Sen. Gallego won't support DHS funding bill in the wake of Alex Pretti shooting

In the wake of a second fatal shooting by immigration officers this month, Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, says he won’t support legislation that would give additional funding to Homeland Security.

Footage shows Border Patrol agents fired 10 shots in a matter of seconds at 37-year-old Alex Pretti during an encounter in Minneapolis on Saturday. His death comes just after U.S. House lawmakers voted to give DHS an additional $63 billion.

Gallego is among several Democrats who’ve said they’ll vote against the Senate version. He told reporters in a press call Monday he wanted to see an independent investigation into the shooting.

“And we need to go back to real enforcement of our immigration laws, and not using these men and women, ICE agents, HSI agents, Border Patrol agents, as a private army of the White House,” he said. “I urged my Republican colleagues to separate out the bills, we will let everything else pass, so we can negotiate a good funding that will make sure we are guarding people’s civil liberties.”

Gage Skidmore/CC BY 2.0

ICE enforcement is also on the rise in Arizona. State Rep. Alma Hernandez says she spoke with a Venezuelan woman who is legally in the U.S. seeking asylum. She said ICE agents stopped her family’s car outside a Tucson elementary school on Friday, saying only that it was a routine operation.

“She said they were all very confused because they weren’t speeding, they weren’t breaking the law, they weren’t doing anything reckless that would give someone probable cause to pull them over,” Hernandez said. “They all explained … they had whatever documents they had on them, showed them their IDs and said, you know, ‘we’re pending an asylum case right now,’ and agents did not care, and still took the other three individuals.”

ICE did not respond to questions about where the passengers were taken or on what charges they were detained.

During the press conference Monday, Gallego said ICE enforcement now involves racial profiling and his office has received reports from people who don’t know where their family has been taken.

“We have heard of people just being disappeared. We’ve seen reports of cars just being abandoned on the side of the road, and ICE just takes people,” he said. “This type of enforcement is what causes chaos and fear.”

Hernandez said the Venezuelan woman she spoke to Friday was the only one in the car that day who wasn’t detained, and she’s searching for a pro-bono lawyer to represent the rest of the family.