Like many Americans I am deeply saddened by the latest fatal shooting of a man in Minneapolis by a federal law enforcement officer. I thought I’d arrange my thoughts into some of the things I do and don’t believe about it.

I do believe that the shooting is a tragedy and an avoidable one.

The killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis by a U.S. Border Patrol agent on January 24, 2026 has shocked the community and drawn widespread protest. Hundreds of people have taken to the streets to mourn and to demand transparency and accountability.

I don’t believe that ICE officers are adequately trained, recruited, or supervised.

The larger pattern of federal immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota including multiple recent shootings raises serious questions about preparation, oversight, and the deployment of personnel in complex urban environments

I do believe that peaceful protest is legitimate.

People have the right to assemble and express grief, concern, and dissent, and thousands have done so in Minneapolis and across the country following this shooting and earlier ones.

I don’t believe that obstruction of justice is legitimate in a peaceful protest.

Peaceful protest carries moral and constitutional weight; physical interference with lawful operations does not. Respect for law is consistent with and enhances the legitimacy of peaceful dissent.

I do believe in enforcing the law.

In a constitutional republic, the rule of law is essential to public order and civil liberties. Law enforcement should be exercised consistently, fairly, and with due regard for rights and safety.

I don’t believe in “sanctuary” states and cities.

Sanctuary states and cities are not merely symbolic gestures; they function as a form of de facto nullification of federal authority in an area where federal supremacy is explicit, and historically such arrangements have proven legally corrosive and socially destabilizing.

I do believe that defense attorneys will emphasize the presence of a firearm as heightening the perception of threat by reasonable law enforcement officers.

Federal officials have asserted that Pretti was armed and that a Border Patrol agent fired in self-defense after officers perceived a threat, and legal arguments in future proceedings will almost certainly focus on how an armed individual would have appeared to reasonable officers in a tense, split-second encounter.

I do believe that law enforcement officers have a right to defend themselves and aren’t obligated to take the first hit or shot to do so.

Under U.S. use-of-force doctrine, officers may use lethal force if they reasonably believe there is an imminent threat of serious harm. That is the legal standard, even if people disagree about how it should be applied in practice.

I don’t believe that any amount of analysis, amateur or professional, of videos of the shooting will determine whether the shooting was justified or not.

Videos can provide critical context, but they cannot fully capture what an officer perceived or the totality of circumstances at the moment of force. Multiple angles and interpretations exist, and available footage has been interpreted differently by local officials, federal authorities, and independent observers.

I do believe that the standard that will be applied in any foreseeable case against the shooter will be whether in that moment he perceived a deadly threat.

This aligns with established constitutional law, under which the central question in use-of-force cases is whether the officer’s belief in imminent danger was reasonable under the circumstances, not whether the victim in hindsight was morally innocent.

I do believe that is up to the courts to decide and until that is decided the officer who fired the fatal shots should be suspended from duty.

Due process requires an impartial investigation and adjudication. A judge has already issued orders to preserve evidence, and state and federal authorities are contesting access and investigative roles.

I do believe that holders of executive office (mayors, governors, and presidents) carry a special obligation to preserve public order and to temper rhetoric that might elevate tensions.

Public statements by local and state executives in this case, as well as by the president, have at times framed protests and federal enforcement in highly charged terms that risk escalating conflict rather than calming it. While vigorous critique is part of democratic discourse, leaders responsible for public safety should weigh carefully how their words will be heard in the streets and on the ground.

The general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security has published a Wall Street Journal op-ed with some interesting observations. I think this is the key passage because it hinges on the claim that “reasonableness” under the Fourth Amendment can substitute for judicial oversight in the specific context of immigration enforcement, a claim that is doing a great deal of work in justifying administrative entry into private residences:

Under federal immigration law, officers may issue an administrative warrant, which means that the probable-cause finding is made by an executive-branch officer rather than a judicial officer. This is consistent with broad judicial recognition that illegal aliens aren’t entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens. It is also consistent with the Supreme Court’s admonition that the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is whether the search or seizure is “reasonable,” not whether it is supported by a judicial warrant. In Abel v. U.S. (1960), the justices recognized that there is “overwhelming historical legislative recognition of the propriety of administrative arrest for deportable aliens.”

