Alex Pretti’s Killing Has Upended the Right’s Narratives About Government Overreach

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

On a frigid day in late January, more than a dozen masked federal agents surrounded a white ranch house in St. Paul, Minnesota. They entered the home with guns drawn after one busted open the front door with a battering ram; when they re-emerged, they led a man wearing nothing but sandals, blue underwear, and a red plaid blanket thrown over his shoulders, head bowed, into the street. ChongLy “Scott” Thao, a U.S. citizen, told the Associated Press that the agents handcuffed him in front of his 4-year-old grandson and refused to let him retrieve his ID. In Thao’s telling, the agents drove him to the “middle of nowhere,” photographed him outside in the subfreezing temperatures, and asked to see the ID they had not let him collect before they returned him to his rental home a few hours later.

The Department of Homeland Security said its agents detained Thao because they believed he was living with two convicted sex offenders they were seeking to arrest, which he has denied. The AP reported that the nearest sex offender listed as living in Thao’s zip code is more than two blocks away, raising the question of why the department thought its targets were living at his address. And under what authority, exactly, did these immigration enforcement officers break into Thao’s rental? According to the Washington Post, ICE agents now have been empowered to enter homes in order to arrest immigrants, a directive that advocates say flagrantly violates the Constitution. “The highest levels of ICE are, in effect, saying agents should break down your door, ransack your home, terrify your children, arrest or detain you without a judicial warrant,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told MSNOW. “It simply means the law means nothing to these agents.”

A flex of power like this should confirm the deeply-held suspicions of many on the right that federal agents are, as former National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre infamously worded it 30 years ago, “jack-booted thugs armed to the teeth who break down doors, open fire with automatic weapons and kill law-abiding citizens.” From Waco and Ruby Ridge in the ‘90s to armed standoffs at the Bundy ranch and the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in the mid-2010s, conservatives have long viewed use of force by federal agents as tyrannical — even when that threat of force was entirely made up, like when conservative officials and commentators stoked conspiracy theories that former President Obama would use military training exercises as cover to implement martial law and seize law-abiding citizens’ guns. 

The right’s pushback on government authority has always been selective and identity-based: white ranchers asserting their property claims, good; diverse groups demanding a correction to racist policing, bad. So over the first year and change of Trump’s second term, conservatives have cheered the deployment of National Guard troops to the streets of multiple American cities without local officials’ consent. They’ve reflexively backed immigration officers who’ve been given wide latitude to execute the president’s mass deportation agenda and shot at least 10 people, three of them fatally. The cognitive dissonance on display in the right’s full-throated embrace of this violent crackdown may be staggering, but it stands to reason that now that these operations serve their political aims, conservatives who were suspicious of federal agents’ actions under Democrats don’t have the same qualms. “It’s not surprising that we see people saying, ‘It’s fine for police to crack the heads of people I don’t like, but not okay when it’s people for whom I feel sympathy,’” Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown Law professor and former reserve Washington, D.C., police officer, told the Washington Post. 

The about-face is most glaring in the reaction to the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday. Several Trump administration officials quickly faulted Pretti, a licensed gun owner, for having a weapon on him while he filmed ICE agents. (It is legal to carry concealed weapons to a protest in the state.) Bill Essayli, who Trump appointed as a U.S. attorney in California, posted on X after the shooting, “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a Fox News interview that, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want.” Both DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested peaceful protesters carry signs, not guns and ammunition. 

This position would be news to supporters of the Bundy family, or to the 180-plus Capitol rioters who carried dangerous or deadly weapons with them when they stormed the halls of Congress on January 6, 2020, and have since been pardoned by President Trump. It would also surprise conservative fans of Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted of murder after he argued that he shot three racial justice protesters, two of them fatally, in self-defense. Essayli’s comment in particular drew a sharp rebuke from the NRA, who said the notion that having a gun in the presence of law enforcement justified the use of force was “dangerous and wrong.” “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens,” the gun-rights group posted on X. 

It’s not just gun rights groups who are struggling to get on board with this messaging shift. In response to Patel’s Fox News interview, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted, “Can the FBI just enforce the law without adopting every leftist gun banner talking point? 🚫Carrying a gun = bad intentions. 🚫Loaded guns = bad guns. 🚫Spare magazines = extra bad. 🚫More than 10 rounds = bad.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, both Trump boosters who gave a wink-and-a-nod to the conspiracy theories about Obama gearing up to implement martial law, have each called for the administration to rethink its handling of the situation on the ground in Minnesota.  

The splintering response to Pretti’s death suggests some on the right are losing patience with Trump’s nascent police state. Support for abolishing ICE had already increased by 21 points among all Americans and 10 points among Republicans from last June, according to a YouGov poll taken on the day of Pretti’s killing. Many GOP officials are now calling for a full investigation into his death and for immigration enforcement to pull out of Minnesota. In an attempt to wrest back control of the narrative, Trump has dispatched his border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota and recalled “Nazi cosplayer” Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol official who directed aggressive operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and elsewhere. But when even the lawyer defending the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good thinks the president has gone too far, he’s already lost it.