Nearly three weeks ago, I wrote about how the January 7 killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent followed a familiar script. Seventeen days later and just over a mile away, the scenario played out all over again. On January 24, 2026, 37-year-old Alex Pretti—an ICU nurse and US citizen—was fatally shot by a Border Patrol agent.
Like the killing of Renee Good, Pretti’s killing occurred amidst a massive urban occupation as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Nearly 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents now occupy the city of just over 400,000 residents, dwarfing the city’s 600-officer-strong police force. And like the Good case, the Department of Homeland Security immediately deployed a familiar playbook. Border Patrol Commander at Large Gregory Bovino claimed that Pretti “wanted to do maximal damage and massacre law enforcement,” a claim not substantiated by video evidence.
DHS claims that Pretti approached agents with a handgun; yet bystander video reveals a different reality. The footage shows Pretti holding only a cellphone, recording as he attempted to shield a bystander from being shoved. He was pepper-sprayed, tackled, and disarmed of a legally permitted firearm he never brandished—and then he was shot ten times in less than five seconds while pinned to the ground.
The reality is that these are everyday Americans falling victim to a system that enables—or even encourages—gross misconduct. To understand how we got here, we have to look at the bolted-shut doors of the American courthouse—a legal regime designed to ensure federal agents remain untouchable.
If a local police officer violates your rights, you can sue under a longstanding federal statute commonly known as Section 1983. But for misconduct by federal agents like those who killed Good and Pretti, no such statutory remedy exists. Instead, victims must rely on the Bivens Doctrine, a 1971 Supreme Court precedent that created an implied right of action to sue federal officials.
Over the last several decades, however, the Supreme Court has pared Bivens down to near irrelevance. Courts now routinely rule that if a case has even a new context—such as involving immigration enforcement—the right to sue simply doesn’t exist. The result: Your constitutional rights are unenforceable when violated by federal agents.
Even if a plaintiff were to somehow thread their way through the Bivens needle, they would hit the second wall: qualified immunity. This doctrine shields agents from liability unless the victim can point to a nearly identical prior case in the same jurisdiction in which a judge found the prior conduct unconstitutional, thereby putting officers on notice. It creates a Catch-22: you can’t win unless there’s a prior case on point, but there will never be a prior case on point if every suit is dismissed at the start.
When constitutional claims are unavailable, plaintiffs should be able to rely upon common law torts such as assault, battery, trespass, or false imprisonment. However, the Westfall Act—originally intended to protect federal employees, such as mail carriers, from simple negligence suits—has been interpreted so broadly that it now creates a significant accountability vacuum. This gap is further exacerbated by the continued narrowing of Bivens and the absence of a federal statutory equivalent to Section 1983. Under this Act, the individual agent—like Jonathan Ross or the agents who shot Alex Pretti—will be dismissed from the suit entirely, provided the attorney general certifies that they were acting in the scope of their employment—a near certainty. The case is then moved to federal court [if initially filed in state court] and the United States government is substituted as the defendant under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA).
This shift is often the final nail in the coffin, as the FTCA is mind-numbingly complex and ripe with loopholes. Because of the FTCA’s discretionary function exception, the government can argue that an agent’s decision to use force was a policy judgment made in the performance of their duties. If the judge agrees, you’re out of luck. And if you manage to prevail, you’re still not entitled to a jury trial. Rather, a judge—who may themselves be a former courtroom advocate for the government—gets to decide your fate. The result is a legal black hole: the agent is immune because of the Westfall Act, and the government is immune because of the FTCA.
The Framers entrusted citizen juries to adjudicate disputes between citizens and their government. Consequently, assessing whether a police officer violated an individual’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force is precisely the type of judgment call the Framers tasked jurors to make. This would mean that a Minneapolis jury should get to decide whether the federal agent’s decisions to use deadly force against Renne Good and Alex Pretti were reasonable—or not.
These are common-sense questions the Framers intended for juries to wrestle with. But as long as the Supreme Court continues on its trajectory of insulating government officials from accountability and Congress remains missing in action, federal agents will operate with the knowledge that the law is not a barrier but a shield.
