ICE Agents Confront Santa Barbara Eastside Residents with Pepper Spray, Santa Barbara Police Respond to Scene
ICE agents confront residents on Santa Barbara’s eastside neighborhood deploying pepper spray on January 28, 2026 (Photo: Ashley Farrell )
Video Shows ICE Agents Shoving and Pepper Spraying Woman in the Face at Point Blank Range
U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents confronted residents of Santa Barbara’s Eastside neighborhood on Wednesday morning, January 28.
Around 7:00 a.m., residents discovered ICE agents in vehicles patrolling their neighborhood. Video captured by Ashley Farrell show residents honking horns of their vehicles and blowing whistles to alert their neighbors of ICE’s presence.
“This is what community looks like,” Farrell stated as video appearing to show other residents following ICE agent’s vehicles and continuing to honk their horns. “We run these Nazis out of town or we live under authoritarian rule for the rest of our lives, those are our options,” she said.
According to video footage on social media, ICE agents exited their vehicles in the area of Salinas and Carpinteria Streets as more residents gathered on the street and sidewalk filming their actions.
A masked ICE agent was seen exiting a white Ford sedan carrying what a large canister of pepper spray. The agent threatens to spray the crowd if they don’t move out of the way and move a vehicle that is in the roadway.
Additional ICE agents arrive on the scene as one agent can be seen on camera shoving a woman who was filming them as the crowd shouts, “do not touch her!”
The agent is seen again grabbing the woman by the arm and shoving her away from the vehicle. He then sprays her in the face with pepper spray at point-blank range. The crowd screams as residents surround the woman and take her to a nearby home for medical care.
[Warning: The below video depicts graphic language]
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At 7:17 a.m., the Santa Barbara Police Department stated it received reports of a large fight in the area of Salinas and Carpinteria Streets.
The police department states that upon arrival, officers determined the large crowd was a combination of community members and ICE agents.
“The Santa Barbara Police Department had no prior knowledge that the ICE agents would be at that location or anywhere in the City of Santa Barbara today. Officers attempted to de-escalate the situation and the ICE Agents left the scene,” the department stated.
The department went on to state that during their investigation, officers learned that one individual had been pushed by an ICE agent, and another individual had been sprayed with pepper spray prior to officers’ arrival. Santa Barbara Police officers summoned Santa Barbara Fire Department personnel to the scene to provide medical assistance to the individual who had been exposed to pepper spray. Fire personnel rendered aid at the scene.
“Officers took statements from involved community members regarding the events that occurred prior to police arrival and documented this incident in a report with the information provided to the officers on scene. Santa Barbara Police provided traffic control in the surrounding area to ensure public safety,” the department stated.
Video footage shows ICE agents had pulled their vehicles to the side of the road while police officers were helping to direct traffic.
There were no arrests made by the Santa Barbara Police Department, and the department stated its role at the scene was limited to medical aid coordination, information gathering, and traffic management.
Video footage shows residents cheering as ICE agents and their vehicles left the scene.
[Warning: The below video contains graphic language]
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Congressional Representative Salud Carbajal stated his office is aware of this incident and they are coordinating with local officials to gather the facts.
“Please remain vigilant and stay safe. Now more than ever, it’s important to know your rights when interacting with ICE officers. You can find my office’s bilingual resource guide here,” Carbajal stated.
Don’t Let Them Tell You That Was Self-Defense
Not after Alex Pretti’s execution. Not ever again.
Jan 25, 20263:07 PM
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Early Saturday morning in downtown Minneapolis, 37-year-old Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in full public view. Within hours, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection officials released a familiar statement: An agent, they said, had acted in lawful self-defense against an armed and violent agitator. According to this narrative, Pretti instigated the violence that led to his death. A multitude of videos filmed by witnesses from multiple angles show this to be a lie.
They show Alex Pretti holding up his phone, filming as masked ICE and CBP agents shove demonstrators and pepper-spray the crowd. They show an agent shoving a woman in the street. They show Pretti stepping forward, without striking anyone or reaching for a weapon, attempting to shield the woman from the agent’s blows. They show an agent spraying Pretti directly in the face with chemical irritant. They show Pretti being tackled to the ground. They show six or seven agents piling on top of him, striking him while he lies immobilized. And they show one agent removing Pretti’s licensed handgun—which he was carrying in compliance with state law—from his waistband.
