Oh my the criminal gang thugs with all the weapons and beating up / killing people are the victims because people disrespect them while local government won’t help them hurt more nonwhite people. Cry me a few more tears. WTF reality are we living in! Everything Bovino the Nazi wannabee gets all the facts wrong, but that is the intent. There is no more truth, justice, and the American way. It is gang thugs trying to get their gang to the top of the heap and the public is just canon fodder for them. That a member of the public can be present and video their illegal activity must mean they are a US hating domestic terrorist who failed to instantly obey the lawless gang thugs. Notice the last paragraph, they moved the shooters out of the state just like they did with Jonathan Ross who shot Renee good. It is to protect the thugs from state laws charging them with the crimes they are doing. Hugs
Gregory Bovino applauded his agents’ actions in Minnesota, despite one citizen being killed by agents.
“We respect that Second Amendment right. But those rights don’t count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers,” Gregory Bovino said. | Angelina Katsani/AP
Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino on Sunday said his Customs and Border Patrol agents are “the victims” after they shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minnesota.
In an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” host Dana Bash pointed out that Bovino had repeatedly referred to Pretti as a “suspect” as he defended CBP’s training and de-escalation tactics.
“With respect, it feels as though in some ways you’re blaming the victim here,” Bash said.
Bovino replied, “The victim? The victims are the Border Patrol agents. I’m not blaming the Border Patrol agents. The suspect put himself in that situation.”
Bovino said that Pretti had “injected” himself into a federal law enforcement operation and was “more than likely” on the scene to assault officers.
The federal agents, Bovino added, “prevented any specific shootings of law enforcement. So good job for our law enforcement in taking him down before he was able to do that.”
Pretti was shot and killed Saturday morning as CBP agents continued to patrol Minneapolis streets as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. He is the second U.S. citizen in Minneapolis to be killed by immigration officers in recent weeks. Renee Good was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer earlier this month in the city.
Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have questioned why Pretti was in an area where agents were on the scene to arrest a “violent” illegal immigrant and accused him of interfering with federal law enforcement operations.
“Let’s look at why he was there in the first place. Was he simply walking by and just happened to walk into a law enforcement situation and try to direct traffic and stand in the middle of the road, and then assault, delay and obstruct law enforcement? Or was he there for a reason?” Bovino said on Sunday.
Video footage of the moments leading up to the shooting and verified by several media outlets, including the New York Times, shows Pretti filming the scene with his phone. While federal officials assert Pretti was holding a gun, video of the incident does not appear to corroborate the allegations. The analysis from the New York Times concludes that agents did not identify Pretti had a gun until about eight seconds after they had wrestled him to the ground.
While Pretti did hold a concealed carry license, video footage of the shooting from multiple angles appears to show Pretti holding a phone, not a gun, as he approaches a woman who had been shoved to the ground by agents.
“Are you saying it’s not okay for him to exercise his Second Amendment right, not to mention his First Amendment right to be there in the first place, and if you do you can be shot by federal law enforcement?” Bash asked.
“No, I didn’t say that, Dana. I never said that,” Bovino replied. “What I’m saying is we respect that Second Amendment right. But those rights don’t count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers.”
Bovino added he does not know if Pretti was unarmed at the time of the incident but said that agents believed he was in possession of one. “We heard the law enforcement officer say gun, gun, gun. So at some point they knew there was a gun,” he said.
Video footage does not appear to show Pretti holding a gun as he tried to help the woman stand. Still, agents surround Pretti and force him to the ground before opening fire.
Bovino said he doesn’t know how many agents opened fire, but that those involved “will more than likely be on administrative duty” and relocated out of Minneapolis.
While I like the idea of people having integrity, it does seem like the government is being purged of people that want to do the right things, to be decent people. This government is corrupt and is run like a crime syndicate with a mob boss wannabee at the top. I think how fast these people took over the government and turned all the good that government can do upside down so that government has become the very engine of harm in our country. Hugs
It is clear they are not going after the worst of the worst but simply they are white supremacist trying to remove non-white people from the country. How is this making anyone safer? Hugs
Organizers say ICE agents have been targeting African nationals amid surge focused in Portland and Lewiston
A woman films a Homeland Security Investigations agent in Portland, Maine, on Friday. Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP
Three days into its immigration crackdown in Maine, the Department of Homeland Security said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had arrested “more than 100 illegal aliens”.
In a statement to the Guardian on Friday, the DHS assistant secretary of public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, said some of those taken into custody were “the worst of the worst” and had been “charged and convicted of horrific crimes”, but cited the same four examples it released earlier in the week.
Speaking to Fox News, Patricia Hyde, deputy assistant director of ICE, said the agency had compiled a list of 1,400 individuals in Maine it intends to target.
White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest
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Immigrant rights groups have been on alert as ICE concentrates its operation on Maine’s two largest cities, Portland and Lewiston. Organizers say agents have been targeting African nationals from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola, many of them asylum seekers who have made the coastal state home in recent decades.
On Wednesday, a local ICE sighting hotline – organized and run by the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition – said they received more than 1,100 calls, a 35% increase in calls from the previous day. Immigrants in Maine represent only about 4% of the state’s total population, most of whom have legal status to live and work in the US, according to a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute.
At a press conference in Portland on Thursday, Janet Mills, the state’s Democratic governor, said the Trump administration had not returned her calls since the operation began. She added that her office had received reports of people with no criminal record being detained and urged homeland security to be transparent in its actions, saying she would be “shocked” if federal law enforcement located 1,400 individuals with criminal backgrounds.
“If they have warrants, show the warrants,” she said. “We don’t believe in secret arrests or secret police.”
