Video appears to show Alex Pretti in scuffle with federal agents 11 days before his death

This article is thanks to The Court Jester!

A newly released video appears to show 37-year-old Alex Pretti confronting federal immigration officers on a Minneapolis street 11 days before he was fatally shot in another encounter with Customs and Border Protection agents.

A representative for the Pretti family told CBS News that Pretti was the man in the video. The representative said the family knew about the incident and that he sustained injuries, but did not receive medical care.      

The video was recorded on Jan. 13 and posted Wednesday by The News Movement, a digital media outlet. It shows a man confronting federal agents along with other protesters. The video was verified by CBS News partner BBC News, and CBS News has confirmed the footage was filmed in Minneapolis.

In the video, the man is seen kicking and damaging the taillight of a government SUV. The vehicle then stops, and federal agents emerge and tackle him to the ground.

There appears to be a handgun in the man's waistband — as was also seen in footage from the day Pretti was killed. 

The video does not indicate whether the man was detained by federal officers following the Jan. 13 incident. 

Later in the video, officers deploy chemical irritants in the street as a number of other people shout, honk their horns or stand around filming the scene on their phones.

Man who appears to be Alex Pretti filmed interacting with federal agents by The News Movement on YouTube

A Department of Homeland Security official told CBS News investigators with Homeland Security Investigations were aware of the video and are analyzing it. 

Another video from the scene that day also shows a man who resembles Pretti wearing the same clothing as seen in the footage posted by The News Movement.

Pretti was wearing very similar clothing in footage from Saturday, Jan. 24, the day he was shot and killed.

"A week before Alex was gunned down in the street — despite posing no threat to anyone — he was violently assaulted by a group of ICE agents," Steve Schleicher, an attorney for the Pretti family, told CBS News in a statement regarding the video. "Nothing that happened a full week before could possibly have justified Alex's killing at the hands of ICE on Jan 24."

Pretti, an intensive care nurse with the Veterans Administration, was shot as he and several others protested an operation by immigration officers in south Minneapolis. Videos from the scene showed that he had a cellphone in his hand before being shoved to the ground by several officers, one of whom removes a gun from Pretti's waist during a skirmish moments before another Border Patrol agent opened fire.

Trump administration officials have alleged that the shots fired by the agents were "defensive" in nature. 

Pretti was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry, local officials said. Under Minnesota law, it's legal to carry a handgun in public if you have a valid permit.

According to a government report sent to Congress and obtained by CBS News, two CBP agents fired their weapons during the encounter. 

The agents involved in the incident have been placed on leave, a federal law enforcement official told CBS News Wednesday. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/video-alex-pretti-scuffle-federal-agents-minneapolis-11-days-before-his-death/

The Riddle ‘What Came First—the Chicken or the Egg?’ Befuddles Anti-ICE Supporters

Democrats and the rest of the left get stumped by the reality of cause and effect.

Ariddle posed simply as a philosophical paradox to stimulate discussion among thinkers of the day dates back to ancient Greece; that riddle proffered, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” Paramount to contemplating questions of life stimulated by such philosophical thinking was understanding the law of cause and effect.

Science eventually provided the riddle’s answer, determining the egg came first. A bird—not quite a chicken and thus considered a “proto-chicken”—laid an egg containing a genetic mutation, creating the DNA of the first true chicken.

An analysis of cause and effect is always critical to help resolve problems created as a consequence. Undertaking causes can sometimes unintentionally create negative effects; other times, the consequences may be foreseeable, thus creating an obligation to take action beforehand to limit the negative impact.

In a recent social posting by New York City’s socialist Democrat mayor, Zohran Mamdani, he made no effort to reflect upon cause and effect. His anti-America post came after ICE arrested a city employee, asserting the act represented an “assault on our democracy.”

By Mamdani’s post, the reader assumed an innocent New Yorker was wrongly apprehended. Of no concern to the mayor was why he was taken into custody—i.e., he was an illegal alien with an arrest for assault detained by ICE to examine his status.