Then, while he remains pinned to the pavement, helpless beneath a mass of armed bodies, gunshots ring out. Agents scatter, and one of them appears to clap. Pretti does not get up. This is not self-defense. It is much more akin to an execution.
Pretti was a licensed, law-abiding gun owner and registered nurse who worked at a veterans hospital.
The sequence of events matters, not only because it starkly contradicts the official account but because it exposes how the language of self-defense has been distorted to the point that it now functions as a near-automatic exoneration for state violence. When authorities invoke “self-defense” today, they rarely describe a factual necessity. They are deploying a rhetorical shield with deep historical roots and devastating contemporary consequences.
Just weeks earlier, on Jan. 7, Renee Good was shot three times and killed by an ICE agent as she attempted to flee in her car. In that case, too, officials framed the killing as justified and necessary, as self-defense rather than aggression. In that case, too, video evidence and eyewitness accounts—including an agent muttering “Fucking bitch” after the shooting—raised serious questions about the agents’ alleged “fear for their lives.” There is little to suggest that lethal force was unavoidable in this case, and yet Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is refusing to investigate the killing as a homicide. Instead, it is investigating Good’s widow. The pattern should be clear: Use an empty claim of self-defense to vindicate the shooter, then frame the victim as the perpetrator.
What we are witnessing is not a series of isolated tragedies. We have reached the logical end point of a political and legal culture that has long distorted claims of vulnerability, of “reasonable fear,” in the service of power, conflating aggressive, state-sanctioned violence with necessary self-protection.
From the nation’s founding, claims of self-defense have been used to justify extraordinary brutality. Systematic colonial violence against Indigenous nations was routinely rationalized as necessary to the protection of settler families and communities. Entire Indigenous communities were eradicated under the guise of lawful defense, with Indigenous resistance labeled “Savage Wars,” as a confrontation among equals rather than a genocidal onslaught.
After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan organized itself “to maintain forever the supremacy of the white race.” At the center of its mission lay the claim that white society required urgent protection from formerly enslaved people. Their founding documents emphasized “the sacred duty of protecting [white] womanhood” from sexual violence, with violence as necessary.
This mandate of protection congealed into widespread racial terror, claiming the lives of thousands of Black men, women, and children between Reconstruction and the mid-20th century. The Equal Justice Initiative estimates that 4,400 lynchings took place during this time period, which was also characterized by legalized segregation, mass disenfranchisement, economic coercion, and sexual violence perpetrated against Black women. And yet, when anti-lynching bills appeared before Congress—again and again—white leaders defended ritualized, spectacular acts of racial terror as a regrettable but necessary response to generally false claims of sexual violence by Black men against white women.
This “rape-lynch” mythology “that Negro men rape white women” was a “threadbare lie,” as journalist Ida B. Wells painstakingly documented in 1892, and she was almost murdered for speaking the truth. But truth was never the point. The claim of self-defense functioned as a form of camouflage to shroud the economic, political, and social project of keeping Black Americans subordinate under a blanket of legitimacy. It worked because enough people were willing to accept it, to pretend that racial terror was necessary to (white) public safety.
A similarly pernicious logic has insulated law enforcement from legal accountability for generations. Police violence, no matter how extreme, is routinely reframed as a defensive reaction to a threat rather than aggression. “The officer feared for his life.” “The suspect was reaching … for something.” “The situation escalated quickly, and the officer had no choice but to shoot.” The language is reflexive, ritualized, and remarkably effective. It is baked into our nation’s DNA to frame the victims of state-sanctioned violence as perpetrators.
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In recent decades, that logic has been codified into law and expanded to select citizens through “Stand Your Ground” laws and permissive gun regulations that collapse the distinction between defense and dominance. These laws encourage armed confrontation while removing the legal duty to retreat or de-escalate. They transform subjective fear into legal justification while inviting ordinary citizens to imagine themselves as lone sentinels in a hostile world, as heroic “good guys with guns,” and as “armed citizens” exercising their Second Amendment rights. The laws reward those who act on that fantasy with legal immunity.
But only when they are acting in the service of repressive power. By all accounts, including the video evidence, Alex Pretti was a law-abiding good guy with a gun, who stepped in to protect an unarmed woman from an assault. He did not draw his weapon, nor did he attack the agents who disarmed him before shooting him multiple times while he was pinned to the ground.
