The recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January by federal agents in Minneapolis draws attention to the legal foundations, historical precedents and video evidence documenting immigration enforcement over the past year. 

Good and Pretti, both U.S. citizens, are among the 13 people shot by Department of Homeland Security agents since September. A reported 32 people have died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. 

Despite federal agents’ aggressive tactics while enforcing immigration law, immigration in the U.S. is part of administrative law, not criminal law, said Raquel Aldana, a professor in the UC Davis School of Law and Global Migration Center research affiliate. Federal immigration agents also lack accountability based on the historical evolution of their powers and more recent developments of qualified immunity for their actions. 

“The historical context of these powers of immigration enforcement doesn’t match how these powers are being used on the ground,” said Aldana. “ICE and CBP are behaving as though they are in a war. Their tactics go further than what police are allowed, and we’re seeing the consequences of that, including the killings of people engaged in protest.” 

Federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and in states across the U.S. is part of a larger history of government violence against citizens and non-citizens alike. However, today’s technology, rhetoric and legal tensions are changing what that violence means for society. 

“There are very few precedents for what we're seeing right now,” said Eric Rauchway, a professor of history in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. 

A history of immigration enforcement in the U.S.  

During the 1930s, President Herbert Hoover’s administration also launched mass deportations. These took place at the height of the Great Depression, when unemployment reached 25% and the federal government imposed high tariffs intended to prevent foreign competition for American goods. 

Like today’s immigration enforcement, actions under Hoover also included raids on immigrant communities. In one of these in 1931, known as the “La Placita Raid,” 400 people were detained at a public park in Los Angeles with only a handful ultimately deported.  

However, actions by federal immigration agents under Hoover were not limited to immigrant communities.  

“He would send those agents to places where either there were strikes or where there were labor unions organizing or where there were mutual aid societies and try to intimidate people,” said Rauchway. 

Then, as now, this increased immigration enforcement led to large-scale exodus of immigrants from the U.S. Between 1929 and 1934, at least 400,000 immigrants returned to Mexico. This number represented roughly one-third of the Mexican population in the U.S. at that time. 

Mass deportations also took place under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 in what was called “Operation Wetback,” which ultimately deported roughly 1 million people, some of them American citizens.

In 2025, expanded immigration enforcement led to an estimated 1.4 million fewer overall immigrants in the country between January and May alone. One estimate puts the number of people in ICE detention facilities at 68,990 as of January 8, 2026.  

Historically, immigration enforcement in the U.S. has involved aggressive tactics. A recent New York Times report documents a long history of violent encounters.  

Kathryn Olmsted, a professor of history at UC Davis, said that the closest historical analogue to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are the killings during the Civil Rights movement. During that time, many activists, both Black and white, were killed by law enforcement and vigilantes for their activism.  

“The main difference is that the local law enforcement, and in some cases vigilantes, were not associated with the federal government in any way,” said Olmsted. “Here, of course we have federal law enforcement responsible for these deaths.” 

Differences between immigration law and criminal law 

Today, two federal agencies are primarily responsible for enforcing immigration law. ICE is the primary federal agency responsible for enforcing immigration law and conducting deportations. It was established in 2002 as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 passed in response to the September 11th attacks. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is the federal agency that enforces immigration laws primarily at the U.S. border. 

Immigration enforcement is part of administrative law, the system through which federal agencies and state and local governments implement and enforce laws enacted by Congress or state legislatures.  

Aldana said that administrative law enforcement is typically less intrusive on people’s rights than criminal law enforcement because violations are more likely to lead to fines rather than imprisonment or other penalties associated with criminal law. In the early history of immigration law, the U.S. Supreme Court treated deportation as a civil consequence rather than a punishment. 

There’s a need to update the constitutional safeguards for immigration enforcement. We should rethink whether we should treat immigration policing in the context of administrative law enforcement.

 — Raquel Aldana, Professor, UC Davis School of Law 

Because DHS and its immigration enforcement agencies ICE and CBP are responsible for immigration enforcement, their actions are subject to administrative law. This gives agents more flexibility compared to police who are regulated by constitutional constraints on criminal law.  

For example, police are subject to the exclusionary rule, which prevents the government from using most evidence gathered in violation of the Constitution. In immigration court, said Aldana, the exclusionary rule only applies if ICE or CBP misconduct is “egregious." 

However, said Aldana, immigration law enforcement has become indistinguishable from criminal law enforcement because the actions immigrants face is so severe, including indefinite detention and the risk of injury or death during arrest. 

Immigration enforcement and the Constitution’s 4th Amendment 

The Constitution’s 4th Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizure by the government, sets requirements for the level of justification needed for the government to make a seizure. To arrest someone suspected of a crime, police must obtain a judicial warrant signed by a judge and based on probable cause that a crime has been committed. 

