The revelation of the identities of the federal agents who shot Alex Pretti revealed a culture of law enforcement impunity amidst calls for accountability, reports Jon Queally.
ICE and Border Patrol agents on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, 2026 follwing the shooting death of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti. (Chad Davis / Flickr / CC BY 4.0)
By Jon Queally
Common Dreams
After Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez were identified as the two masked federal officers who shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, calls for their arrest and prosecution went out alongside demands for the heavy-handed operations ordered by the Trump administration to come to an immediate end.
ProPublica on Sunday named Ochoa and Gutierrez, both from Texas but deployed for operations in Minnesota prior to the shooting, based on government documents the nonprofit news outlet obtained.
Portrait photo of Alex Pretti taken in 2018. (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
According to ProPublica:
“Both men were assigned to Operation Metro Surge, an immigration enforcement dragnet launched in December that sent scores of armed and masked agents across the city.
CBP, which employs both men, has so far refused to release their names and has disclosed few other facts about the deadly incident, which came days after a different immigration agent shot and killed another Minneapolis protester, a 37-year-old mother of three named Renee Good.”
Protests erupted in Minneapolis and nationwide following the homicides of Good and Pretti, both captured on video from various angles by bystanders for all the world to see. Sunday’s reporting notes that both Ochoa and Gutierrez were seasoned officers with the Border Patrol, joining the agency in 2018 and 2014 respectively.
“The two CBP federal agents who murdered Alex Pretti have been on the job for 11 and 7 years, respectively,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the New York Health Campaign, in response to the reporting. “It’s not a lack of training issue, it’s a culture of violence and lawlessness issue. If you’re still voting to fund this, you’re condoning it.”
Many lawmakers have argued that the killings of Pretti and Good — as well as the near-endless list of violence, intimidation, unconstitutional searches, and unlawful behavior of immigration enforcement officers under the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — are attributable to a wave of new recruits and inadequate training.
But critics have said that the argument provides a smokescreen for the Trump administration, which has encouraged such tactics as a matter of policy.
“ICE has much more than a training problem — it has a culture problem,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) during a news interview Sunday. “The lack of accountability for their violence and lawless actions corrupts the entire agency, and our communities are forced to pay the consequences.”
Social justice activists like Lance Cooper were among those demanding, now that the identities are known, for the arrest and prosecution of the two agents named in the reporting.
“These killers are being protected by the U.S. government,” said Lance, “and we must continue to demand their arrest and prosecution.”
State and local law enforcement in Minnesota have not been allowed to participate in the investigation following Pretti’s shooting, and both agents were quickly taken away from the scene and then out of the state.
While the Trump administration has withheld the names of the agents from public disclosure, the editors at ProPublica said in a note that the public has an overriding interest in learning more about the masked men behind the killing of Pretti.
“The policy of shielding officers’ identities, particularly after a public shooting, is a stark departure from standard law enforcement protocols, according to lawmakers, state attorneys general and former federal officials,” the outlet stated.
“Such secrecy, in our view, deprives the public of the most fundamental tool for accountability.”
Jon Queally is managing editor of Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
GREAT
GREAT
Nothing surprises me when it’s been proven that they’ve received training from the IGF, let’s not use the D anymore because theirs nothing defensive about those killers.
This is such a textbook example of ” problem – reaction – solution” the details and nuances could be taught for generations .
My concern is that all “sides” are being manipulated and provoked and that the result will be US Citizens becoming acclimated to masked “law” enforcers jumping out of cars and grabbing people .
On the contrary, people who have had a life long aversion to guns are arming themselves. We have met the enemy and and they are us.
Shoot back …
The argument that “more and better training” helps the Trump administration is false. The Trump regime is NOT making that argument–the Democrats are. That argument has been used by the Dems before, and it is their way of avoiding having to take a position on something awful they mostly agree with. Noem and the other fascists in the Trump crew certainly don’t care that their agents–with plenty of training in how to kill citizens, both here and Over There–are using unbridled violence to assert their prerogatives. Its the Dems desperately trying to Move On who are hoping their phony concerns will get the citizenry to forget and start getting pumped up–for the Midterms. Midterms, Midterms, Midterms! And the media will oblige them.
Aren’t people with names like Ochoa and Gutierrez the sort of people ICE are supposed to be abusing and deporting ?
In an alternative universe this would be funny.
You need to know more about Texas. First of all people with Mexican names in TX are not necessarily immigrants. Texas was Hispanic before long before gringos got there. But sure, there has been constant immigration into TX from Mexico since then. Many of these immigrants are already quite “tuned in” to the U.S. and assimilate into TX culture faster than you might think. That’s why (until recently anyway) the most Hispanic part of TX (Rio Grande Valley) was starting to turn Republican. (I think that trend has reversed over the past year, screwing up Texas’s latest gerrymandering — let’s hope so). I am not a Texan, but I lived there 25 years and this doesn’t surprise me at all. Anyway, they chose to join the Border Patrol in the first place, didn’t they.
Yes. At risk of being subjected to a Kavanaugh stop.
It isn’t funny but it is ironic. This is supposed to be about white supremacy, but in these shootings one assailant has a Philippine immigrant wife and the other assailants were gay Hispanics. This is why it’s important not to box institutions into some BS racial corner and remember that class and power are what drive institutions. The whole woke narrative is a crumbling pile of crap.
