Videos of ICE Violence Are Plentiful. Accountability.… Not So Much.

January 31, 2026·51 min·3 clips

Radley Balko argues Trump supporters calling Minneapolis protesters 'domestic terrorists' would have said the same about Patrick Henry and Sam Adams.

The premise is blunt. After a second Minneapolis killing involving ICE agents, the hosts ask what happens when videos, witness accounts, and public memory outrun the official story. Alex Preti is not treated as a symbol. He is named as a thirty-seven-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. veteran, then set beside Stephen Miller's social-media claims that he was a domestic terrorist and would-be assassin. That contrast carries the segment. Officials do not just speak quickly. They try to define the scene before everyone else can agree on what they saw. From there, the conversation moves to Boston. The guest treats protest against armed authority as an old American habit, not some foreign import. The newspaper accounts matter because they give the segment a paper trail: pro-patriot, anti-monarchy writing, hostile reports of British troops, and a city already arguing over force and legitimacy. The parallels are sharp without becoming too neat. Threats at carriages, intimidation of ICE watchers, and warnings to go home become ways to read modern videos and witness accounts. The segment does not need grand equivalence. It lets the same gestures pile up: guards, houses, soldiers, bases, and officials keeping distance from the people living with their policies. Stephen Miller comes back into view. So do Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio, named as officials who have moved away from their homes and onto military bases. When the host calls out military exhibitionism in Boston and Minneapolis, it sounds less like a flourish than a label for what is already on the table. Elliot Higgins closes with the harder point: institutional lies now arrive after the public has seen truth, and authoritarianism and camps full of immigrants demand a bigger answer than visibility alone.

As heard by us

A sharp On the Media episode on ICE violence, public video, and the fight over who gets to define American protest.

On the Media centers this episode on the killing of Alex Preti in Minneapolis, where ICE agents shot the 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. veteran and Stephen Miller quickly called him a domestic terrorist and would-be assassin.

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Why you'd press play

You've watched videos of ICE operations and wondered why accountability never catches up to what the footage shows.

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