Although reasons for the arrested man’s detention were justified, Mamdani’s only interest was in posting his kneejerk reaction to ICE doing its federally mandated job of arresting those who have violated our immigration laws.

While Mamdani’s post was irresponsible by failing to provide an explanation as to why ICE did what it did, an even more outrageous observation on a different matter was made by an official in another state. Arizona’s Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes effectively created an 1881 “O.K. Corral” shooting environment for locals by sanctioning the killing of ICE agents. Unbelievably, Mayes, citing the state’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law as justification, suggested that residents encountering masked ICE agents and feeling endangered had the right to shoot them. But nothing in that law justifies a citizen’s use of deadly force against a law enforcement officer in the line of duty. One would think too, as attorney general, Mayes would have explained, while the defensive law was meant to empower action when a victim’s space was being invaded, it would probably be inapplicable when the space of the ICE agent was being invaded by protesters.

Without any clarification, Mayes added to the confusion with the statement, “It’s kind of a recipe for disaster because you have these masked federal officers with very little identification, sometimes no identification, wearing plain clothes and masks.”

Sadly, on January 24, another ICE-involved killing occurred in Minneapolis. The victim was Alex Pretti and, while the media was quick to portray him as totally innocent, we are learning he was a member of the anti-ICE Signal chat group responsible for coordinating operations against the agency.

Shooting details remain sketchy but it is known he carried a gun and two magazines. It begs the question whether someone so armed was there to peacefully protest. A struggle ensued, during which Pretti was shot and killed.

Despite the shooting, Mayor Jacob Frey saw no need to warn the public to avoid ICE operations or to designate a safe area away from the ICE operations for protesters to demonstrate. Instead, he foolishly asked questions intent on dodging any responsibility on his part for what happened:

How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end? How many more lives need to be lost before this administration realizes that a political and partisan narrative is not as important as American values? How many times must local and national leaders plead with you, Donald Trump, to end this operation and recognize that this is not creating safety in our city?

Frey failed to ask a question, the obvious answer to which would restore the safety he supposedly sought for his city. That question is, “What can I as mayor do to prevent confrontations between ICE agents doing their job and residents opposed to them doing it?”

Frey totally ignored the fact that while Trump does his job as president, ridding our country of illegal aliens, the mayor fails to do his job to ensure the safety of his citizens. Doing so entails warning them against interfering with legal ICE operations and limiting their protesting to distant safe areas.

The failure of Frey and other state and local officials to do this explains why ICE agents have suffered a 1,300% increase in assaults, a 3,200% increase in vehicle attacks, and an 8,000% increase in death threats.

Boiled down to its common denominator, the incidents occurring between ICE agents and anti-ICE activists put two U.S. Constitutional rights into conflict. While anti-ICE activists do have a First Amendment right to protest, ICE agents are within their legal right to perform their federally-mandated duty to arrest illegal aliens. It is that same Constitution that, through the Supremacy Clause, mandates conflicting rights (as long as their congruent with the Constitution), bend to federal authority. This is the point that state and local officials have a responsibility to impress upon their citizens, offering the means by which both groups can effectively exercise their rights.

As evidenced by Mamdani with the arrest of his illegal alien employee, rather than warning NYC citizens about ICE rightfully being able to do so, he rushes to attack it. Yet it is this—the disrespect for U.S. law such aliens exhibit by illegally crossing our borders and automatically triggering ICE’s right to remove them—that Mamdani and other state and local officials choose to totally ignore. It is the cause of ICE doing what it rightfully has to do that creates the risk effect of injury or death to anti-ICE protesters who have chosen to disrespect U.S. law as well by aggressively interfering with ICE operations.

For years now, there have been laws mandating manufacturers provide warnings about their products that may not be known to the public. While the public should be well aware of what risks are undertaken by interfering with an ICE operation, there is a lack of accountability on the part of state and local government officials by their failure to forewarn about this.