Mills also described widespread fear in schools, workplaces and businesses that are losing employees who have either been detained or are not showing up, despite living in the state legally.
Earlier this week, a video by 28-year-old Cristian Vaca – an Ecuadorian immigrant living in Maine with valid immigration status – went viral online. In the footage, federal agents appear outside Vaca’s home in Biddeford, 18 miles south of Portland, where he lives with his wife and young son. In an interview with the Associated Press in Spanish through a translator, Vaca said that he approached the officers when they were taking pictures outside his house.
When Vaca refused to go outside, the video shows one of the agents telling him that they will “come back for your whole family” through Vaca’s screen door.
“I have been in this country since September 2023,” Vaca, who works as a roofer, told the AP. “I have immigration status … the judge postponed my court date to another day. Now I have a new court date. I have my work permit. I have my social security number [sic].”
Local authorities also decried the scope of the federal immigration dragnet this week. The Cumberland county sheriff, Kevin Joyce, said that on Wednesday evening one of his corrections officer recruits was arrested by ICE agents.
“This is an individual that had permission to be working in the state of Maine. We vetted him,” the sheriff said of the unnamed recruit.
Joyce was one of more than 100 national sheriffs who met with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, last year. “The book and the movie do not line up,” Joyce told reporters on Thursday. “We’re being told one story, which is totally different than what’s occurring.”
Later, Joyce said that ICE officials contacted him to say all detainees held at the Cumberland county jail were being moved on Thursday. In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, he said “about 50” people were removed from the jail. The DHS did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment about where detainees are being held as Maine does not have a dedicated immigration detention facility.
The Maine Immigrants Rights Coalition’s advocacy and policy manager, Ruben Torres, said that family members are now finding it “extremely difficult to be able to find their loved ones once they have been picked up”.
The Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP), Maine’s only statewide immigration legal services organization said it had received several fearful calls as the crackdown continues. This includes a pregnant woman who reached out to ILAP because she was “terrified to leave her home to go to a medical appointment”. Another person called and said someone had “pulled the fire alarm in her building, desperately trying to save people from ICE”. ILAP said that they received reports of teachers escorting immigrant children home from school who had agents follow them and push their way into an apartment building lobby.
“It is clear the overall operation is anything but targeted,” said Sue Roche, ILAP’s executive director. “People are being racially profiled on the streets and in their cars. As is their playbook, ICE is doing everything they can to inflict maximum cruelty and chaos.”
In Lewiston, it was “hard to overstate the level of fear within the community”, according to the Democratic congressional candidate Jordan Wood, who is running to replace the outgoing US representative Jared Golden. “I have heard that as many as 20% of students at certain schools did not show up,” Wood, who was born, raised and lives in the area, told the Guardian.
He added that the community response to the ICE surge – from ensuring immigrants know their rights to sharing where agents have been spotted – has been hugely encouraging. “It’s important to just know the community that they’re coming after won’t stand idly by while our neighbors are terrorized,” Wood said.
At her press conference in Portland, Mills still wanted more information about the decision to target the Pine Tree state. “Why Maine? Why now? What were the orders that came from above? Who’s giving the orders?,” she said, adding that state officials have reached out to the Trump administration but still “have no answers”.
Very interesting report. Seems that Noem and her boyfriend wanted wide spread round ups to create a spectacle because they felt it would look good for them on TV. Others wanted to prioritize criminals which is what tRump kept saying. Let’s be clear, Noem and that crew are die hard racists who want to terrorize nonwhite people and make sure that everyone understands that in their minds it is a white country with white people in charge. They don’t see nonwhite people and immigrants as humans. Hugs
ICE rounded up all the witnesses that did not run from them and took their phones and warned them not to talk to people about what they saw. ICE is out of control gang thugs that feel they do not have to follow any rules or laws. They are an authority unto themselves and that might makes right. One person in one interview said that ICE are racists who feel the US is in great danger as the white population declines and the non-white population increases. They want a race war and they see whites who interfere with them ethnically cleaning the US as race traitors. Hugs
Again the video below shows the lies that Bovino is trying to push, that the tRump people are trying to pus. They want to claim just having a gun and being there makes Pretti a dangerous terrorist out to mass murder ICE thugs. But as one host shows using videos Pertti was backing away from ICE gang thugs when they attacked him. The government wants to make it so just protesting what Stephen Miller is doing is a crime worthy of death. Hugs
Videos appear to show agent taking gun before Minneapolis shooting
Bash asks him straight out if Pretti had brandished his gun and Gregory Bovino dodges the question instead falling back to the talking points that they have all decided looks good for them. They claim he was interfering, nope he was filming them with his phone. They did not like that and attacked him for doing it. They killed a person in anger for that person filming their illegal actions. They want to be called police and pretend they have police powers but watch the videos again, one ICE thug lunges at a woman knocking her back and down for no reason except he wanted to feel tough and Pretti was trying to help her when another ICE thug peeper sprays him in the face at point blank range. Remember that at that close it can stop the breathing. Then they dog pile on him beating him while on officer steals his lawful gun. Then they shoot him repeatedly. Bovino wants to pretend that anyone filming ICE is interfering. He keeps saying ICE police and police action but that is not true ICE has no police powers. It is all lies to protect their need to remove nonwhites while he keeps saying they were there for a violent offender but they don’t say what offender, and then Bovino calls him a suspect and saying that just being there he was interfering. It makes no sense what he is saying. Well worth her questioning him to see how he shifts and lies. They want people to disappear and obey like, the victim he claims are the ICE thugs there. Damn. And they don’t want people to believe their eyes. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 