Isaac Saul (18:21)
All right, that is it for the left and the writer saying, which brings us to my take. When I was a kid, I used to have this recurring nightmare where a room full of friends and family were talking to me and I was responding, but they'd all keep asking me why I wasn't answering. At the end of the nightmare, I'm yelling as loud as I can to get them to hear me and they all just keep looking around at each other, wondering why I won't talk. Then I'd wake up in my bed screaming. This week I'm reminded of that nightmare. For so many months I've felt like I've been shouting and unable to get the people I want to hear me most to listen as I did after Renee Goode was killed. I'll start by describing the events as objectively as I can based on the available video evidence. Alex Preddy is standing in the middle of the street, recording DHS agents. A car approaches and he waves it past. One of the agents appears to approach a woman standing in front of Preddy and you can hear him and the agent both yelling. Preddy then grabs the woman and walks her toward the sidewalk, away from the agent who follows them there. Another woman approaches and yells something at the officer who shoves her to the ground. Preddy steps between the officer and the second woman and lays a hand on the DHS agent before raising his other hand into the air. The CBP officer sprays a substance into Preddy's face and Preddy turns away from him while keeping one hand in the air, filming with the other. He then tries to help pick the woman up off the ground. The CBP agent continues to spray him and the woman on the ground from behind. More agents then surround Preddy, who is clinging to the woman he was trying to help, and throw him to the ground. They begin spraying him, punching him and trying to restrain his Arms and legs. Preddy struggles. What happens next is difficult to parse, but one officer appears to see Preddy is carrying a firearm and pulls it out of its holster. Another screams, gun. And then the shooting begins. Ten rounds in total, several after Preddy is lying motionless on the ground. These were my first thoughts after watching the video recording. Law enforcement is legal, and carrying a firearm is a constitutional right. Preddy seemed to be trying to keep his distance from the CBP agents, and he only ever got close to them after one followed Preddy toward the sidewalk, then violently shoved the woman who yelled at him. Preddy's instinct to put himself between the agent and the woman seems totally normal, if not explicitly admirable to me. He touched the CBP agent, which was his gravest error. But he did it in about the most conciliatory way possible, with one arm in the air, as if to say, I'm not trying to start any trouble with his body language. A screen grab from one angle of the shooting where Preddy has his left hand in the air while holding his phone in his right hand captures his demeanor well. What happened after the agents began pepper spraying, beating and disarming Preddy was pure chaos. Pepper spraying someone while trying to handcuff them generally does not produce a perfectly compliant response. Whatever you think of Preddy, one agent screaming gun after he has been disarmed, then another. Shooting and killing him while he was held down by several agents then is not orderly law enforcement. Nor is an officer shouting, where is the gun? While searching Preddy's body nearly a minute after he was shot. I've been doing this job for long enough that I'm rarely shocked anymore. But what happened in the wake of the shooting? It genuinely shocked me. For starters, the brazenness of the smearing of Alex Preddy is disorienting. The administration has claimed Preddy was a domestic terrorist who was trying to massacre government agents and inflict maximum damage and was brandishing a weapon. Stephen Miller called him an assassin who tried to murder federal agents. However, Preddy never brandished his weapon. He never threatened an agent before stepping between the CBP agent and the woman he'd shoved. I've seen nothing to indicate that he so much as verbally antagonized officers. We now know the playbook. If an immigration officer assaults or kills someone, the administration will respond by trying to make the victim look as evil as possible. Remember, President Trump claimed Renee Goode viciously ran over an ICE agent whose survival was hard to believe, and that the officer was recovering in the hospital. All misleading or outright false. Preddy, Trump claimed, was a gunman whom CBP had to protect themselves from. All this is to say this playbook totally justifies why people are recording immigration officials. When the federal government tries to call people they apprehend or kill assassin or domestic terrorists or murderer or pedophile, it's crucial to have some evidence to show they are lying in the public sphere. A lot of people who support DHS have claimed that Preddy was obstructing law enforcement or resisting arrest. In my view, both of these allegations are flawed. Obstruction implies Preddy was stopping agents from carrying out some kind of law enforcement action. The supporting evidence is that he was standing in the street filming and waved the car past him, which some alleged was him directing traffic to block the agents. However, since the action was occurring in front of Preddy, it looks to me like Preddy simply waved the car past him while filming in the street. The other claim is that by standing between immigration agents and the woman he just shoved to the ground and making contact with said agent, Preddy was obstructing an arrest. Again, this is odd, since they don't appear to be trying to arrest the woman in question. In fact, it looks like the agents are just assaulting her, shoving her to the ground and pepper spraying her without any effort to actually detain her. This is one element that's making this issue feel so dissonant. Onlookers and traditional defenders of law enforcement, often on the right, are talking like we're witnessing traditional law enforcement tactics, as if a police officer was assaulted by an onlooker while trying to put handcuffs on a thief. In reality, immigration officers are brutalizing American citizens for filming them standing in the street or yelling insults at them. And when one guy instinctually tries to protect a woman being roughed up by one of those agents, he gets ganged up on, beaten, disarmed, and shot multiple times. Let's be serious. Preddy is an ICU nurse at the VA with no criminal record. He was no domestic terrorist. Others, like Greg Price, under what the Right Is Saying, called out that no Democrats protested for Lakin Riley, a