Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Alex Pretti

Add his name to Renee Good’s.

By Joyce Vance, Jan 26, 2026

After a long, difficult weekend, following the murder of Alex Pretti on Saturday in Minneapolis, which followed the murder of Renee Good earlier in the month, there is more evidence that when we protest against this administration and stay the course, we prevail. We cannot give up, and Americans don’t look like they intend to. Instead, with a lot of grit, they are staying the course.

There is more I want to write about the death of Alex Pretti once I finish processing everything that happened this weekend. I think we’re all still processing, but also, it’s a moment that demands action, so we have to be able to do both of those things at once. We saw the shameless, untrue, demeaning propaganda DHS spouted about Pretti. There is the failure to acknowledge a tragic mistake, to show empathy for his family, to take steps to take the temperature down—all things this administration must be held accountable for at the highest levels. But today, I want to write about the little bit of light shining through the dark.

Trump is backing down.

His Attorney General Pam Bondi’s offensive offer—give us your voter files, she said to Minnesota, and ICE will leave—was called into question by Judges in Oregon and Minnesota. It was clear the judges had questions, but they weren’t alone.

In the wake of the administration’s lies about Pretti, protests erupted across the country. Americans called for an unbiased investigation after reporting emerged that ICE refused to let state and local investigators onto the scene at first, and then abandoned it without securing it, which compromised other agencies’ ability to gather evidence. With protests ongoing across the country, the administration is slowly backing away.

On the Sunday shows, in addition to Democrats, Oklahoma’s Republican Kevin Stitt said Trump needed to answer questions about pulling ICE out of Minnesota and opined “He’s getting bad advice right now.” On Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbot said on a local radio show that “They, being the White House, need to recalibrate on what needs to be done to make sure that respect is going to be reinstilled,” and that they had a plan to do that. Congressional Republicans, including Representative Michael McCaul of Texas and Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, called, in varying degrees, for more investigation. That’s about as much backbone as we’ve seen from Republicans in the past year.

It was clear to Republicans that Americans had no intention of letting this go.

Tonight, it appears that the days of Gregory Bovino strutting around Minneapolis streets in his greatcoat may be over. The Atlantic reported earlier tonight, “Greg Bovino Loses His Job.” They wrote that he had “been removed from his role as Border Patrol ‘commander at large’ and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to a DHS official and two people with knowledge of the change.”

DHS is denying that the report is true.

But as Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News posted, “Nothing in this carefully worded statement by DHS denies the crux of the reporting that Bovino was demoted to his previous job, lost social media access, will leave Minnesota and may retire soon.”

Of course, removing Bovino alone is not the answer, but it’s a start. And we the people did that. We cannot let up, we have to keep going. As I wrote to you last week on Martin Luther King Day, peaceful protest is the answer. “Bull Connor’s ghost is walking the streets of America in the guise of Donald Trump and others around him, Kristi Noem and Thomas Homan, people who reject country and Constitution. People who have no appreciation for our system of government or our rule of law, but who think only of themselves. We don’t talk enough about how not-normal this is. We all know it, it’s become an accepted truth. Let’s honor the legacy of peaceful protest by speaking that truth to power. Because we love our country. And we intend to take it back in this election year.”

This week, Americans did just that: we spoke truth to power.

In the immediate wake of Pretti’s death, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and others, including the President, tried to demean his character and call him a terrorist. But it quickly became apparent that Pretti was holding a phone, not a gun, and was trying to save another protestor, a woman, who was being attacked by an agent. He wasn’t there to massacre law enforcement. He was a VA ICU nurse. He was there to help. As Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy tweeted, “It should freak the American people out that Trump, Noem and Bovino lie so enthusiastically. He wasn’t ‘brandishing a weapon’. He wasn’t attending a ‘riot’ or ‘interfering in a crime scene’. He was an ICU nurse exercising his constitutional rights.”

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