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What is new today is not the twisted rhetoric of self-defense but its escalation, and its targets. Masked federal agents, many of them poorly trained, now patrol public streets with military-grade weapons and broad discretionary authority. They detain, assault, and, increasingly, kill people based on vague or erroneous claims of public safety. They do so while invoking the same exonerating language that has long enabled state violence.
For generations, public state violence has been normalized precisely because it was disproportionately inflicted on nonwhite people, immigrants, low-income and other marginalized individuals. Many learned to look away or to justify this violence as the necessary price of “law and order.” Part of race and class privilege was the capacity to see such violence as a regrettable but necessary byproduct of maintaining order and keeping “us” safe.
We are now witnessing—some of us in incredulous horror—what happens when a society confuses authority with innocence and violence with virtue. We have built legal doctrines that reward escalation. We have granted weapons to institutions without demanding restraint. We have taught ourselves that “good guys” with guns will keep us safe from “bad guys.” Maybe now we are learning that the boundary separating the two was never clear in the first place.
The Killing of Alex Pretti Should Be the Breaking Point
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Image by Jessica Christian.
Last week, I wrote an article at CounterPunch about the killing of Renee Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis. When I wrote that piece, my goal was to stay measured and make the case that the shooting was unjustified in a way that might actually get certain people to listen. I reviewed the video evidence and told a story from my Army days about a moment when we were able to avoid killing civilians in a split-second situation far more dangerous than the one the officer was in who shot Renee Good. The point was to stay calm, professional, unemotional, and deliberate, to keep the anger out of my voice and focus on facts.
But after seeing the videos of federal agents killing Alex Pretti, I’m not interested in putting on that pretense anymore. Because I am fucking angry. And every American, regardless of political belief or background, should be angry too.
Watching Kristi Noem and other Republicans once again deny reality and twist the shooting into something it plainly is not would almost be impressive if it weren’t so preposterous. The level of mental gymnastics they are demanding of the public is staggering. When regime propagandists like Noem and Gregory Bovino go on television and tell the American people to accept the “official” version of events, even when it directly contradicts what anyone with eyes and a functioning brain can clearly see across multiple videos from multiple angles, we’ve crossed into classic Orwellian territory, textbook doublespeak straight out of 1984.
“War is peace.”
“Freedom is slavery.”
“Ignorance is strength.”
“He intended to inflict maximum damage and kill law enforcement.”
That last claim from the administration is such complete and obvious bullshit that you should be insulted they think you’re dumb enough to believe it, despite the overwhelming, high-definition evidence you can watch for yourself.
The videos, which if you’re reading this you’ve almost certainly seen multiple times by now, leave very little room for doubt about what actually happened. And the official statement from Pretti’s grieving parents says out loud what we can all already see: “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
But much like in the case of Renee Good, as soon as the last shot was fired into his prone, beaten, defenseless body, Kristi Noem and other officials were already scrambling for the nearest microphone to label Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist before they even knew his name or background, let alone before any serious investigation had taken place. They moved immediately to control the narrative and plant seeds in people’s minds, knowing full well that video would surface that would contradict the official story.
This time, they went too far.
Alex Pretti was anything but a domestic terrorist. He was an ICU nurse who worked at the VA hospital caring for veterans at the end of their lives. He had no criminal record. He was a responsible gun owner with a legal concealed carry license. He was a model citizen by any reasonable standard.
The kind of person I recognize from my time in the Army, someone who spent his life serving and helping people who needed it. The kind of neighbor, friend, or relative most Americans would be grateful to have. And he was the kind of guy who, when he saw an amped-up thug in tactical gear violently assault a woman, rushed to her aid without thinking about his own safety.
And for that, he was violently beaten and executed in the street by masked state enforcers operating with impunity, after their leaders made it clear that ICE and other federal immigration agents are now functionally above the law. Because the Trump administration knows it cannot let the truth come out without Americans turning on them, they immediately ramped up a smear campaign, attempting to paint Pretti as a violent criminal and inventing a story that never existed.
One thing we have always known about Donald Trump is that he never accepts responsibility and never admits mistakes. There appear to be no lengths Noem, Trump, and other regime officials won’t go to in order to blame the victim, the people of Minneapolis, Tim Walz, Democrats, literally anyone and everyone except the people who actually pulled the trigger or the administration that put them there.