Instead of judicial warrants, ICE requires only administrative warrants to arrest people, and these warrants are granted by supervisors and even agents within the federal agency itself without additional oversight.  

The 4th Amendment is also the basis for making racial profiling by police illegal, but a September 2025 Supreme Court ruling allows immigration officers to use “apparent ethnicity” combined with other factors, such as where someone works or speaking a different language than English, to justify stopping anyone for questioning based on reasonable suspicion of being in the country illegally. 

This kind of stop has been called a “Kavanaugh stop,” after Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the opinion.  

“ICE and Border Patrol could stop people on suspicion, which could include appearance or language, detain them briefly to ascertain if their suspicions were right and then release them,” said Gregory Downs, a constitutional scholar and professor of history at UC Davis. 

Misinformation and public trust 

Expanded federal immigration enforcement and the resulting violence have been documented by bystander video, but some of those events have been described far differently by federal officials.  

In the case of Renee Good, immediately after she was shot and killed by a federal agent, federal officials said that Good assaulted that agent. The President said she, “ran him over.” After Alex Pretti’s shooting death, Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem said Pretti “approached” officers with a gun, but in recorded video of the incident he holds a phone in one hand and his other hand is empty.  

Videos of both shootings clearly show both the President’s and Noem’s statements are false. Bystander video showed Renee Good turning her car away from the officer before he opened fire. Pretti did have a pistol on his person, and was legally licensed to carry it, but the gun was taken from his possession before he was shot. 

This is really quite extraordinary what we're living through. That people can see the videos and yet have officials contradict what seems to be a clear interpretation of those videos, that’s new.

 — Kathryn Olmsted, Professor of History 

In the 1930s, in the years before the U.S. entered World War II, American news media owners used their control over information to carefully select and present stories to support their pro-Fascist and then anti-interventionist views. Olmsted’s book The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler (Yale, 2022) documents how media owners worked in concert to influence public opinion in a right-wing direction. 

“They did not, for the most part, outright lie about what was going on,” said Olmsted.  

Video evidence that contradicts official statements 

The widespread video documentation of interactions with federal agents in Minneapolis and cities around the U.S. are much more reliable as evidence compared to witness accounts alone. Psychologists have documented the “gun focus effect,” which can happen when a person experiences or witnesses a traumatic event. 

“A lot of times, witnesses or victims of an attack can very well remember and describe the gun or weapon that was used in the attack, but they fail to or sometimes even have an incomplete or very inaccurate recollection of the perpetrator or context,” said Narine Yegiyan, a professor of Communication at UC Davis who has conducted research on the gun focus effect. 

Video recordings and the technology to share them widely, she said, bypass how the human brain focuses its attention and forms memories that can be influenced by emotions.  

  With social media and with our immediate access to this camera, we now have this powerful resource that counters any sort of possibility of manipulation because we have factual evidence that you cannot refute.

 — Narine Yegiyan, Professor of Communication 

However, Cuihua (Cindy) Shen, also a professor of communication at UC Davis, said she has already seen manipulated images of Pretti on social media in which he is holding a gun instead of a phone.  

Shen is a visual misinformation researcher and said that because of the growing volume of manipulated images and video, increasing rapidly with new AI tools, people have less trust overall in what they see online. In her research, Shen has also found that people cannot reliably tell the difference between an image that is real or faked. 

“There is a saying called ‘seeing is believing,’ and we do have this tendency to believe everything we see,” said Shen.  

In communication research this phenomenon is called the “truth default.” Shen said that this tendency to believe at first glance serves humans well in dangerous situations, but it also makes us subject to manipulation.  

Even seeing videos of the shootings might not persuade all viewers that what they see is inconsistent with statements from the federal government describing those events.  

In her research since 2019, Shen has documented “confirmation bias” which is the tendency for people to be most likely to believe ideas and facts that are consistent with what they already believe. At the same time, her research also demonstrates how a person’s motivation about a topic increases the attention they give to it.  

“Both of these things are true,” said Shen. “If I'm more motivated about a topic, I tend to pay more attention to it. At the same time, if I already believe strongly in something I'm more likely to think this is credible. And vice versa.” 

The historical origins of immigration law 

Prior to 1882, states had considerable control over migration policy. People were forced to work through various state and local laws that controlled their movements.  

The U.S. Constitution itself does not assign broad immigration powers, said Aldana. Despite this, in the 1880s, she said, the Supreme Court framed immigration as a federal power.  

“Then it decided in those very early cases that this power, because it was inherent in sovereignty and rooted in war powers and foreign affairs, is a plenary power that is not subject to constitutional constraints in the same ways that other powers are.” 

