According to ProPublica, the CBP goons Stephen Miller paid to invade Minnesota, where they murdered Alex Pretti, are two Latinos from South Texas.
The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.
The records viewed by ProPublica list Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, as the shooters during the deadly encounter last weekend that left Pretti dead and ignited massive protests and calls for criminal investigations.
Both men were assigned to Operation Metro Surge, an immigration enforcement dragnet launched in December that sent scores of armed and masked agents across the city.
CBP, which employs both men, has so far refused to release their names and has disclosed few other facts about the deadly incident, which came days after a different immigration agent shot and killed another Minneapolis protester, a 37-year-old mother of three named Renee Good.
[snip]
Ochoa is a Border Patrol agent who joined CBP in 2018. Gutierrez joined in 2014 and works for CBP’s Office of Field Operations. He is assigned to a special response team, which conducts high-risk operations like those of police SWAT units. Records show both men are from South Texas.
Jacqueline Sweet identified pictures of both men (Ochoa, Gutierrez).
They’re not the only Latino Border Patrol officers from South Texas who’ve made news in recent days. Alfredo Mancillas Jr. was found in St. Paul last Tuesday, passed out drunk in his illegally-parked car, covered in his own vomit.
A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol employee was charged with drunken driving in St. Paul after a state trooper found him passed out in a car Tuesday morning “covered in vomit.”
The state trooper found 31-year-old Alfredo Mancillas Jr. of Corpus Christi, Texas, “slumped over in the driver’s seat” at 3:25 a.m. Tuesday in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood near Allianz Field, according to charges filed that day by the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office.
His car was parked in a no-parking zone and smelled like alcohol while Mancillas himself had “bloodshot and watery eyes,” the charges allege.
After failing a field sobriety test, Mancillas refused to submit a breathalyzer test. He was arrested, booked into the Ramsey County jail and charged with 3rd and 4th degree driving while impaired.
Nor are Ochoa, Gutierrez, Mancillas the only prominent goons who’ve been hiding their own ethnicity under masks.
The alleged victim of a conspiracy to dox in Los Angeles is an ICE Deportation Officer named Rogelio Reyes, who has since started using the last name Huitzilin — though Bill Essayli, the Muslim son of Lebanese immigrants masquerading as US Attorney for Los Angeles, had to drop the doxing charge because the women he accused never actually shared Reyes’ specific address, as required by the law. Rather than dox him, they just made it clear to Reyes’ neighbors in predominately Latino Baldwin Park that he is La Migra.
The two heavily masked ICE agents who snatched Brad Lander last June are “a Pakistani Muslim immigrant who lives in Brighton Beach” and “an Indo-Guyanese gentleman who lives in South Ozone Park.”
There are a lot of reasons Stephen Miller’s goons wear masks. To terrify the communities they invade. To make it harder to shame them. To make it harder to tie them to other crimes they may have committed. In testimony before a JB Pritzker commission designed to document the problems with Stephen Miller’s invasions, Garrett Graff calculated that CBP officers commi crimes at a higher rate than migrants.
In total, according to CBP’s own discipline reports, over the 20 years from 2005 to 2024 — the last year numbers are available — at least 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested themselves, some multiple times. (In 2018 alone, a single CBP employee was arrested five times.) To put that number in perspective:
• The population of CBP agents and officers who have been arrested would make it roughly the nation’s fourth largest police department — equal to the size of the entire Philadelphia police.
• Indeed, for much of the 2010s and likely before and since, it appears the crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States. [my emphasis]
But there is accumulating evidence that a big reason these goons hide their faces is to hide that the white nationalist project Stephen Miller is pursuing — like virtually everything else in America — relies on brown people to do the hard work. Miller can only sustain the myth of white self-reliance by hiding the faces of those who murder white men at his behest in the streets of Blue cities.
In advance of what will be (if he is lucky) a two-week debate over new restrictions on DHS goons, Mike Johnson said unmasking agents and requiring meaningful badges would, “create further danger. I mean, Tom Homan told Leader Schumer himself — I was part of the conversation in the Oval Office a few days ago — ‘That’s one of the demands, I’m not going to be able to implement. I have to protect my officers.’ And when you have people doxing them, and targeting them, of course we don’t want their personal identification out there on the streets.”
Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Mike Johnson — they’re not trying to keep their officers safe. As Phil Bump laid out the other day, that simply has not happened.
They’re trying to hide how much even their deeply racist project is helpless without brown labor.
Update: Definitely read Adam Serwer on the import of masking in fostering unconstitutional activities.