About 50 people from the greater Jackson area gathered on Town Square on Saturday morning to protest federal immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota.
Jackson’s protest was planned in solidarity with “ICE Out” demonstrations in Minnesota and elsewhere across the country.
Hours before the gathering, news broke that officers with the Department of Homeland Security had fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Jackson resident Craig Logan organized the protest with Teton County Indivisible. He said it was a tense few hours waiting for information on the shooting as temperatures hovered near zero.
“I don’t think any of us at the time of the protest expected to find out what we did later that day,” he said. “It turns out there was basically another execution.”
Pretti is the second person federal agents have shot and killed in Minnesota in recent weeks. Jackson residents held a vigil on Town Square last weekend to remember Renee Good, shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Jan. 7.
U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino defended the shooting. He said that Pretti approached agents with a handgun and “wanted to do maximum damage.”
Analyses from some national outlets contradicts that claim.
Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, KHOL has reported two incidents of federal immigration enforcement in Teton County. In western Wyoming, federal immigration enforcement has primarily taken the form of transfers from the county jail, often involving people originally detained for traffic violations, according to Teton County Sheriff Matt Carr.
Logan said he thinks Wyomingites are aware of the “gravity” of violence from federal agents and what he called a violation of Second Amendment rights.
The Wyoming Democratic Party posted a statement over the weekend expressing outrage and said it did not view the actions as an “isolated tragedy.”
“It is part of a dangerous pattern in which armed federal agents terrorize communities in secrecy with no accountability. When that happens, trust collapses, fear spreads, and innocent people die,” the statement reads.
