OVERTHINKING THE ETHNICITY OF ALEX PRETTI'S KILLERS

ProPublica has identified the two men who shot Alex Pretti.

The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez....

Ochoa is a Border Patrol agent who joined CBP in 2018. Gutierrez joined in 2014 and works for CBP’s Office of Field Operations. He is assigned to a special response team, which conducts high-risk operations like those of police SWAT units.

I don't like the framing of Marcy Wheeler's response to this:

Stephen Miller Paid Latino Thugs to Murder Alex Pretti emptywheel.net/2026/02/02/s...

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— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) February 2, 2026 at 6:53 AM

Wheeler notes that a number of Miller's goons aren't white. For example:

Alfredo Mancillas Jr. was found in St. Paul last Tuesday, passed out drunk in his illegally-parked car, covered in his own vomit....

The two heavily masked ICE agents who snatched Brad Lander last June are “a Pakistani Muslim immigrant who lives in Brighton Beach” and “an Indo-Guyanese gentleman who lives in South Ozone Park.”

(Lander was the comptroller of New York City and a supporter of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign. He's currently primarying Congressman Dan Goldman from the left.)

What I don't like about Wheeler's framing is that she doesn't seem to believe that these non-white enforcers of Miller's reign of terror have any agency of their own. To Wheeler, only the whites in the Trump regime can be decision-makers. And her belief that Miller feels the need to conceal the ethnic identity of these men seems absurd to me.

There are a lot of reasons Stephen Miller’s goons wear masks. To terrify the communities they invade. To make it harder to shame them. To make it harder to tie them to other crimes they may have committed....

But there is accumulating evidence that a big reason these goons hide their faces is to hide that the white nationalist project Stephen Miller is pursuing — like virtually everything else in America — relies on brown people to do the hard work. Miller can only sustain the myth of white self-reliance by hiding the faces of those who murder white men at his behest in the streets of Blue cities....

They’re trying to hide how much even their deeply racist project is helpless without brown labor.

Wheeler doesn't offer us any of this "accumulating evidence," only a list of non-white offenders.

I think this misunderstands the way right-wingers look at race. Some are pure bigots in the David Duke/Nick Fuentes mold. They hate anyone who isn't white and Christian. And even those who don't fall into this category want to live in an America in which white male heterosexual Christians run pretty much everything.

But the people hoping to build a white ethnostate are always in tension with those on the right who proudly point to everyone of color who seems to have "escaped" from "the liberal plantation." The organizers of Trump's campaign rallies seemed happy to have the candidate speak with "BLACKS FOR TRUMP" signs in the background. Trump embraced Kanye West before West became too toxic. And Republican candidates of color -- Herschel Walker in Georgia, Mark Robinson in North Carolina, Royce White in Minnesota -- have won Republican primaries throughout the Trump era. In the Florida governor's race, Byron Donalds leads all other candidates in Republican primary polling by more than 30 points, and in polling of the Ohio GOP gubernatorial primary, Vivek Ramaswamy's lead is more than 50 points. Most Republicans enjoy pointing to these figures and accusing liberals of being "the real racists."

Wheeler's framing implies that Miller's non-white immigration agents are laboring in a state of pseudo-enslavement, or at least doing the work reluctantly because there's nothing else available. That's belied by what the ProPublica story tells us about one of the agents:

Ochoa, who goes by Jesse, graduated from the University of Texas-Pan American with a degree in criminal justice, according to his ex-wife, Angelica Ochoa. A longtime resident of the Rio Grande Valley, Ochoa had for years dreamed of working for the Border Patrol and finally landed a job there, she said. By the time the couple split in 2021, he had become a gun enthusiast with about 25 rifles, pistols and shotguns, Angelica Ochoa said.

And this doesn't surprise me:

Records show both men are from South Texas.

Recall the results of the 2024 election:

After years of losing the statewide Latino vote by double digits, Republicans set a high-water mark with Donald Trump capturing 55% of the critical voting bloc, besting Vice President Kamala Harris’ 44% share, according to exit polls.

In the traditionally Democratic strongholds along the border, Trump managed a near sweep.

He won 14 out of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, a number that doubled his attention-grabbing 2020 performance in the Latino-majority region. He carried all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley just eight years after drawing a mere 29% in the region — a feat that included delivering 97% Latino Starr County to Republicans for the first time since 1896. And, though he lost El Paso, one of the border’s most populous counties, he narrowed margins there in ways not seen in decades.

According to Pew, Trump won 28% of the Hispanic vote in 2016, 36% in 2028, and a remarkable 48% in 2024. He won 50% of Hispanic men. Polls show that Trump's support among Hispanics has plunged since the 2024 election, but a quarter of Hispanics still back him.

I don't believe that the Hispanic men who killed Alex Pretti were men of color reluctantly doing jobs for white overlords. I think they shared the mindset that compels white men to become immigration officers. It's patronizing to imply that they didn't want to be to be doing what they're doing. I've watched my fellow Italian-Americans move to the right during my lifetime, and I think it can happen to members of any ethnic group. The Republican coalition is still overwhelmingly white, but it isn't exclusively white. Maybe Stephen Miller wants it to be, but we're not there, even now.