Don't abuse the word 'protest'

Alex Pretti wasn't killed while "protesting." This is a common description of what he was doing on a Minneapolis street the fateful morning when a confrontation with federal immigration agents ended in his tragic shooting. But if Pretti had been a mere protester, he'd very likely be alive today. Now that we've seen videos of an earlier struggle with federal agents and learned more about the organized nature of the anti-ICE resistance, it's become clear that the better word for Pretti was agitator, or perhaps even operative. A protester, as typically understood, is someone who is making a point, often as part of a gathering of other like-minded people and, usually but not always, in opposition to something. A protester might hold a sign outside a coal-fired power plant calling for it to shut down. He might go to Union Square Park to hear speeches from bullhorns whenever something happens that outrages the left. He might march against the Iraq War, or the Vietnam War — or in favor of Hamas. This kind of activity is not to everyone's taste — personally, I hate the drums and the chants — but there is no doubt that it is a legitimate form of political advocacy. Depending on the cause, it can even be admirable. What we've seen in Minneapolis, though, is often quite different. Run-of-the-mill protesters don't seek out federal agents and harass and obstruct them. They don't follow and block their vehicles or establish a robust communications network to deploy resources to create maximum disruption of their operations. Pretti was part of this effort, which is more a form of low-level and (by and large) nonviolent insurgency than conventional protest. In his first confrontation, 11 days before his death, Pretti was every bit an anti-ICE street brawler. He challenged, at close quarters, an agent to assault him, while screaming insults at him. He spit on a federal vehicle and kicked out its taillight. If Pretti was an "observer," in the euphemism preferred by anti-ICE politicians and activists, he was observing how much unhinged behavior he could get away with. There's no doubt that at this event he was the violent instigator. After Pretti damaged the vehicle, agents got out and pushed him to the ground. For all the talk of ICE being the equivalent of the Gestapo, they didn't even bother to arrest him, despite his having committed a crime. If he'd been arrested and charged, Pretti might never have shown up at the other ICE operation and would still be with us today. That Pretti, we now know, made it a practice to court violent encounters with federal agents while armed was incredibly irresponsible. He was fortunate that the first struggle didn't escalate into something much more hazardous to him and to others if an agent had noticed his gun. The firearm wouldn't have been an issue in the second incident, meanwhile, if he'd really been protesting. If that were the case, he would have stayed on the sidewalk and held up a sign, or chanted, "ICE go home," and the officers might have been annoyed, but there never would have been an interaction to potentially go catastrophically wrong. The calculation in Minneapolis, though, has been that this kind of benign activity is less effective than direct action, and unfortunately— with public opinion swinging against Operation Metro Surge — this assessment looks to be accurate. Why simply express a point of view when you can act to stop arrests and to create a hostile, threatening environment for agents? This doesn't mean that Pretti got what he deserved, or that the officers acted appropriately. It does mean that the state and city officials should have been telling people not to "monitor" DHS activity, but to stay well clear of legitimate law-enforcement activities. Reasonable people can disagree about the desirability of the goal that Pretti was pursuing, but there's no doubt about how he was going about it, and it didn't involve conventional protest.