When enforcement turns deadly, democracy requires evidence, transparency, accountability, and the courage to refuse silence.
Updated August 24, 2026
A statement and critical review by Mr. Alvarez, on behalf of Climate Change Community LLC and its child-sites.
Why Climate Change Community LLC Will Speak
Climate Change Community LLC was created to confront the Climate and Ecological Emergency, but a livable future is about more than atmospheric carbon, ecosystems, and technology. It is also about whether human beings can live with dignity, safety, rights, and a meaningful voice in the societies that must navigate those emergencies. A community cannot become resilient by becoming indifferent to suffering.
So yes: we will speak up and speak out about injustice. From genocide and mass atrocities to the murder of innocent people, political violence, racialized dehumanization, abuses of state power, and attacks on basic human dignity, we will not decide that suffering is “outside our lane” simply because it is not labeled climate policy.
We will try to do that work carefully: separating verified facts from allegations, correcting ourselves when the record changes, refusing dehumanization, and rejecting violence as a political answer.
That is why the deaths of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti matter here. They are not climate stories in the narrow sense. They are stories about civic trust, the use of government power, the right of people to observe and protest public authority, and the kind of institutions we will depend upon as climate disruption puts greater pressure on housing, migration, emergency response, public health, food systems, and social stability.
What Happened in Minneapolis — and What the Record Now Shows
On January 7, 2026, Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, poet, and mother of three, was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross during a federal immigration operation in south Minneapolis. Good and her wife had stopped in the area in support of neighbors and were monitoring the federal enforcement activity.
Her wife later summarized the imbalance they experienced in five words:
“We had whistles. They had guns.”
The federal government quickly characterized the shooting as self-defense and said Good had used her vehicle as a weapon. Video reviewed by Reuters showed Ross firing three shots as Good’s SUV moved forward. Reuters reported that Ross and the vehicle appeared to make contact but could not determine precisely how. Its reconstruction showed the first shot passing through the windshield as the SUV moved past Ross, followed by two shots into the driver’s side as the vehicle continued past him.
That evidence does not, by itself, settle every legal question. It does demonstrate why immediate political declarations of certainty were inappropriate before a complete investigation.
Seventeen days later, on January 24, federal immigration personnel killed Alex Pretti, also 37, during another confrontation in Minneapolis. Pretti was an intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System.
He was legally carrying a handgun, but video verified by Reuters showed him holding a cellphone—not a gun—as agents wrestled him to the ground. Video also showed an officer removing Pretti’s firearm from his body shortly before the first shots were fired. He had a legal permit to carry the weapon.
A preliminary Customs and Border Protection review subsequently said two federal officers—a Border Patrol agent and a customs officer—had fired their weapons. Investigative reporting later identified the officers as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and CBP officer Raymundo Gutierrez.
These details matter because early government statements portrayed Pretti as an armed aggressor who threatened officers. The available video sharply complicated that account. Reuters found similar contradictions between government descriptions and visual evidence in several immigration-enforcement encounters.
A person can be armed lawfully and still be entitled to constitutional protection. A protester can be angry and still be entitled to due process. A federal badge does not erase the obligation to explain why deadly force was used.
The Story Did Not End in January
The original version of this post was written while events were still unfolding. Seven months later, the central demand for accountability has not become less urgent. It has become better documented.
The Justice Department opened a civil-rights investigation into Pretti’s killing. Reuters reported at the time that no comparable criminal civil-rights investigation was being pursued into Good’s death.
Minnesota authorities pursued their own investigations and spent months seeking access to federal evidence. Hennepin County officials formally demanded records after saying federal agencies were refusing cooperation.
Then, in July, federal prosecutors finally transferred key material to Minnesota investigators—including hard drives containing statements, body-camera video and other materials, along with Good’s damaged SUV. The Associated Press reported that the evidence had been sought for months.
Even that transfer did not end the transparency dispute. On July 31, a federal magistrate judge said the government’s evidence production relating to Good’s shooting appeared incomplete and ordered an explanation for gaps involving personnel files, use-of-force policies, witness statements, medical records and video evidence.
Around the same time, the attorney representing Pretti’s parents said the family continued to lack basic answers concerning their son’s death.
And now there is an even more current benchmark. As of August 20, 2026, Minnesota’s investigations into both fatal shootings remained active, and no charges had been filed. Pretti’s family also said it still had not been provided the identities of the agents who shot him through official federal channels.
That is precisely why “trust us” cannot substitute for a documented investigative record when government agents take a human life.