However, she added, plenary power does not mean unlimited and unilateral Executive branch powers. Congress has always had a role in regulating immigration, including its enforcement. Inside U.S. territory, some constitutional due process and 4th Amendment principles limit immigration agencies’ enforcement powers. 

However, she added, federal immigration agencies have flouted even the most basic statutory constraints. One of these is CBP officers operating well away from U.S. borders when Congress charged the agency only with immigration enforcement at or near the border.  

She also said that immigration statutes say little about the most aggressive tactics ICE and CBP agents are employing on everyone, regardless of their immigration status, in the streets of U.S. cities in the name of immigration enforcement, while Congress has substantially expanded federal funding for these agencies.  

In 2025, federal funding for ICE rose from roughly $10 billion in recent years to $85 billion.  

“You’re seeing an abdication of Congress’ role of constraining immigration policing and, at the same time, an executive who is violating the few constraints put in place by law,” said Aldana. 

Accountability and legal limits on federal power 

Since expanded immigration enforcement operations began in January 2025, federal agents have detained and deported people despite active court orders barring their removal. A high-profile example was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was removed to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in El Salvador despite his protected legal status against being sent to that country.  

“The whole system has been constructed to be as unchecked as possible,” said Aldana. “They can take you from your home and it doesn't matter what age you are. They can mandatorily detain you, and, not only that, they can remove you from the jurisdiction in which you were arrested without even notifying your family members.” 

Minneapolis, where Good and Pretti were killed in January, is where George Floyd was killed by police officers in 2020, an event also documented with video by bystanders. Former police officers Derek Chauvin, Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane were convicted of state and federal charges related to Floyd’s death. Federal charges for Chauvin and Lane included violations of Floyd’s civil rights. 

“This stands as an exceptional case,” said Aldana. “However, it also shows you that in that space it is still possible to demand accountability. I don't think that it is completely off the books to imagine that Pretti’s death in particular could lead to a conviction. The problem is not law, because I think the law could allow for that. It's more political.” 

In the U.S., murder is a primarily state crime charged by state prosecutors. It becomes a federal crime in interstate issues or implicates a federal agent. If the suspect is a federal agent, that crime is likely to be charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). 

The DOJ Civil Rights Division is investigating the killing of Pretti but not Good. The Department of Justice also began investigating Good’s widow after the shooting even though she was not present and had no involvement in it. 

Congress as well as individual states, including Minnesota and California, have moved to enact new laws to regulate federal agents and actions. These include a ban on masks for law enforcement.  

The U.S. Constitution was designed to limit the federal government's power, and the 10th Amendment cements the separation of powers between the federal and state governments. While the Supreme Court would ultimately decide whether the 10th Amendment applies to immigration enforcement, the Trump administration has repeatedly challenged judicial authority and defied lower court orders. 

In January, Minnesota chief federal judge Patrick Schiltz found that ICE violated 96 court orders just that month alone. 

“If the Supreme Court begins to push back against the Trump administration, it is possible that the Trump administration would refuse to comply with their rulings,” said Aldana. “An attack on the judiciary is an attack on all of the judiciary.” 

Balancing media skepticism and video evidence 

An end to violence during the Civil Rights Movement took years, said Olmsted, and in that time Black and white activists were killed by police and people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. After more than a decade of protests, news broadcasts of police violence against non-violent protesters changed public opinion in support of Civil Rights. 

“This really upset people who were watching television, not only around the nation but around the world,” said Olmsted. “There's another parallel there with today's events in that I think people have a much more visceral response when they see the videos as opposed to just reading about it or hearing about it.” 

However, today’s AI video generation tools make it much easier to create manipulated and outright false media. Shen said there are no technical tools that can definitively determine whether an image or video has been created by AI. This puts society at risk because if every image or video could be faked then there is no reason to believe any image or video is authentic. 

Understanding media can balance this kind of extreme skepticism, she said. While it is true that bias exists in journalism, bias is not the same as journalistic standards, such as fact checking and using original sources. Some media organizations may be perceived as highly biased in what they report but their reporting strives to be accurate. 

“They still have their journalistic standards,” said Shen. “They have fact checkers that rigorously check whether something is authentic to make sure what they report is what they believe to be true. There are other organizations which don't have such high standards.” 

Social media might serve as a tool for coming together as a community. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Yegiyan was a journalist in Russia and saw how authoritarian countries would block accurate information. More recently, social media has made it possible to share video evidence from the war in Ukraine that disputes official statements.  

“Regular citizens would put out these videos and counter disinformation and engage other global communities to come and make a difference in these countries,” said Yegiyan. “I think the U.S. at this point is feeling that through their own experience.” 

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