Some states recognize the crime of “murder by omission.” It arises when a person with a duty to act to prevent the death of others fails to do so. No better example is befitting of state and local officials failing to so act to warn against public interference with ICE operations or to provide a safe area for protesters to demonstrate than the actions of those in Minneapolis.

It took time for the first, modern chicken to evolve. How much more time needs to pass and how many more ICE/protester victim lives claimed before common sense evolves among our political leaders?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/01/the_riddle_what_came_first_the_chicken_or_the_egg_befuddles_anti_ice_supporters.html

Starmer Arrives in China, Promising to Make ‘Real Progress’ With Xi Jinping

The British leader’s trip to China comes after several weeks of tension with Trump.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrives for a three-day visit in Beijing on Jan. 28, 2026.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrived in China on Jan. 28 for a three-day visit, a week after his government approved plans for a controversial new Chinese embassy in London.

Starmer, who is traveling with more than 50 representatives of UK businesses, will ⁠meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Jan. 29, before talks in Shanghai with local officials on Jan. 30.

“It doesn’t make sense to stick our head in the ground and bury it in the sand when it comes to China; it’s in our interests to engage,” Starmer told reporters aboard the plane to Beijing. “It’s going to be a really important trip for us, and we'll make some real progress.”

The most recent meeting between a British prime minister and Xi was in 2018, when Theresa May visited Beijing.

Starmer said he believes he can improve trade ties with China without harming the UK’s relationship with the United States.

“The relationship we have with the U.S. is one of the closest relationships we hold, on defense, security, intelligence, and also on trade and lots of areas,” Starmer told reporters.

Writing in an opinion piece published in The Times of London on Jan. 27, China’s ambassador to the UK, Zheng Zeguang, said the UK and China should “seek common ground while managing differences.”

“It is a fact that China and the UK do not see eye-to-eye on every issue,” Zheng wrote. “The right approach to addressing these differences is to engage in rational dialogue, and look for solutions in the spirit of mutual respect and pragmatism.”

China is the world’s second-largest economy and a major trading partner for the UK, but there has been a shift in the relationship in recent years amid a growing awareness of the security threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Espionage Operations

In September 2025, prosecutors dropped the charges against two British men, one of them a former Conservative Party parliamentary researcher, who had been accused of spying for China.

In the wake of the trial’s collapse, the Crown Prosecution Service sought to clarify with Starmer’s deputy national security adviser, Matt Collins, whether China was considered by the UK government to be a hostile state or an enemy.

On Oct. 15, 2025, Collins’s witness statements were published and revealed details of CCP espionage operations in the UK.

Protesters outside a proposed site for a new Chinese Embassy in London on Jan. 17, 2026.

In his August 2025 statement, Collins said, “The Chinese intelligence services are highly capable and conduct large-scale espionage operations against the UK to advance the Chinese state’s interests and harm the interests and security of the UK.”

The leader of the UK Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, said on Oct. 16, 2025, that Starmer “doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to Beijing.”

Starmer had said that his government was not responsible for the collapse of the trial and sought to blame the previous Conservative government, which lost power in the July 2024 election.

In November 2025, Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of the UK Conservative Party, who was sanctioned by China in 2021 after he highlighted the repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, told The Epoch Times that the new Chinese embassy at Royal Mint Court would have room for “200 extra spies” and would increase the CCP’s capacity for transnational repression.

On Jan. 20, the UK government granted planning permission for the new embassy.

In a letter, the UK’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, said security risks linked to the new embassy could not be fully eliminated but could be managed, and it said the new embassy would replace seven different diplomatically accredited Chinese sites across London and that “this consolidation should bring clear security advantages.”

UK Tensions With Trump

Starmer’s trip to China comes after several weeks of tension with U.S. President Donald Trump over the issue of Greenland. The UK was among those threatened with U.S. tariffs.

The British prime minister also described remarks made by Trump that non-U.S. countries in NATO had been absent from the front line in Afghanistan as “insulting” and “appalling.”

The UK lost 457 military personnel as a result of operations in Afghanistan between September 2001 and August 2021, according to the Ministry of Defence.