A Larger Pattern of Force, Secrecy, and Human Cost
Good and Pretti were killed during Operation Metro Surge, a massive federal immigration-enforcement deployment in Minnesota.
Reuters later reported that approximately 3,000 immigration agents had been deployed between December and February and that ICE said the sweeps resulted in roughly 4,000 arrests. Residents interviewed after the operation described lingering fear and economic harm, including people avoiding work, school, medical treatment, and ordinary public life.
The deaths in Minneapolis also occurred within a wider national escalation.
By July 13, the Associated Press reported that at least nine people had been killed nationwide since the administration’s immigration-enforcement campaign began the previous year and that no one had been charged in connection with those fatal shootings at that point.
Separately, a June Reuters analysis of ICE records found that 50 people had died in U.S. immigration detention since January 2025. Reuters calculated that the detention death rate had risen from approximately one death per 3,848 detainees during 2009–2024 to approximately one per 1,630 detainees under preliminary data through early June 2026.
Reuters also cautioned that deaths in custody have complex causes and do not automatically establish neglect or abuse. That caution is important.
So is the trend.
One policy response after the Minneapolis shootings was an accelerated deployment of body-worn cameras. DHS announced that every field officer in Minneapolis would receive one, with broader nationwide expansion planned as funding became available.
That is a sensible step—but a camera is not accountability by itself.
Cameras matter only when they are used consistently, footage is preserved, investigative access is not obstructed, policies are enforceable, and findings lead to consequences when rules or laws are violated.
Verified Facts, Disputed Claims, and the Discipline of Truth
A movement for justice loses strength when it treats uncertainty as an inconvenience.
We do not need rumors to make these cases disturbing. The verified record is already serious enough.
It is verified that Good and Pretti were U.S. citizens killed by federal immigration personnel in Minneapolis in January 2026.
It is verified that important elements of the federal government’s earliest descriptions were challenged by video evidence and subsequent reporting.
It is verified that state investigators spent months seeking federal evidence.
It is verified that substantial evidence was eventually transferred to Minnesota investigators in July.
And as of August 20, it is verified that Minnesota’s investigations remained active and that no criminal charges had been filed in either fatal shooting.
What remains a matter for investigators, prosecutors, courts, and potentially juries is the full legal responsibility of the individual officers and supervisors involved.
That is why this post uses the words “killing,” “fatal shooting,” and “death” for these specific cases unless referring to a formal allegation or quotation.
Calling for accountability does not require us to pretend that a legal verdict has already been delivered.
Accountability Is Not Anti-Law-Enforcement
There is a false choice that appears whenever government force is questioned: either defend every action of law enforcement or be accused of supporting chaos.
A functioning democracy should reject that framing.
Professional law enforcement depends upon rules, documentation, supervision, disciplined use of force, accurate public statements, and consequences for misconduct.
Officers who follow those standards should not be placed in greater danger by institutions that normalize secrecy, reckless rhetoric, or poorly controlled operations.
Accountability protects the public.
It also protects the legitimacy of lawful public service.
The standard should be straightforward:
Power must be bounded.
Force must be justified.
Evidence must be preserved.
Official statements must be corrected when facts contradict them.
And when conduct crosses legal or professional lines, consequences must be real.
Government power deserves more scrutiny, not less, precisely because it is exercised with public authority and, at times, lethal force.
History Has Warned Us Before
History does not repeat in identical form, and we should resist careless comparisons. But democratic societies are supposed to learn from earlier moments when authorities treated dissent, assembly, or public presence primarily as threats to be controlled.
On March 7, 1965, approximately 600 nonviolent voting-rights marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Alabama state troopers and others confronted them with tear gas and clubs, injuring hundreds in what became known as Bloody Sunday.
The lesson is not that every modern clash with law enforcement is Selma.
The lesson is that public documentation can reveal abuses that official power might otherwise define entirely on its own terms.
On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd at Kent State University during protests surrounding the Vietnam War, killing four students and wounding nine.
Eleven days later, city and state police fired on demonstrators at Jackson State College in Mississippi, killing two students and injuring twelve.
These events remain warnings about what can happen when political tension, armed state power, fear, and failures of de-escalation converge.
Frederick Douglass put the deeper principle plainly in 1857:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
The point is not that every demand is automatically correct.
The point is that rights and accountability survive because people insist that institutions answer to the public.
Climate Resilience Requires Democratic Resilience
This is where the connection to our climate mission becomes direct.
