before immigration agents shot Alex Pretti dead in the street — before they fired four bullets into his back, paused, and then fired six more into his motionless body — they’d had a prior altercation with him.
Pretti, a thirty-seven-year-old intensive care unit nurse, had raised his boot and kicked out the taillight of an unmarked SUV. Agents stopped their vehicle in the middle of the street, slammed him to the frozen asphalt, breaking his rib, and then fired pepper balls at shocked onlookers. Video of the incident shows Pretti was carrying a legally registered handgun, the same one that was taken from him moments before he was fatally shot, but he never reached for it either time.
After his murder, it was reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had previously exchanged information on Pretti, possibly adding him to a database the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is compiling of protesters in 2026. Speculation then quickly spread online that Pretti had been targeted by agents and publicly executed for daring to kick their vehicle.
We’ll likely never know if Pretti was overtly targeted or not (agents appeared to kill Renée Good two weeks earlier for simply acting as an observer), but the suspicion is not totally unreasonable. We have many examples of ICE and DHS specifically targeting people that the US mainstream press would call, if they lived in a faraway country, “political dissidents.”
It is, after all, what happened to Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student organizer at Columbia University. In March 2025, Khalil was kidnapped in front of his pregnant wife by DHS for his pro-Palestine organizing and illegally held in an ICE detention facility for three months.
Another instance was the abduction of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral candidate at Tufts University, who was snatched off the street by masked agents and illegally held in ICE detention after writing a single op-ed in her campus newspaper calling…
Auteur: Levi Vonk