nurse who was murdered by an immigrant here illegally. The difference, obviously, is that Riley's killing wasn't committed, celebrated, or justified by the state. Her murderer was arrested, tried and convicted. Then, finally, is the defense of a person's Second Amendment rights, which I discovered in the last 48 hours is ideologically flexible. Many liberals who have long attacked the Second Amendment are now preaching about Preddy's right to carry Meanwhile, many conservatives who have historically defended the right to carry firearms tried to make Preddy look bad by framing him as someone who had a gun at a protest. FBI Director Kash Patel went as far as claiming that you don't have a right to bring a firearm to a protest, which is precisely the opposite of the actual law. All of this, obviously, is nonsense. You can legally exercise your Second and First Amendment rights at the same time, as many Trump supporters have been doing, sometimes with great fanfare, for years. Cops don't get to assume you're a threat because you are legally carrying a firearm. In fact, the Second Amendment was explicitly designed to protect citizens against government overreach, especially the violent kind, which I don't think I've ever seen more clearly on display in my lifetime than right now in Minneapolis. This we don't know why federal agents are acting so brazenly, so aggressively as of late, but a questionable recruitment and training process undeniably has something to do with it. Even though the officers who pulled the triggers on Renee Goode and Preddy were both veterans of the force, dhs, through CBP and ice, has been quickly amassing an army of aggressive recruits, training them poorly and giving them a green light to treat both American citizens and illegal immigrants and as hostile entities in a war zone. DHS's diminished hiring and training standards can only contribute to the decay of standards in the agency, and they're also easy to observe. Recently, ICE literally offered employment to a journalist who applied for a job just to write a story about the process, and whom the administration apparently didn't even run a background check on. As Minneapolis police chief pointed out in a remarkable must watch interview, his department recovered 900 guns, arrested hundreds of violent offenders, and went the entire year in 2025 without a single officer involved shooting. Consider that this is now the third DHS involved shooting in Minneapolis in less than three weeks, and the second American citizen killed by immigration enforcement in that timespan. On top of that, DHS has repeatedly tried to detain off duty non white Minnesota police officers and and in at least one case allegedly approached an officer during a traffic stop with their guns drawn. On top of that, after 48 hours we still know very little about the DHS agents who shot Preddy. No names, just that one of the shooters was a Border Patrol officer who had been on the force for eight years and no accountability. As I've been screaming into a nightmare. These agents are masked, anonymous and protected by the state. Unlike police officers or other law enforcement, they've been given carte blanche to act however they like without being easily identified, something that should never be normalized in American society. If you spend a lot of time online, you'd be forgiven for thinking that these shootings are divisive or that DHS actions are becoming a partisan issue. Some may even hear my take today as left leaning or overtly liberal, but I believe this division is an illusion. Asked if Freddy's shooting was justified, respondents to a YouGov poll came out 28 points for unjustified, with nearly a third of respondents unsure, probably because they hadn't seen the video of the shooting. Support for abolishing ICE not defunding or limiting or restraining, but abolishing is now 4641 in support and is a plus 12 issue with self identified independence the list of Republicans calling out the Trump administration's enforcement efforts is only increasing. Senators Dave McCormick from Pennsylvania, Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, Thom Tillis from North Carolina, Susan Collins from Main, John Husted from Ohio and Pete Ricketts from Nebraska have all to varying degrees criticized DHS or called for investigations. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia pleaded with supporters to see how bad this is getting. Representative Andrew Garbarino from New York, the House Homeland Security chair, has stepped up requests for heads of ice, CBP and USCIS to testify before his committee. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican, said Americans don't like what they're seeing right now and criticized the bad advice Trump is getting, careful not to actually go after the president himself. Some Minnesota Republicans in Trump counties are beginning to jump ship. And Chris Madle, a GOP candidate in Minnesota's gubernatorial race who is also the lawyer representing the agent who killed Renee Goode, has now ended his campaign and said that DHS has gone beyond its stated focus on real public safety threats. Perhaps most jarringly, John Mitnick, who helped establish the Department of homeland security in 2002 and 2003 and and was Trump's Senate confirmed choice for general counsel for DHS in Trump's first term, is now calling out DHS's lawlessness, fascism and cruelty and suggesting Trump should get impeached. If you think I'm taking a partisan line here or overreacting, read that sentence a second time. Even President Trump appears to be looking for an off ramp. He announced he's sending border C Tom Homan to Minnesota, and officials are beginning to leak that he's unhappy with dhs. My own politics have circled the political center for the last decade, and I've been an outspoken critic of the left's immigration policies. Yet the Trump administration's actions here, its shameless smearing of dead Americans, its violation of civil liberties, the overt violence of its agents, are decisively turning me against this enforcement effort. I'm glad to see I'm not alone and that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the New York Post editorial boards are all on the same side of this issue. Democrats, waking from their stupor, say they want to separate DHS funding from an upcoming spending bill, even if it causes a government shutdown. That's a good start, but it should only be a start. Oversight and accountability for everything that has happened, from the unlawful searches to the unjustified arrests to these horrific shootings, should come next. And it should come swiftly. We'll be right back after this quick break.
