This is the story of two men who embodied opposing visions for America.
Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old I.C.U. nurse gunned down by federal agents, represents one set of values. Gregory Bovino, who until a few days ago commanded federal agents in Minneapolis, represents a different set. A nation cannot be reduced to two men, of course, but perhaps their choices can clarify our own. Do we want to live in Alex Pretti’s America? Or Gregory Bovino’s?
Pretti loved mountain biking and the outdoors and had a deep concern for social justice. Colleagues describe him as having been warm and empathetic.
“He just exuded friendliness and kindness,” Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, who worked with Pretti, told me. “A smile would be on his face within the first 30 to 60 seconds of talking with him. He would be laughing.”
Drekonja said that Pretti did not talk about patriotism as such, but that his choice of a Veterans Affairs hospital revealed his values.
“There are many jobs in nursing, but choosing to work with veterans is something many of us do because we appreciate being in a system that does what is needed and doesn’t bill patients,” Drekonja said.
Pretti reportedly had his garage door fixed recently and gave the repairman, a Latino, a $100 tip because of the crackdown on immigrants.
“He cared about people deeply, and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE,” Michael Pretti, his father, told The Associated Press. “He thought it was terrible, you know, kidnapping children, just grabbing people off the street.”
Pretti was both a sensitive man and a brave one, trying in his last moments to shield a woman in distress.
Federal agents had attacked the woman, shoving her hard to the ground. Pretti stepped between her and her assailant, even as the agent sprayed chemical irritant in his face. That’s when a group of agents seized him, threw him to the ground, took his legal firearm from him and then shot at him 10 times as he was unarmed and defenseless on the ground.
“All Alex ever wanted was to help someone — anyone,” his younger sister, Micayla, said in a statement. “Even in his very last moments on this earth, he was simply trying to do just that.”
Bovino represents an alternative kind of masculinity, a swashbuckling, armed-to-the-teeth, never-retreat machismo that has infused the Trump administration. Bovino joined the Border Patrol in 1996, but his career took off only last year, reportedly after the Trump administration noted his aggressive style and tapped him to manage a major operation in Los Angeles. There he deployed his “mean green team” with customary swagger, at one point telling his men, “this is our city” — with an expletive thrown in. His team’s ferocity appalled many Californians, but won plaudits in MAGA circles.
In some authoritarian quarters there is a yearning for an unapologetic John Wayne approach to law and order, and Bovino cast himself in that role. His style was not to negotiate obstacles, but to crush them.
In Chicago last year, Bovino’s masked and heavily armed agents undertook a series of violent operations, including one that foreshadowed what happened in Minneapolis. An agent shot a U.S. citizen, Marimar Martinez, five times as she sat in her vehicle, and administration officials then accused her of being a “terrorist” who had attacked them. She survived and the case against her collapsed, but the authorities have refused to release body cam video of the incident.
In a scathing 233-page judgment, a U.S. District Court judge, Sara Ellis, described a pattern of violent and lawless behavior in Chicago by federal agents under Bovino.
“Tear gassing expectant mothers, children, and babies shocks the conscience,” she wrote. She dismissed Bovino’s testimony as “not credible” and asserted that “Bovino admitted in his deposition that he lied multiple times.”
Apparently unconcerned, Trump administration officials then dispatched Bovino to run the operation in Minneapolis in which Renee Good was killed first, and then Pretti.
“Hats off to that ICE agent” who shot Good, Bovino declared. “I’m glad he made it out alive.” He later suggested, contrary to evidence, that Pretti had wanted to “massacre law enforcement.”
While administration officials proclaim themselves on the side of law and order, they are steamrolling the law. The chief federal judge in Minnesota has excoriated ICE for violating nearly 100 court orders, saying that it disobeyed more judicial directives in January than some agencies have in their entire existence.
There’s a danger in telling these stories of shoehorning everything into a too-neat narrative. Neither Pretti nor Bovino is a caricature. A video has surfaced of Pretti cursing federal agents, spitting at them and kicking their vehicle and damaging it, 11 days before his killing. In those moments, he does not seem as saintly as some eulogies suggest, but perhaps a bit more human.
I’ve framed this as the story of two men, but of course in reality it’s the tale of two Americas. Bovino was not a rogue actor, and the policy was never his; it was always President Trump’s.
For now, Bovino has been exiled from Minneapolis, but the White House described him as “a great professional” who “is going to very much continue to lead Customs and Border Patrol throughout and across the country.”
To me, this feels like one of the epic confrontations of my early childhood, the civil rights movement, when law enforcement turned fire hoses and police dogs on peaceful protesters. Back then, it was the states that employed violence, while federal agents tried to restrain them; now it is the reverse.
Those civil rights battles were resolved in part because the public recoiled after seeing the brutality police employed against protesters. These days, the bloodshed is even more visible, revulsion is similarly growing — and the horrors we have witnessed should impel more of us to take a stand. The question is straightforward: Which America do we choose?
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