I did a good bit of this at The Hayride on Monday, in a post objecting to endangered RINO Senator Bill Cassidy’s going wobbly on the ICE deployments after last weekend’s developments. Let’s start with what I said there, and then we’ll add more after the excerpt… I’m not about to say I was happy over the death of a radical anti-ICE protester over the weekend. His name was Alex Pretti, and he was a 37-year-old male nurse at a VA hospital who appeared to be well-liked and good at his job. I’ve watched the videos of Pretti’s death at the hands of ICE agents over the weekend, and counter to what the Left are now screaming in unison that he was “murdered,” I don’t claim any particular superpowers of discernment that indicate much other than a scrum, chaos and utterly idiotic situation that was bound to go badly. What I do know is that Alex Pretti brought a gun to a protest of federal law enforcement agents engaged in an operation to deport a criminal illegal alien. He had a right to carry a firearm to that protest. But then Alex Pretti thought it would be a good idea to grapple with ICE agents as the protest turned into a mini-riot, and found out different. I’m not even saying it was a “good shoot” that caused his death. I’m going to be agnostic about that question. What I will say is that wading into a team of ICE officers as they’re trying to do a job the people elected Donald Trump president in order that it would get done, and furthermore is a job a large majority of Americans support being done, is a very stupid and dangerous thing to do and generated very predictable results. Oh, yeah — in case you missed it, Trump’s deportations are still very popular, as Brian Joondeph notes at American Thinker… Night after night, TV viewers see images of angry protesters, breathless commentary about “authoritarian crackdowns,” the familiar ‘Trump is Hitler/Nazi/fascist’ trope, and sympathetic portrayals of activists blocking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The media narrative is clear: Americans are revolting against deportations. But polling tells a very different story. A recent Rasmussen Reports survey shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans support President Trump’s efforts to locate and deport illegal immigrants. That includes a majority of independents, more than a third of Democrats, and almost two-thirds of Hispanic respondents. Support spans all age groups. Black and White voters show nearly identical approval ratings. This isn’t fringe sentiment; it’s mainstream opinion. Yet, this reality is almost entirely missing from media coverage. The disconnect matters because it reveals how much narrative has replaced analysis in today’s political journalism. Protests are viewed as substitutes for public opinion, while polling — especially when it contradicts preferred stories — is ignored, downplayed, or dismissed. Regarding immigration, the media’s main belief is that enforcement equals cruelty, and opposition equals compassion. They often claimed that Trump put kids in cages, ignoring that the practice existed before Trump and expanded during Obama. They also called Barack Obama the “deporter in chief,”  deporting more illegal aliens than Trump. But voters are not nearly so simplistic. The Rasmussen data suggest Americans still believe in something unfashionable in elite ruling class circles: laws should be enforced, and national borders should mean something. Independent voters, who tend to decide elections in competitive districts, approve of enforcement efforts. Hispanic voters, who are often portrayed as uniformly opposed to deportations, support them at surprisingly high levels. Even among Democrats, whose leadership has largely embraced near-open borders, more than a third approve of Trump’s approach. These figures do not reflect a public in revolt. In the vast majority of the country, ICE is busy deporting illegal aliens, and primarily criminals — 70 percent of those deported have committed crimes while here or are under a judicial deportation order; I’m not just calling them criminals because they broke the law coming here — without incident. Largely because how things are supposed to work is that when an illegal is arrested for committing a crime, local law enforcement holds them in jail and then notifies ICE, who comes to get them and takes custody of them, brings them to a detention center and then deports them. The environment is controlled and safe and the public isn’t affected by the removal of a criminal element in our midst. But in sanctuary cities like Minneapolis, that isn’t done. Local law enforcement doesn’t cooperate with ICE. They’ll release criminal illegal aliens on bail or on their own recognizance before trial, without notifying the feds. And then the feds have to go into the community to fetch the criminals and bring them to a detention center to be shipped home. An organized army of “protesters” like Alex Pretti and Renee Good, the woman shot three weeks ago by an ICE agent she hit with her car, are following ICE agents around and interfering with them as they arrest illegal alien criminals. There are communications networks, like the Signal chat organized by Minnesota’s own Lt. Governor, the nose-ringed leftist Peggy Flanagan, which dispatch protesters to the scenes of ICE arrests when they’re detected. And those protests are not nonviolent. They’re invasive, intrusive and aggressive. They’ve led to ICE officers getting hurt and protesters getting hurt. Minnesota’s leadership are ginning up these protests in an effort to force the Trump administration to back down. Why? Not because they care much about protecting criminal illegal aliens per se, but because they want to extract the maximum political cost to deportations, period — because this is the easy stage. After the criminal illegals are sent home, the politically