Duckworth: Video of Pretti Confrontation with ICE Shows GOP Trying to Blame Victim, ‘Need to Focus on ICE’

On Thursday’s broadcast of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) said that a video of Alex Pretti in a confrontation with federal agents “adds for me that my Republican colleagues are on the blame-the-victim bandwagon.” And “if you were to bring this into court and say, well, this guy was out there protesting before, the judge would throw this out. And so, we need to stop blaming the victim, and we need to focus on ICE.”

Co-host Steve Inskeep asked, [relevant exchange begins around 3:20] “I want to ask about a bit of news we have in the last 24 hours or so involving the killing of Alex Pretti. There’s now a new video moving around. Republicans are making a lot of it. It is not from the day in which Pretti was killed last weekend. It’s eleven days earlier. But somebody who looks a lot like him is out on the street, having some kind of confrontation with federal agents, and he gets upset and he kicks a vehicle and breaks a taillight of a federal vehicle. This, in the eyes of Republicans, shows that he was more violent than people imagined. What, if anything, does this add to the picture for you?”

Duckworth answered, “Well, this adds for me that my Republican colleagues are on the blame-the-victim bandwagon. We’re talking about an incident, captured on video, where it was clear that all he was doing was holding a cellphone and trying to protect a woman from ICE officials when he was brutally murdered. So, let’s talk about that. If any court — if you were to bring this into court and say, well, this guy was out there protesting before, the judge would throw this out. And so, we need to stop blaming the victim, and we need to focus on ICE. And — but that’s what my Republican colleagues want to do. They are too afraid to confront Donald Trump and the fact that this brutality is not something that Americans want on their city streets.”

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