I am astounded at the Democrats holding 340 million American citizen hostage over ICE’s attempts to remove people who should not be in this country in the first place. Governments are supposed to work for their CITIZENS, not for people in the country ILLEGALLY. I am absolute stunned at the Democrats representing non-citizens over hard working, taxpaying American citizens.
Meanwhile, million of American citizens are without health insurance. Hundreds of thousands of American citizens are living in the streets. Millions of young families can’t afford a home. But billions of our tax dollars have been stolen by phony immigrant and “housing” scams. IF A GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WORK FOR ITS OWN CITIZENS, WHO NEEDS IT?
Re. being “absolute stunned at the Democrats representing non-citizens over hard working, taxpaying American citizens”: Deportations of people without residency status in the USA under the last 3 presidential terms: hXXps://www.newsweek.com/immigrant-deportations-removals-trump-biden-obama-compared-chart-2026835
Re. “million of American citizens are without health insurance”: hXXps://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/why-us-doesnt-have-national-health-insurance-political-role-ama
Re. ” Hundreds of thousands of American citizens are living in the streets. Millions of young families can’t afford a home.”: hXXps://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/ and hXXps://drexel.edu/hunger-free-center/research/briefs-and-reports/minimum-wage-is-not-enough/
Re. “billions of our tax dollars have been stolen by phony immigrant and “housing” scams.”: hXXps://affordablehousinghub.org/affordable-housing/section8-housing-eligibility-for-undocumented-immigrants-in-2025-answers-to-your-mostasked-questions
Maybe your sources of information are not telling you the truth. Glad you’re reading this site. Keep it up and you’ll start to see what’s really going on. One last thing. If you’re wondering where most of your tax dollars + borrowed debt you have to pay back are going: hXXps://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2026
The current focus on an ‘us v. them’ mentality is a deliberate distraction. It’s an attempt to keep our attention away from the very wealthy few, the corporations, the banksters, and the Wall St. manipulators who benefit from this crooked trickle up econ system. That’s where the billions, trillions even, extracted from us actually went. An example: after the ’08 crash. Wall St. was bailed out while the millions of us in the majority working class who lost jobs, pensions, houses got nothing.
The current actions in the cities aren’t to protect citizens. Citizens have been rounded up, too. Only 5% of the undocumented had violent criminal convictions, the rest for things like traffic tickets, while 73% had no record at all. (Stats from the very conservative Cato Institute.) It’s a rehearsal for when we get so desperate we go back to reviving the labor union movement and organizing politically by class. WWII German pastor Niemoeller famously said: “First they came for X, and I didn’t protest because I wasn’t X. They came for Y, then Z…by the time they came for me, there was no one left to protest.”
Surely the way to deal with illegal immigrants in a more humane manner is to prosecute all the people who are hiring them ?
Remove the incentives and they will return home. How many politicians, actors, billionaires are hiring illegals ?
However, as is obvious, ICE is nothing to do with illegals, it’s all to do with stopping criticism of Israel and the corrupt government.
May I suggest an even more human way to do away with illegal immigration? What about not invading, bombing and starving by illegal economic sanctions other nations? What about allowing economic development (industrialization sustain by a high energy per capita and internal improvement – infrastructure)? What about not wanting to put other countries in debt trap in US dollars and imposing IMF economic structural ‘reform’ of free trade, privatization, deregulation that allows Anglo-American corporations and London City and Wall Streets bankers to loot those countries, often reducing to mere raw exporter nations to obtain US dollars to pay back loans and thus stifling their industrialization, a necessary to improve well-being? In short, why not becoming a good neighbour anew and promoting win-win economic project of development through the Americas instead of fantasizing on big guns, big ships and regime change? How many big infrastructure projects have the US built in Latin America in the last 30 years? If you say zero, you are spot on. As long as American will tolerate elites British imperial economic policy, as expressed by Brzezi?ski, of not wanting a new Japan south of the border, don’t whine to have illegal immigrants coming.
And you write this garbage in relation to the execution of two US citizens, a nurse and a mother, abiding by their constitutional rights, by lawless thugs who have been granted immunity by the Trump administration. Holy hell, and you spin this into being anti -American. There is nothing more fucking anti-american than you, and i roundly implore you to get the hell out of this country.
GREAT
Once upon a time in the United States of America, the specter of masked, anonymous federal agents attacking citizens of their own country, or anyone, was anathema. Purportedly, that only occurred in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia (the Soviet variant) or perhaps, in Zionist Israel. Not so any more as the following article discloses, one again from Consortium News in a piece from Jon Queally, the managing editor of Common Dreams. Because Facebook does not permit links to Consortium News, I had to copy and reformat it.
The gestapo and stalinist equivalent never hid their faces or who they worked for. Yet in America they do. As reported elsewhere [1] ICE should be forced to go maskless and should have identifying badges like normal cops do. After all, they are paid out of the public purse and are therefore public servants answerable to the law of the land, apparently !!
[1] Ron Unz, ‘Say Goodbye to the Second Amendment—and Most of the Others as Well!’
The following webpage prepends its own “non-news” address to “news” urls so they can be posted to and redirected when clicked on at Facebook: hxxps://r.pebmac.ca/
Well said Guillermo!
Report who this militia really is. These are j6rs after trump pardoned couldn’t get hired . Miller hired at 50000 each sign on. No they have no training but go to military.com see trump and BIBI CONTRACTED FOR IDF BABY KILLERS TO TRAIN J6RS
THEY A T LIKE JIGH ON METH WHICH BEEN REPORTED IDF GIVEN METH IF THEY WANT BEFORE BATTLE.