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Alex Pretti wasn’t killed while “protesting.”
This is the most common description of what he was doing on that Minneapolis street last weekend when he got in a confrontation with federal immigration agents that ended in his tragic shooting.
But if Pretti was merely a protester, we need to change the definition.
A protester, as typically understood, is someone who is making a point, often as part of a gathering of other like-minded people and, usually but not always, in opposition to something.
A protester might hold a sign outside a coal-fired power plant calling for it to shut down.
He might go to Union Square Park in New York City to hear speeches from bullhorns whenever something happens that outrages the left.
He might march against the Iraq War, or the Vietnam War — or in favor of Hamas.
This kind of activity is not to everyone’s taste — personally, I hate the drums and the chants — but there is no doubt that it is a legitimate form of political advocacy.
Depending on the cause, it can even be admirable.
What we are seeing in Minneapolis, though, is often quite different. Run-of-the-mill protesters don’t seek out federal agents and harass and obstruct them. They don’t follow and block their vehicles or establish a robust communications network to deploy resources creating maximum disruption of their operations.
We all are very familiar with how clashes between protesters and police usually go: A contingent of cops faces an unruly crowd along a skirmish line, and the advance guard of the crowd gets more and more aggressive, or the cops begin to move in to disperse the crowd. One way or the other, mayhem ensues. We’ve all seen it hundreds of times.
This is different. Opponents of ICE are, in an organized effort, tracking agents and showing up at operations to stop them from doing their job or make it as difficult as possible. This is more a form of low-level, (by and large) nonviolent insurgency than conventional protest.
And Pretti was part of this effort. It’s more accurate to describe him as an agitator, or — depending on the level of his involvement in the ICE network — even as an operator, than a protester.
The point is to influence events, by direct involvement, rather than simply observe or protest them.
It is telling that, according to CNN, Pretti was injured in a prior confrontation with ICE agents a week before his death.
The fact of the matter is that if Pretti had indeed been only protesting last weekend, he’d still be alive today. He would have stayed on the sidewalk and held up a sign, or chanted “ICE go home,” and the officers might have been annoyed, but they presumably wouldn’t have interacted with him, and there wouldn’t have been any encounter with the potential to go catastrophically wrong.
The calculation in Minneapolis has been that this kind of benign activity is less effective than direct action, and unfortunately — with public opinion swinging against Operation Metro Surge and Trump apparently looking for a climb-down — this assessment looks to be accurate.
We can disagree about the desirability of the goal that Pretti was pursuing, but there’s no doubt about how he was pursuing it, and it wasn’t through conventional protest.