In the aftermath of the recent fatal ICE shooting of Alex Pretti, Republican Congressman Byron Donalds blamed the killing on so-called “paid agitators,” despite there being no such evidence that protesters in Minneapolis have been paid to agitate federal officers.
“Nobody wants to see any American lose their life like this…But we also have to be honest about what’s happening in Minneapolis,” said Donalds, a Republican candidate for Florida governor endorsed by President Donald Trump, told NewsNation. “You have paid agitators. You have a coordinated operation going on in Minneapolis for the sole purpose of doxing ICE officers, impeding ICE officers, stopping them from following and executing federal law.”
When asked to clarify whether he was implying that Pretti, an ICU nurse for veterans, was a paid agitator, Donalds explained, “I’m not saying that. I’m saying that what people are seeing on their phones and on news networks around the country is the result of paid protests and paid agitators.”
He continued, “We’re already starting to see some information about a high-level coordinated effort to follow these ICE officers. And now you’ve had two Americans lose their lives as a result of that.”
Rep. Donalds’ suggestion that mass protests in Minneapolis are a result of paid agitators echoed remarks made by President Trump and his allies following unrest in the city after the fatal ICE shooting of 37-year-old wife and mother Renee Good earlier this month.
“The thugs that are protesting include many highly paid professional agitators and anarchists,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Jan. 18. He made similar remarks during a White House press conference marking the official one-year mark of his second term, telling reporters, “They’re paid agitators and insurrectionists.”
Despite these claims made by Trump, Donalds, and other conservative voices defending the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and other cities across the country, there is no evidence to support them. As PolitiFact notes, “Although some people on social media have provided what they said is evidence of such activity, we found none of the claims held up to scrutiny.”
Yohuru Williams, a historian and director of the Racial Justice Initiative at Minnesota’s University of St. Thomas, told the fact-checking news outlet, “most protesters are residents of the state who are concerned not only about the presence of ICE in the state but also the President’s usurpation of power.”
Rod Adams, founder and executive director of the New Justice Project in Minnesota, told theGrio that protesters “in the streets” are the result of years of organizing, particularly in Minneapolis, where the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020 sparked nationwide protests.
“We’ve organized for so long,” he explained, adding that there has been a particular focus on “building a multi-racial democracy” in the state, which includes “a lot of the networks and systems that we have already existed.”
“We saw what happened in 2020, here, so we know how to respond to a crisis,” Adams told theGrio.
The organizer said that the MAGA pushback and flooding of ICE agents in Minnesota is an intentional targeting of the state in an attempt to suppress its successes of progressive policies, like paid leave, restoring voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, and driver’s licenses for all, regardless of immigration status.
“This is an attempt by this administration to not only, you know, create fear, cause chaos, but to prove that what Minnesota was, and the progress that we made here, doesn’t work,” said Adams.
