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.
What will it take to understand we are not the land of the free anymore. Government has been taken over by groups that don’t care about civil rights of the public. What is happening is fascism, an authoritarian take over of the government who have no concern of the rights of the people. They only care about their individual group’s goals. The wealthy want to rule, the white supremacists want a white only country where they judge everyone on how European white they think they are, the Christian nationalist want a theocracy want a country run by their own version of the religion, the maga cult simply wants to be rude crude 1950s thugs and not be called on it. Hugs
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
Read more
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”.
No doubt we’ve all seen that AG Bondi has contacted Gov. Waltz stating that if he will forward the MN voter rolls to her, the federal government violence will stop in MN. Last I knew, that offer was declined. Meanwhile, they’re still in MN, and now they’re raiding in Maine (I’m certain their Republican US Senator is deeply concerned, though not concerned enough to demand a turnaround.) Anyway, below are some links and snippets about preparation. The fact is that immigration enforcement has been around in every state for years, but they mostly haven’t been Gestapo-awful, or not at the massive numbers of people abused and killed, as they are currently. So, it isn’t as if things can’t happen instantaneously anywhere. If we still haven’t begun building local community, it’s definitely time. Aside from making sure we can take care of our neighbors and vice-versa, here are some good guidelines for dealing with our reality. We can do this. There is a place for everyone.
snippet: Today, after a year of rapid, large-scale mobilizing, resistance to rogue immigration agents is seeing its own set of commandments emerge. From compiling strategies from across the United States, 10 Rules of Resistance for #ICEOut can be identified. Taken as a whole, they offer all of us a robust approach to denying ICE the basic necessities of their operation.
10 Rules of Resistance for #ICEOut
No silence.
No selling.
No service.
No hotel rooms.
No entry.
No informing.
No looking away.
No collaboration.
No transporting.
No detention centers.
(You can add to this list, of course. There’s no limit to the ways we can resist.)
Nonviolent movements succeed by strategically pressuring the pillars of support for an injustice to withhold or withdraw things like information, cooperation, funding, labor and more. These 10 Rules of Resistance for #ICEOut offer ways to deny immigration agencies the key resources they need to function effectively. ICE cannot function without detention centers, transportation of detainees, access to businesses and properties, staging areas in parking lots, surveillance, telecommunication, recruitment ads, deliveries, or even quiet and uninterrupted sleep at hotels. (snip-more at link-the title above)
General strikes can have a tremendous impact, but to succeed they require an organized majority, networks of solidarity and resources to weather repression.
The call is coming from a rapidly growing coalition that includes the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005, Service Employees International Union Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, Communications Workers of America Local 7250, the Saint Paul Federation of Educators, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, the Minnesota AFL-CIO, Sunrise Movement, and grassroots groups like Tending the Soil, among others.
That breadth matters — it’s not just a tiny group but an array of organized, powerful entities.
The action carries momentum. It follows the extreme violence carried out by ICE and other immigration agents in Minnesota — and the courageous, sustained pushback by Minnesotans who have stepped in to protect one another. The Jan. 23 one-day economic blackout is not the only tactic on the table. It sits alongside legal challenges, corporate pressure campaigns targeting ICE enablers, mutual aid and direct services, physical interventions, and more.
This is how real movements tend to move: not in a straight line, but through overlapping experiments. (snip-see the rest by clicking the title above)
The movement for justice and democracy is growing and has displayed significant political clout: mobilizing unprecedented millions in mass protest, resisting ICE attacks in Minneapolis and other cities, turning interim electoral outcomes against MAGA policies, and building pressure for National Guard withdrawals. Trump’s ratings have slumped to the lowest level of his second term. A recent poll shows a majority of Americans opposed to ICE’s aggressive tactics.
Now we are at a critical juncture, a moment of escalating risk, but also opportunity for political gain. Protests and protective actions have surged in Minneapolis, especially following the murder of Renee Nicole Good. Citizens and public officials in Minneapolis have condemned the brutality of ICE and Border Patrol operations and their blatant acts of racial and ethnic profiling. They are demanding the withdrawal of federal forces and a halt to the de facto military siege of city neighborhoods.
Hey there! So I’ve been juggling with this idea for some time, and I think now is the best time to launch it, a little more than one month before back-to-school.
As a former elementary school teacher, I know how limited classroom budgets are, but as someone who grew up trans, I also know how important it is for trans youth to be in contact with positive trans fictional characters. So here’s my idea :
I made this children’s book titled “A Girl Like Any Other” about four yearsago, about a young girl’s transition and her family and friends. It’s basically the book that launched my career as an author. It allowed me to meet some of the most amazing families that I know, and gave me the background setting for my comic.
As it’s almost back-to-school time, I want to send copies of the book for free to elementary teachers that are willing to have it in their classrooms. All they will have to do is to message me their school’s address on Tumblr or by email before August 15th. I will also send them a link to download my “Genderific Coloring book” for free.
The goal is to get the budget to print 200 copies as well as enough money to cover shipping fees for all over the world. I’ll adjust the goal if I see that the demand is higher than that.
It costs around 8$ to print one single copy, and we can estimate a 4$ median for the shipping (it’s 2.50$ for Canada – where I live, – 3$ for the US and 5.50$ worldwide). We need to add 7% for the handling of the money by GoFundMe and Paypal, so that’s 12.84$ per copy – and 2568$ for 200 copies.
If there’s any money left from the campaign, it will be donated to the Trans Lifeline.
“Want to watch coverage of the politicians encouraging fascism or the politicians doing absolutely nothing to stop it?”
Conservatives had zero problem with Dylann Roof killing nine church goers. No cries for DOJ to investigate. The fake outrage for Don Lemon is clear white supremacy.
Imagine cops buying Don Lemon Burger King?
The pastor is an ICE agent. Jesus would have flipped every table in that church.
Christianity is about welcoming the immigrant and foreigner. It’s about how you treat ‘the least of me’. Loving thy neighbor.
Conservatives get their religion from FOX and Russia, a failed godless communist backwater of civility
You can not reform this level of sadism and white nationalism. You can not reform an agency infiltrated by neo-confederates and fascists and run by pedophile protectors.
You can can only dismantle and abolish. Then prosecute and incarcerate the ICE goons.
I worked as an axillary sheriff’s deputy. We had to be trained on everything we carried and we carried pepper spray. There is a distance you must maintain to keep it nonlethal. Directly in the face is lethal. Plus we had to have all those nonlethal tools used on us. I can tell you that pepper spray is debilitating. Many of my fellow officers needed medical support after being sprayed. Tear gas is a military agent and much stronger than pepper spray. I got that in the military. What this is clearly a private military force with no restraints who are only accountable to Stephen Miller. Hugs