While administrative warrants may satisfy the Fourth Amendment for any arrest of an illegal alien, ICE currently uses these warrants to enter an illegal alien’s residence only when the alien has received a final order of removal from an immigration judge. That means the alien has already seen a judge, presented his case, received due process, and been ordered removed from the country. Aliens in this context are fugitives from justice, and the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Minnesota, has expressly recognized that administrative warrants may be used to enter a residence to capture a fugitive.

His primary complaint and apparent reason for the op-ed is:

Although the law is clear, deep-state actors in the federal government have for decades told ICE officers that they may not enter a fugitive alien’s home even with a final order of removal and administrative warrant. Because Congress hasn’t created a mechanism to obtain a judicial warrant, this meant that under previous presidential administrations, ICE would sit outside the homes of fugitive aliens waiting for them to come outside before arresting them. Illegal aliens quickly identified this loophole. Some would openly taunt ICE officers by waving through the window or passing notes under the door.

No serious country would tolerate this clear aberration of its laws or allow its national security to be jeopardized and mocked in this manner. Congress never intended the immigration laws to operate this way and the Fourth Amendment doesn’t require it.

I think that the central argument of many of the critics of the ongoing ICE operations is lack of due process. But “due process” is not a singular, uniform requirement of judicial warrants or individualized hearings; it varies across legal domains. His claim, in effect, is that in this context due process consists of the prior deportation order itself.

ICE agents should be better-trained and more merciful in carrying out even legitimate enforcement operations; that doesn’t negate the legitimacy of enforcing our laws. Assessing the ultimate legality of these claims is for the courts, but the argument is worth examining on its own terms because it illustrates how much executive power now rests on administrative interpretations of “reasonableness” rather than on explicit judicial authorization.

In today’s Washington Post the editors provide their opinions of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). To be clear I’m not a DOGE fan; I think the effort was misguided. Here’s a snippet of the editorial:

Remember DOGE? The good idea to find government efficiency and reduce spending was so poorly executed that it undermined the case for scaling back the size of government. Yet a little-noticed bit of news out of the Justice Department in recent days suggests that some in the organization were not just incompetent but malicious.

What follows is a compact illustration of two logical fallacies. I won’t fisk the whole thing but the two fallacies in the piece are what are called “hasty generalization” and “intentional fallacy”.

Here’s a key passage:

For a group that was meant to root out waste, DOGE officials were shockingly unfocused on their main goal. One person was apparently more interested in relitigating election results than making government more efficient.

That passage illustrates both of those fallacies. One or two individuals behaved badly; those individuals are representative of DOGE; therefore DOGE was incompetent and/or malicious.

I think that striving for government efficiency should be ordinary, unremarkable, and ongoing. Quotidian. Not done with fanfare by a core group of “experts” parachuted in for the purpose. Unfortunately, that is a repeated practice for the Trump Administration. See the president and members of his cabinet’s speeches at Davos for the most recent example.

Sadly, bureaucracies by their structure and sociology are resistant to such efforts and they would be impossible within our present governmental and legal structure. They would need to have incentives to do their work, e.g. their compensation would need to be based on efficiencies gained, and my reading of the civil service code suggests that would be illegal.

However, I am a fan of solid editorial writing and this isn’t it.

I have found the performance of the WaPo’s editorial board puzzling lately. This editorial reads less like institutional analysis and more like partisan polemic, which is increasingly characteristic of WaPo’s editorial tone.

I agree that ICE’s enforcement practices have been too harsh. What I’m still missing is something I consider morally obligatory for those actively protesting ICE in the streets of our cities—a concrete proposal for how we can enforce present immigration law in the context of “sancturary” states and cities.

