MINNEAPOLIS, MN. – JANUARY 2026: ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers and federal agents clash with a growing crowd of protesters on Nicollet Avenue in south Minneapolis after Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal agents in the area early Saturday morning, January 24, 2026. (Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
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Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said Monday that video of ICE officers and federal agents involved in the shooting death of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis proves that “this is not policing and it’s not military service.” In an interview on MS NOW’s Morning Joe, Hertline said “from the standpoint of a former soldier, I will tell you they are an undisciplined militia, and the leadership is awful.”
Hertling told MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough that ICE officers “dress up as soldiers,” but show none of the discipline and training of the military or traditional law enforcement. Instead, Hertling said, ICE is “running through the battlefield as it were in civilian vehicles, maneuvering like assault teams, and engaging civilians as if they were hostile forces.”
“ICE and DHS are neither military nor police,” he said. “This is not policing and it’s not military service. It’s something dangerously undefined.”
‘The leadership of ICE and DHS seems to be overlooking quite a lot’
In a piece for The Bulwark, Hertling writes that “leaders are accountable not only for what they order their subordinates to do, but for what they allow. The leadership of ICE and DHS seems to be overlooking quite a lot.”
“There is no visible effort to rein in agents, clarify mission boundaries, or enforce standards or restraint. The leaders don’t seem to be conducting the equivalent of battlefield circulation,” Hertling writes. “I have yet to see senior leaders walking the ground, correcting behavior, or relieving those who have lost control.”
Hertling described the shooting of Pretti, a U.S. citizen, as a “horrific tragedy” and accused the Trump administration of “attempting to cover it up.”
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 24: A photograph of the pistol recovered by immigration agents after a shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Saturday morning is shown on a screen behind U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as she speaks during a news conference in the National Response Coordination Center at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters on January 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. Federal immigration agents shot and killed another U.S. citizen on Saturday morning, later identified as Alex Pretti, during operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)
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“There is no evidence he was a ‘terrorist’ intent on a ‘massacre’ of law enforcement’”
Increasingly, it seems the public’s view of Trump’s immigration police is turning against the White House, with the shooting deaths of Pretti and Renee Good seen as a turning point. The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial Sunday, said “the Trump Administration spin on this simply isn’t believable. Stephen Miller, the political architect of the mass deportation policy, called Pretti a ‘domestic terrorist.’ He was a nurse without a criminal record.”
The conservative-leaning New York Post urged the president to “de-escalate in Minneapolis” in an editorial Sunday. “The hasty and misleading rhetoric coming out of the administration needs to stop: Any reasonable person who has watched the videos clearly knows by now that Pretti was not ‘waving his gun around.’ And while Pretti was horribly misguided, there is no evidence he was a ‘terrorist’ intent on a ‘massacre’ of law enforcement. Noem should also take a break from her self-promoting and combative TV hits.”
“However noble the mission is to rid the country of the ‘worst of the worst,’” the Post editorial says, “the broad support for it is now ebbing fast. Mr. President, the American people didn’t vote for these scenes, and you can’t continue to order them to not believe their lying eyes.”
A mourner visits a makeshift memorial in the area where Alex Pretti was shot dead a day earlier by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 25, 2026. On January 24, federal agents shot dead US citizen Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, while scuffling with him on an icy roadway, less than three weeks after an immigration officer shot and killed Renee Good, also 37, in her car.His killing sparked new protests and impassioned demands by local leaders for the Trump administration to end its operation in the city. (Photo by Octavio JONES / AFP via Getty Images)
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MS NOW’s Steve Benen argues that for Trump and his team, the violence playing out on the streets of Minneapolis has exposed the weakness of Trump’s “blame the victim” narrative: video that proves the government’s talking points are false.
“The unbelievable claims were discredited by video evidence and by local officials,” Benen writes. “The president and his team peddled the lines anyway, hoping not only to smear the victim but also to convince Americans not to believe their lying eyes.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2026/01/26/retired-general-ice-agents-dress-up-as-soldiers-but-this-is-not-policing-and-its-not-military/
