Before the videos showing Border Patrol agents disarming ICU nurse Alex Pretti then shooting him to death. Before the video showing Border Patrol “commander at large” Greg Bovino throwing tear gas at protesters. Before the video showing a 5-year-old child, Liam Conejo Ramos, being detained by agents when he came home from daycare.
Before all of those horrors, the besieged city of Minneapolis was already awash with videos. There were plenty to watch. Worst of all, of course, was the video of ICE officer Jonathan Ross shooting Renee Good through first her windshield, then her side window, killing the mom of three.
But one man who should have been watching the tidal wave of videos, and acting on them. apparently wasn’t.
These are the stories which—if he had but paid attention—could have stopped a political crisis for President Donald Trump. Far more importantly, he could have stopped the death of another American at the hands of his own agents.
Target’s Teen Workers Seized
A Jan. 8 video shows federal immigration agents piling onto two 17-year-old employees in the vestibule of a Target store in suburban Minneapolis. Both are wearing bright orange vests that signal they are employees. Both are slammed face down and forcibly handcuffed as if they were resisting rather than simply stunned and scared.
The agents do not react when an onlooker with a cellphone calls out, “You’re on video.” One of the two teens, Jonathan Aguilar Garcia, calls out a phone number when onlookers ask if there is somebody who should be contacted.
“That’s my mom!” he yells.
He tells the federal agents that he has his passport on him and asks to show it. They ignore him. He is being hustled to an unmarked vehicle when he calls out, “I’m literally a U.S. citizen.”
The other teen, Christian Miranda Romano, is also loaded into the vehicle. Nearby stands Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, giving no indication that his minions are doing anything but exactly what he wants them to do.
Eerie Echo of George Floyd’s Murder
“Stop kneeing him in the face!” an onlooker cries in a Jan. 9 clip showing a man being held down in a Minneapolis street by five immigration officers, “Stop it!”
The officer continues doing it again and again as the others keep him pinned to the asphalt, unable even to turn his head away.
A Very Revealing Exchange
After Good’s killing, a woman recorded an exchange between herself and an immigration officer on Jan. 9 in another Minneapolis suburb, St. Louis Park.
“Shame,” the woman says.
“Have ya’ll not learned?” the officer says in an accent that marks him from someplace in America far from Minnesota. “Have you not learned from the last couple of days?”
“Learned what?” the woman replied. “What’s our lesson here?”
The officer responds by grabbing her phone.
“Give me my phone back!” the woman says.
A Teacher is Rammed—and Seized
Another video showed agents grabbing a 25-year-old special education teaching assistant named Christina Rank on Jan. 12. She had just arrived at the parking lot at the elementary school in suburban Inver Grove Heights, where she works, when her car was struck by a vehicle driven by a federal agent. A witness can be heard on the video saying that the agents smashed her car window, yanked her into the street, and deployed tear gas in the vicinity of children.
“That’s because she rammed my vehicle,” the agents can be heard saying.
“No, I was right in front of her,” a witness can be heard saying. “You rammed her vehicle. It’s all documented.”
The witness then reassures Rank, saying, “Christina, we’ll call your mom.”
Traumatic Brain Injury Ignored
An autistic woman was on her way to a nearby traumatic brain injury center in Minneapolis on Jan. 13 when federal agents broke her driver’s side window, cut her seatbelt, and yanked her from her car. Video showed that she was then handcuffed and carried face down to an ICE vehicle.
“I have a brain injury!” she cries out. “Put me down! I was just trying to get to the doctor!”
Noem Busted Lying on Camera—Again
A disorderly protest that served as a worrying reminder of the chaos that followed Good’s death came on Jan. 14 after a federal agent shot a Venezuelan immigrant in the leg in Minneapolis.
Federal authorities say there had been a car stop followed by a foot chase that ended outside the immigrant’s home. He and two other immigrants are alleged to have “ambushed” a pursuing federal agent with a shovel and a broomstick. The agent is said to have fired a “defensive shot to defend his life.” Kristi Noem, cosplaying secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), described the actions of the three alleged assailants as “attempted murder.”
Noem’s account is challenged by a video recorded inside the man’s house immediately after the shooting. Small children can be seen wandering about as the man can be heard calling 911, asking for help in Spanish. The man’s wife tells the 911 operator that her husband had been shot “by ICE” after he fled inside their house.
“They shot through the door,” she says in Spanish.
They Tear-Gassed a Baby
Some 200 protesters began gathering at the scene after the Jan. 14 shooting, and the agents responded with enough teargas that a 6-month-old baby in a nearby home began having trouble breathing. The baby’s family decided that the best thing to do was evacuate. They encountered an ICE officer as they headed to their family car.
“‘I told them I was trying to leave,” the father says on a video that was later posted. “He knew I was trying to leave.”
The father says the officer threw three flashbangs.
“Under my car,” the father adds.
The video shows that the detonations caused the airbags to deploy. The father reports that the baby briefly seemed to go into respiratory arrest.
“He can’t breathe,” the father recalls in the video.
Thankfully, an ambulance arrived, and paramedics revived the boy.
The Awful Video Trump Ignored...
ICE agent Jonathan Ross may have been seeking to answer video with video as he made a predatory circle with his personal cellphone around Renee Good’s Honda Pilot SUV. He instead managed to preserve what seems to have been Good’s very last words.
“That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you,” Good can be heard saying on Jan. 7, sounding not at all like a domestic terrorist.
Ross comes around the back of the Honda, where Good’s wife is standing with her own cellphone, apparently recording him recording her as she mocks him as “Big Boy.” Ross continues circling. His cellophane is still recording as he switches it from his right hand to his left, draws his service weapon, and fires.
“You f---ing b---h,” he can be heard saying, sounding not at all like a guardian of justice.
Noem subsequently called Good a domestic terrorist who “weaponized” her vehicle, even though Ross’ own video shows that the Honda’s wheels were turned away from him when she began to drive.
And The Video He Finally Could Not
Noem repeated the slur 17 days later, after multiple videos showed two federal agents killing Veterans Administration ICU nurse Pretti on Jan. 24. He actually had a weapon. But he was licensed to carry his 9-mm semi-automatic pistol, and it never left its holster until one of the agents who piled on him pulled it away. Two other agents then fired a total of 10 shots, several as he lay motionless in the streets, causing no possible harm to anyone.
The Trumpsters again went into lie mode, saying he had brandished his gun when he clearly had not. They wavered only after a 2024 video appeared showing Pretti on the job at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. Pretti is reading a tender tribute over a deceased patient’s flag-draped body.
Numerous videos from 2026 show federal agents taking actions that would leave them liable to discipline in most police departments. The ones where they are hitting or kneeing people appear to constitute assault, which would mean the agents are violating the law even as they are supposedly enforcing it.
Almost all of the videos appear to have gone unnoticed or simply ignored by the federal authorities who dispatched some 3,000 agents hyped up with talk of defending the homeland against the worst of the worst.
Too often, agents in the videos appear to grab people based on their skin color, regardless of their immigration status. Their masks add to what appears to be the intended effect: instilling terror. And that marks them as the real domestic terrorists, not Good or Pretti.
All the videos were quickly online for any federal official in charge to see. They documented escalating violence on the part of those we pay to protect us. And, by ignoring the warning signs, the top goons have the blood of an ICU nurse on their hands.
DHS and ICE were asked by the Daily Beast to comment on the array of videos of their thugs in action that had preceded Pretti’s death.
They could have gone on video themselves. But their only response was silence.