Climate change is already intensifying heat, floods, drought, displacement, livelihood disruption, and pressure on public systems. But the scientific evidence needs to be expressed carefully.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not say that climate change mechanically causes war or authoritarianism. In fact, the IPCC finds that non-climatic political and social factors remain the dominant drivers of existing violent conflict.
At the same time, it finds that climate hazards can worsen vulnerability, humanitarian crises and displacement and, in some circumstances, adversely affect conflict risk.
That distinction matters.
Climate disruption is a stress multiplier, not a moral excuse.
The hotter and more unstable the world becomes, the more important trustworthy institutions, fair procedures, social cooperation, and public legitimacy become.
A government that responds to social stress primarily through intimidation, secrecy, scapegoating, or unchecked coercion weakens the very adaptive capacity society will need.
Adaptive resiliency therefore cannot mean teaching people only how to survive heat waves, storms, floods, or supply disruptions.
It must also include civic resilience: the ability to protect rights, preserve truth, maintain social trust, resist dehumanization, organize peacefully, and hold powerful institutions accountable without reproducing the violence we oppose.
What We Demand Now
First, both fatal shootings require investigations that are genuinely independent, complete, and capable of following the evidence wherever it leads. State and federal authorities should cooperate rather than treat evidence as institutional property.
Second, relevant evidence should be preserved and released as promptly as law and legitimate privacy concerns allow—including body-camera footage, bystander video in government possession, incident reports, use-of-force documentation, training and policy records, dispatch information, and relevant supervisory communications.
Third, chain-of-command responsibility must be examined. Accountability cannot stop with the individual who pulled a trigger if planning, rules of engagement, training, supervision, intelligence, deployment practices, or public messaging contributed to an avoidable death.
Fourth, DHS should establish enforceable nationwide standards for body cameras, visible identification, de-escalation, medical aid after force, evidence preservation, and public correction of materially inaccurate early statements.
Fifth, Congress must treat oversight as a constitutional responsibility rather than a partisan favor. That includes obtaining records, requiring testimony, funding independent inspectors, protecting whistleblowers, and writing clearer safeguards when agencies demonstrate that voluntary restraint is insufficient.
Finally, civic participation must not be treated as presumptively dangerous. People retain the right to observe, document, criticize, assemble, and protest within the law. Operational planning should protect those rights while also protecting officers and the public from genuine violence.
Nonviolence, Human Dignity, and Refusing the Cycle
Climate Change Community LLC condemns political violence, retaliatory violence, threats against law-enforcement personnel, attacks on immigrants, and the dehumanization of protesters or public servants.
We will not answer abuses of power by encouraging another form of abuse.
Nonviolence is not passivity.
It can be organized, persistent, disruptive, courageous, and strategically powerful.
It can document.
It can litigate.
It can vote.
It can strike.
It can boycott.
It can assemble.
It can protect neighbors.
It can demand records.
It can create independent media.
It can train communities in de-escalation and legal observation.
And it can refuse silence without turning another human being into an enemy who no longer deserves humanity.
That is the line we intend to hold:
No worship of state power.
No worship of political violence.
No convenient indifference to suffering.
And no surrender of the discipline required to tell the truth.
Closing: Names Must Not Become Footnotes
Renée Good and Alex Pretti should not be reduced to symbols, hashtags, or ammunition in a partisan contest.
They were human beings with families, work, relationships, and futures.
Their deaths demand the same thing every death involving public power should demand:
A truthful accounting.
The passage of time does not make that demand less important. In some ways, it makes it more important.
News cycles move on faster than investigations.
Institutions know that public attention fades.
Democratic accountability depends upon refusing to let unanswered questions disappear simply because a new crisis has replaced the old one on our screens.
Climate Change Community LLC will continue to speak about the Climate and Ecological Emergency because those emergencies threaten life on a planetary scale.
We will also speak about injustice, democracy, genocide, human dignity, abuses of power, and the killing of innocent people—because there is no resilient future worth building if we become silent about what happens to human beings in the present.
We should be evolving toward societies that can meet crisis without abandoning rights, meet fear without embracing cruelty, and exercise power without escaping accountability.
If we cannot do that, then our problem is larger than any single agency or administration.
It is a failure of the social resilience we claim to be building.
Editorial Note
This post addresses active investigations and evolving legal questions. It should be updated if prosecutors announce charging decisions, investigators release new evidence, courts make findings, or materially different verified facts emerge.
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