A member of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade who returned from helping with operations to evacuate people from Kabul airport in Afghanistan walks to the air terminal after disembarking a RAF Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, England, on Aug. 28, 2021. Alastair Grant/PA

Last week, Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on Canadian ⁠goods if its prime minister, Mark Carney, were to make an unspecified deal with China.

Carney responded in a speech in Davos, Switzerland. Without naming the United States, Carney said such powers are using “economic integration as a weapon, and tariffs as leverage.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/china/starmer-arrives-in-china-promising-to-make-real-progress-with-xi-jinping-5977395?ea_src=frontpage&ea_med=section-1

How Activists Use Curriculum and “Training” to Embed Leftist Ideology in K-12 Schools

(DCNF)—Activist organizations are developing curricula instructing teachers and students to be skeptical toward claims of antisemitism and sympathetic to pro-Palestinian causes, documents show.

Two pro-Palestinian organizations, Participatory Action Research Center for Organizing (PARCEO) and Project48, orchestrate programs and disseminate materials that blame “white nationalism” for antisemitism and ask participants to consider the “bad habit” of whiteness, documents obtained by Defending Education (DE) and shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation show. The activist programs are already finding their way into schools.

PARCEO “is a research, resource and education center” that partners with groups and institutions focusing on “educational justice; racial justice; workers’ rights; gender justice; challenging Islamophobia; immigrant rights; health and food justice, and more.” Project48 “was created to center Palestinians in the telling of their own history” and works to provide “educational material, eyewitness testimonies, images, videos and artifacts” to teach about “the ongoing Palestinian struggle against colonial erasure and the return of refugees to their ancestral lands.”

Both organizations have benefited from large, direct grants from Soros-linked Open Society foundations.

The two groups joined forces to create the Palestinian Nakba Curriculum, using the Arabic word for “Catastrophe” to refer to “the creation of Israel in 1948” and the following territorial struggle. The curriculum is meant to be used for “individual classes, for semester-long learning, as theme-specific modules, for presentations, and for workshops and webinars” and touches on topics such as “Settler Colonialism, Zionism, Refugees and Right of Return,” according to the Project48 website.

One session of the curriculum, titled “Nakba in Practice,” directs participants to “consider the history and material consequences of the Nakba, including what’s been hidden and erased, what’s been built over, stolen, destroyed, and what remains,” materials obtained by DE show. The section also covers “indigeneity” and “settler colonialism” in relation to Palestine.

Another section decrying Zionism purports to examine the “pervasive Zionist narrative” behind the Nakba, with slideshows on “the enactment and reality of Zionist colonization in Palestine” and Israel’s “intentionality behind the process.”

“The session also addresses the pervasive Zionist narrative that continues to ‘justify’ the Nakba, despite clear and compelling facts, and experiences of Palestinians,” the description explains.

The final session covers the “ongoing social, political, economic, and cultural forms of resistance in Palestine,” teaching students about “the impact, visions, and connections among movements for justice in Palestine and globally.”

PARCEO has also created the Curriculum on Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation, which blames antisemitism on “white nationalism” and compares it to “other forms of racism and injustice.”

These curricula are already being put to use in the classroom.

In 2023, the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE), a “group of current and former public school educators and their allies committed to fighting for social justice in our school system and society at large,” hosted an event exploring these two programs. More recently, an Oakland Unified School District teacher and member of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) helped organize a PARCEO event in October 2025 and invited school board members to participate, emails obtained by DE show. The event was meant to explain “the harmful disuse of ‘antisemitism’ to silence discussion of what is happening in Gaza and throughout Palestine.”

Other materials by PARCEO created in conjunction with JVP portray “white nationalist antisemitic violence” as the primary driver of anti-Jewish hate, warning readers that “white supremacists and white nationalists take advantage” of the anti-Zionism movement “to sow confusion and promote antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism.”