Failing that it seems to me that Occam’s Razor suggests that they want open borders.

Open borders are unworkable and would be harmful to poor citizens and taxpayers alike.

I wanted to underwrite the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s hope that the Supreme Court will strike down the president’s ability to impose permanent tariffs at will:

The world is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legality of President Trump’s “emergency” tariffs, and Mr. Trump’s weekend tariff spree against European allies underscores again why his abuse of his authority needs to be reined in.

Mr. Trump unleashed a new tariff volley against several European countries (see nearby) to coerce Denmark to sell or cede Greenland to the U.S. He cited no legal authority for doing so. He simply said he is imposing the tariffs.

Though he didn’t say this, presumably he is doing so under what he has claimed is his power in an “emergency” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But what emergency? Greenland isn’t under threat of invasion, and Denmark has said the U.S. can have more or less free run of the island for defense purposes.

But Mr. Trump wants ownership of the island on his legacy resume, so he is likely to say that control of Greenland is an emergency even if it isn’t in any normal understanding of the term. The only observable emergency is the threat to the NATO alliance that Mr. Trump’s demands and tariffs are creating.

The episode puts in sharp relief how open-ended Mr. Trump’s claim of tariff emergency authority is. He can declare an emergency on his own, he can decide which countries and goods he can hit with the border taxes, and at what rate. This means he can use tariffs essentially whenever he wants for whatever reason he wants. Congress gave him no such expansive power under IEEPA or any other statute.

Tariff apologists will say the Greenland tariffs show the uses of border taxes for foreign policy, but the taxing power is Congress’s under the Constitution unless expressly delegated to the President.

U.S. trade rep Jamieson Greer said Monday that if the Supreme Court overturns Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the President will quickly rely on other tariff authorities. But those delegations are more limited on what goods, for what reason, and for how long they can be imposed. They don’t allow tariffs for any emergency that Mr. Trump conjures for whatever political purposes he desires.

Like Joe Biden’s abuse of the spending power on student-loan forgiveness without Congressional assent, Mr. Trump’s abuse of the taxing power cries out for a Supreme Court correction.

Imposing tariffs is the responsibility of the Congress not the president.

However, I suspect my views on what Congress should do is markedly different from those of the editors. I suspect their views are the conventional neoliberal ones: unconditional free trade, asymmetrical tolerance of industrial policy abroad, reliance on theory assuming immobile labor and capital.. The distinctive problem we have is that if we are following neoliberal principles and none of our trading partners are it places us at a distinct disadvantage. They can manage their tariffs, quotas, and internal incentives to offset any comparative advantages we might have and those are becoming increasingly narrow as capital and even populations become more portable.

What the Congress should do is to provide incentives for our trading partners to reduce their own tariffs, quotas, and internal incentives against our exports. The word for that is “reciprocity”. It is not lost on me that theory says that the country with the fewest tariffs, quotas, and internal incentives benefits the most. Unfortunately we cannot remain a global power without industries of our own and, at least in some cases, that implies that we must impose tariffs, quotas, and internal incentives of our own. Those industries include the entire supply chain for the manufacturing of ships and aircraft, semiconductors, and others.

In some cases tariffs should be temporary bargaining tools; in others, particularly where national capacity is at stake, they must be structural even if uneconomical.

Even if tariffs are sometimes necessary, that necessity makes Congressional control more important, not less.

I don’t know whether Gerald Baker’s counter-history of the Greenland War in his Wall Street Journal column is tongue-in-cheek or not. Here’s a sample:

It wasn’t much of a battle, to be sure. President Trump, fresh off his swift and effective intervention in early January to topple and bring to trial in the U.S. Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife (who were later pardoned by President JD Vance and now run a chain of retail cocaine stores based in Palm Beach, Fla.), doubled down on his “Donroe corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

He insisted that the U.S. needed to annex Greenland for its own security and that of the wider Western Hemisphere and initially sought to pressure Denmark, the Arctic island’s sovereign authority, to sell it. Deploying his favorite diplomatic tool, import tariffs, Mr. Trump—not unreasonably—expected the Europeans to cave, as they typically did when confronted with the reality that decades of dependency and complacency had left them powerless in the face of strength.

