Barack Obama has issued a stark warning about the future of the U.S. under President Donald Trump following the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis over the weekend.
Pretti, 37, was fatally shot by federal agents while filming an immigration operation on his phone. His death came just days after another fatal incident involving federal immigration enforcement: the shooting of Renee Good, a mother of three, by an ICE officer on Jan. 7.
“More and more Americans are voicing their outrage at the tactics being deployed by federal agents in Minnesota,” the former president wrote on X. “But it’s important to understand the broader implications of what this administration is doing, and the threat it poses to the basic freedoms of every American.”
In a separate post, Obama shared a link to a January 23 episode of The Ezra Klein Show, saying the podcast “does a good job of laying out what’s at stake, and why all of us need to get off the sidelines to demand change.”
The episode examines whether Trump’s large-scale immigration crackdown operation in Minnesota, where some 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents are now operating, signals a shift toward authoritarian governance.
“Is it authoritarianism now? Has the nature of the American state finally changed into something else?” asks The New York Times columnist Klein in the episode’s opening.
Klein accused the Trump administration of “creating the conditions” for tragedies like the deaths of Good and Pretti by escalating immigration raids “in their size, in their aggression, in their framing and their propaganda.”
“And that is a fairly common thing in authoritarian regimes — we’ve seen this in other countries and in history — where you attack your own population, and you then look for pretext to escalate,” Klein continued.
“Where the question is not how to prevent the killing of a Renee Good from happening again but actually how to escalate around the killing of Renee Good in order to catch more of the Trump administration’s enemies in their net—call the protesters domestic terrorists, etc.”
In the aftermath of the fatal shootings, Trump administration officials sought to deflect blame.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Pretti of “attacking” officers and “brandishing” a gun, while top White House aide Stephen Miller described Pretti as “a domestic terrorist” and “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”
However, a preliminary federal report later found no evidence that Pretti had brandished a weapon, contradicting those initial claims.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued to defend the actions of the ICE officer who killed Good, arguing that he acted lawfully during the incident.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, earlier accused the Trump administration of appearing “eager to escalate” tensions while feeding the public apparent lies.
“The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault,” the former president and first lady wrote in a statement.
Trump, speaking with The Will Cain Show on Fox News on Tuesday night, said “the whole thing is terrible.”
“I don’t like the fact that he was carrying a gun… It’s pretty unusual. But nobody knows when they saw the gun, how they saw the gun, everything else. Bottom line, it was terrible,” he said.
The president has said he would seek to “de-escalate” the situation in Minneapolis.
