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.

So that’s where we are. And here’s where Bill Cassidy, Louisiana’s hyper-establishmentarian senator who is up for re-election, is in the aftermath of Pretti’s death…

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Saturday expressed concern about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) reputation following another fatal shooting in Minnesota.

“The events in Minneapolis are incredibly disturbing. The credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake. There must be a full joint federal and state investigation. We can trust the American people with the truth,” Cassidy said Saturday in a post on the social platform X.

…

Cassidy’s comments follow weeks of tension in Minnesota over President Trump’s immigration agenda, which escalated in the wake of the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer earlier this month.

Recently, the Louisiana senator has also found himself at odds with Trump. Last week, the president even endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.) over Cassidy, saying Letlow “is a TOTAL WINNER!”

“I know Julia well, have seen her tested at the highest and most difficult levels, and she is a TOTAL WINNER! A Proud Mother of two children, Julia is a wonderful person, has ALWAYS delivered for Louisiana, and would continue doing so in the United States Senate,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.

The question for Cassidy is this: are you petty as hell, or just weak?

Because ICE spent most of the month of December running an operation in southeast Louisiana, and though the local media did everything they could to manufacture the kind of crisis that is going on in Minnesota right now, there were no Renee Good or Alex Pretti incidents.

Why? Because local law enforcement cooperated with ICE.

Connie Hair has an excellent piece up here at The Hayride today talking about the absolute scum of the earth which has been removed from the streets of our state thanks to ICE’s efforts. That piece lands just as Cassidy is wetting his pants over ICE and the ugly scenes the radical protest army are causing, courtesy of the uncooperative locals in that state.

Cassidy isn’t reflective of the majority view – not nationally, and certainly not in Louisiana. Which leads one to think that maybe he isn’t being weak here – unless he’s also stupid, and easily influenced by legacy media narratives – but rather this is Cassidy getting revenge on Trump for weighing in against his re-election.

Either way it’s disqualifying for Cassidy.

But if this is reflective of the new Cassidy stance, and by endorsing Julia Letlow Trump has set Cassidy free to become Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski or Mitch McConnell, you could see this stupidity as a predictable result of a bad decision on Trump’s part. Cassidy might have been more likely to behave himself had Trump not surrendered his leverage by making that endorsement.

It’ll take some time to find out whether that’s true.

But like I said above, either way it’s disqualifying for Cassidy.