“White nationalist violence has been on the rise in the U.S., fueled by anti-immigrant and racist manifestos, sentiments, and conspiracy theories, such as the great replacement theory,” an explainer from PARCEO and JVP reads. “Jews are among the targets of white nationalist violence along with Black people, immigrants, Muslims, and trans and queer people, among others. Our safety is bound together with the safety of all people, and none of us is free if we aren’t all free.”

The groups claim opposition to Zionism is no different from criticizing the “settler colonialism, imperialism and white supremacy at the foundation of the United States.”

“Positionality” curriculum created by PARCEO and uncovered by DE seeks to help participants understand their “own identity in relation to race, class, power, gender, privilege, role and position.” Participants are asked to “Consider an experience … where you were conscious of your race, class, gender, migration status, sexual identity, or any other part of your identity(ies)” and encouraged to discuss how it made them feel.

“This is important for creating an inclusive environment,” the organization insists. “If we don’t reflect on our own identity and how we enter and influence a space, we can unknowingly perpetuate inequality and oppressive power structures.”

Some of the additional resources recommended in the curriculum include a “Phenomenology of Whiteness” paper, which “considers how whiteness functions as a habit, even a bad habit,” and a “White Awareness Handbook For Anti-Racism Training.” 

https://thelibertydaily.com/how-activists-use-curriculum-training-embed-leftist-ideology/

Supreme Court to consider reviewing Trump's appeal of E. Jean Carroll verdict next month

The high court will review the president's petition at a closed-door meeting on Feb. 20.

The United States Supreme Court updated its docket Wednesday to consider whether to take up President Donald Trump's request for a review of the jury verdict in writer E. Jean Carroll's civil battery and defamation case next month.

The high court will review the president's petition at a closed-door meeting on Feb. 20, where they will also review dozens of other requests, according to The Hill. The majority of petitions that reach the Supreme Court are dismissed.

The petition comes after Trump attempted to appeal the verdict in lower courts, which found him liable for sexually assaulting Carroll and defamation, but did not find that the president raped her. He was ordered to pay $5 million.

Trump has repeatedly denied the sexual abuse and rape allegations, which date back to the 1990s. 

Trump’s personal attorneys argued in their final brief Wednesday that it is “deeply damaging to the fabric of our Republic” for the president to have to continue fighting “against decades-old, false allegations and the myriad wrongs throughout this baseless case. This mistreatment of a President cannot be allowed to stand."

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/supreme-court-consider-reviewing-trumps-appeal-e-jean-carroll-verdict-next 

BREAKING: FBI Raids Fulton County, GA Election Office!

 This is a breaking news alert…

The FBI is executing a search warrant (i.e. a raid) at the Fulton County election office in Georgia, happening right now:

Fox News confirms this IS INDEED related to the 2020 election:

Watch it live on Fox News right here:

Of course the main question on everyone’s mind is will this be too little, too late?

If there was damaging evidence out there, why would they leave it sitting there for over five years?

Fox News added these details:

FBI agents were seen Wednesday carrying out a search at an election hub in Fulton County, Georgia, a location that became ground zero for concerns and complaints about voter fraud beginning in 2020.

Agents were seen entering the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, a new facility that state officials opened in 2023 that was designed to streamline their election processes.

It was not immediately clear what the FBI agents were investigating, but Fox News Digital is told the probe is related to the 2020 election.

The bureau said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital that FBI Atlanta was executing a “court authorized law enforcement action at 5600 [Campbellton] Fairburn Rd.”

“Our investigation into this matter is ongoing so there are no details that we can provide at the moment,” the bureau said.

The Department of Justice did not provide comment.

President Donald Trump lost the election in Georgia in 2020 by a wafer-thin margin and claimed various instances of fraud had tainted the results. Those claims did not survive court scrutiny. Fulton, a suburb of Atlanta and the state’s most populous county, drew significant attention at the time.

A machine count and two recounts confirmed that former President Joe Biden had won the state, leading Trump to feud with Georgia’s leaders for years.

The DOJ sued Fulton County last month seeking access to ballots related to the 2020 election.

https://100percentfedup.com/breaking-fbi-raids-fulton-county-ga-election-office/