But the Danes, a proud people whose soldiers had fought and died alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, refused. When Mr. Trump ordered U.S. forces to seize the island, Denmark enlisted a handful of nations to help with the resistance—a coalition of the willing, but not very able.

It was never a contest. In addition to Danish and Greenlandic forces armed for winter warfare, the allies included a shipload of British Royal Navy admirals; a Canadian armored detachment handpicked in compliance with the nation’s strict commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion; a German fleet of battery-powered armored fighting vehicles that had to be abandoned when the only charging stations in Nuuk, the territory’s capital, broke down; and a Dutch infantry battalion that was forced to withdraw because of a shortage of ammunition, and discovered that shouting “bang-bang,” as they had been trained, was of little effect in battle.

Humiliated, the Europeans and Canadians retreated but regrouped, committed to do whatever they could to retaliate. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formally dissolved in late 2026. Europe expelled American troops. Deprived of its forward operating bases there, from which vital missions had been conducted across the world over the last 75 years, the U.S. tried to strike deals with Arab governments for bases in those countries. But domestic popular hostility to American military deployment, and continuing tensions over the U.S. alliance with Israel, meant there was to be no Middle Eastern replacement for Ramstein or Lakenheath.

That should give you the general idea. I’m not sure whether he’s harder on the U. S. or our putative European allies.

It’s certainly food for thought.

I’m going to repeat myself in criticizing President Trump’s remarks on Greenland. I think his Bronx bully routine is not just foolhardy it’s actually counterproductive because of its tonedeafness. Experience suggests that the surest way of getting Danes to dig in their heels is to try to bully them.

That said I find the reactions of miscellaneous European countries to Trump’s bullying is far-fetched. As Marc Champion observed at Bloomberg does anyone seriously think that the Baltic countries would abandon the security umbrella they receive from U. S. participation in NATO for Denmark?

I think there’s one more factor to consider. If Trump does manage to fracture the NATO alliance, the first casualty would undoubtedly be Ukraine. In the absence of NATO allies declaiming that Ukraine is just the first bite being taken by the Russian bear, our interests in Ukraine are quite abstract: rule of law, the principle of self-determination, rejection of one country invading another.

I think the Trump Administration is missing a strategic opportunity. I do not know whether this reflects a lack of understanding of how power and legitimacy interact or the conviction that they should show strength.

It should bring a resolution to the United Nations Security Council protesting the mass execution of protesters in Iran and, possibly, propose UNSC action to protect Iranian civilians. That would accomplish several things:

• It would publicly and permanently establish the United States as defending universal human rights against a regime executing its own citizens.
• If vetoed by Russia, China, or both it would put the vetoing power on the record as publicly shielding mass executions.
• It establishes legitimacy and due process before any further action.
• It would not be impulsive or illegal.

That would not reflect weakness; it would reflect strength. Using the Security Council is not about winning the vote. It is about shaping legitimacy.

That’s the sort of strategic diplomatic thinking I find missing in U. S. policy.

Before I leave the subject of Mr. Vallas, I wanted to make one final point. I genuinely wish he had been elected mayor of Chicago. He, not Brandon Johnson, reflects what Chicago needs right now.

However, the piece to which I linked illustrates why he was not elected. He ran as a technocrat. In today’s political semiotics, technocracy itself has become a cultural marker associated not with competence but also with elite managerialism. That is easily recoded by opponents as right-wing, corporate, and ultimately “Trump-adjacent”.

He made the mistake of confusing how one governs with how one must campaign. He should have governed as a technocrat. Chicago no longer votes primarily on programs or competence; it votes on identities and narratives. He should have run as a Greek. That would at least have given voters steeped in identity politics a culturally acceptable rationale for supporting him.