harder work of deporting the less-dangerous illegals begins. And those 20 million, or more, illegals are the ocean which gives Democrats the electoral votes they need to stay politically relevant — even if they don’t vote, and a lot more of them do than you think, they’re still counted in the census. As we’ve seen with the case of widespread, shocking amounts of welfare fraud among the Somalis in Minnesota and elsewhere, immigrants, and particularly illegals, though most of the Somalis were legal immigrants, make for an amazingly lush environment for cheating the system and giving Democrats easy funds for campaigns and wealth redistribution. It’s a Cloward-Piven opportunity leftist radicals have begged for since the 1960’s and they won’t let it go without a fight. Yes, I know. Were I borrowing from anyone else but myself, I would be guilty of plagiarism. I’m happy to report that, as the editorial staff of that publication, The Hayride has no complaints. But there is more, because we are finding that the violence and turmoil surrounding ICE operations aren’t just in blue states but specifically — vastly disproportionately — in just nine counties across the country. (RELATED: What’s Really Causing the Minnesota ‘Insurrection’?) On X, Kevin Bass posted the results of a study he did on violent ICE-involved incidents, and the numbers were fascinating and highly instructive… I am horrified. I cannot believe it. I analyzed public databases and media reporting on violent confrontations with ICE over the past year. Just 9 counties accounted for TWO-THIRDS of violent confrontations with ICE in America. This is twice all violent confrontations in the… pic.twitter.com/PuQuntgtGF — Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) January 26, 2026 At 28, there have been more of these incidents in Chicago than anywhere else, which is perhaps one reason why the police chief there came out strongly against anti-ICE protesters interfering with ICE agents. One wonders if the fact that South Chicago, which has always been the heart of that city’s black community, was the site of most of ICE’s activity during their ramp-up, and the black community was anything but opposed to the deportations. Chicago’s Democrats walk a bit of a fine line pushing the open-borders catechism; their core voters in that city and state are not on board with that catechism, given the negative effect on their quality of life that illegal aliens have. Beyond Chicago, though (and Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson are as loony-left a pair as it’s possible to elect), these cities are as communist a set of enclaves as it’s possible to have in this country. Los Angeles Minneapolis New York Portland San Francisco Seattle Newark Denver Know what also ties those places together? They’re all cities with stagnant or declining populations whose federal funding and congressional representation (state representation, too) are bolstered by the presence of illegals. Alex Pretti might not have realized it — the chances are he didn’t have a clue — but he died trying to protect a political party as it was negating the votes and wealth of Americans in favor of an imported vote-plantation underclass. Almost certainly, he was ginned up to believe that ICE was busily attacking single-mother domestic laborers and fast-food workers already stepped on by The Man, when ICE, for the most part, hasn’t even gotten to them yet. (RELATED: Peaceful Protestors Don’t Carry Loaded Pistols) And he and those like him are being ginned up by Minnesota’s Democrat leadership, and Democrats nationally, so that Trump will give up on the mass deportation and demoralize his own base — and, per Rasmussen’s latest polling, the majority of the country — in advance of the midterms. The horror of it is nothing short of breathtaking. The First Amendment does not give them the right to interfere with law enforcement officers as they carry out their duties. But as I’ve noted a few times, the Left has indoctrinated its activists into a cult of victimization. It’s almost a line-by-line refrain of Jim Jones’s Guyana song and dance, in which the victimization led to exile and mass suicide in 1978. Back then, the bulk of the country was disgusted by Jones’s inducing his followers to drink the Kool-Aid, but now it’s been normalized. I’m saddened by Alex Pretti’s death. I’m sure everyone at ICE is. That it could well have been an accident — there are reports indicating Pretti’s Sig Sauer P320 accidentally discharged, which is a known issue with that cheap pistol, just after it was taken from him, and that precipitated the ICE officers to shoot him — makes this even worse. But that’s precisely why responsible cops across the country, but not in Minnesota, are telling people the First Amendment does not give them the right to interfere with law enforcement officers as they carry out their duties. And to stay the hell back from the fray lest something tragic might happen. The organizations — and they are organizations; this isn’t an organic protest but a disciplined, funded army at work in Minnesota — responsible for “training” the Alex Prettis of the world must be taken down. They are getting people killed, and they’re doing it for an utterly illegitimate, partisan-political purpose that the American people vehemently oppose. (RELATED: Who’s Paying for the Minneapolis Protesters?) We don’t want to see anybody else die at ICE’s hands. The principal culprits in those deaths so far have been the bastards throwing cannon fodder at ICE. It has to stop, no matter how aggressive the administration has to be to stop it. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Emasculating the Emasculating Big Media Europe Is Thus Illuminated, Exactly As It Is Was That Church Attack the Tipping Point in Minnesota? Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.