Speaking of triggers, let’s talk about guns for a minute. Specifically, the gun Alex Pretti was carrying, and gun culture more broadly.
One of the points the administration keeps hammering home is that the victim was armed, as if that alone somehow justifies federal agents shooting him. But he was a law-abiding citizen with a legal concealed carry permit. He never brandished his weapon. He never threatened anyone. Multiple videos from different angles clearly show Pretti holding only a phone before he’s wrestled to the ground. After several agents had him pinned and beaten, a Border Patrol officer is seen retrieving a handgun from near his waistband and walking away with it, before another agent unholsters his own weapon and begins firing into Pretti’s body.
They also keep pointing out that he had “multiple magazines,” meaning one in the weapon and a backup, as if that automatically means he intended to murder as many people as possible. If carrying extra mags is the standard for intent to do harm, then the agents who killed him also qualify.
And so do I. So does every lawful gun owner I personally know. And because I’m a veteran who lives in Texas and tends to spend time around other Texas veterans, I know a lot of them. Carrying a backup magazine is normal and prudent. Pretti was exactly the kind of person gun-rights groups claim to support.
And in fact, the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun organizations have called for a full investigation, explicitly rejecting the idea that lawful gun ownership justifies lethal force. When groups that routinely move in lockstep with Trump publicly say the government has gone too far, it’s probably worth paying attention. In my view, they should have gone much further than calling for an investigation, but at this point I suppose I should be relieved they found the nerve to say anything at all.
And yet, plenty of right-wing commenters on social media continue repeating the regime’s line. “Well, he had a gun.” As if that settles the matter. It’s hard to ignore the irony that many of these same people decorate their profiles with “Don’t Tread on Me” flags or “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” while simultaneously arguing that the mere presence of a legally carried firearm makes someone expendable when the state decides to pull the trigger. You can’t posture as fearless defenders of freedom while bending over backward to excuse state violence the moment it’s politically convenient. You can’t have it both ways.
And where, exactly, are all the right-wing militias who have been warning about this scenario for decades? For years, they’ve insisted that Americans need guns to prevent a tyrannical government from turning on its own people. Well, that tyrannical government you’ve been warning us about for decades is here. It’s on 4K video, streaming across every network in the country right now. It’s actively treading on people’s constitutional rights and literally killing Americans in broad daylight, including lawful gun owners, and their response has been mostly deafening silence. I’m sorry if you really wanted that government to be led by a Democrat, but we don’t get to pick the party colors tyrants wear.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that a bunch of dudes in camo pants and face paint should storm out of the woods and start attacking ICE facilities. I’ve long advocated for peaceful, non-violent resistance. We have to hold the moral high ground at all costs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi were right: if we resort to violence, even in the face of violence, we lose. We lose the narrative.
There’s a principle known as the 3.5 percent rule that shows this isn’t wishful thinking. Political scientists studying major resistance movements found that nonviolent campaigns are about twice as successful as violent ones, and that when roughly 3.5 percent of a population engages in sustained, disciplined, nonviolent protest, those movements succeed. In the U.S., that’s about 12 million people.
That number isn’t unachievable. Every time the Trump administration pushes policies most people don’t want, every time a citizen is killed by masked federal agents in public, and every time the regime follows it up by spinning a narrative we can all see is false and demanding that we accept it anyway, the anger grows. So does the recognition that we’re being gaslit and that silence only invites more of the same. And with that recognition, more people show up in the streets.
It may very well be wishful thinking, but as I talk to friends and acquaintances, it feels like the old party lines are starting to blur and fall away. I’m not talking about the hardline white nationalists and fascists who genuinely believe in the kind of governance Trump is trying to impose on this country. I’m talking about the moderate Republicans, fiscal conservatives, and independents I know who voted for him because of the economy, or because they were angry at the DNC, frustrated by the way Biden’s decline was handled, or felt alienated by a nomination process that was closed off and predetermined. I’m also talking about the people who’ve spent years sitting on the fence, playing the familiar “both sides are at fault” game. More and more of them are starting to realize that the divide doesn’t have much to do with the affiliation on your voter registration card.
This isn’t about being a Republican or a Democrat: It’s about where you land when the state uses force to silence dissent. It’s really that simple. Either you believe the American people retain the protected right to assemble and protest, even when you don’t agree politically with what they’re protesting, or you accept a system where a small group of powerful people gets to decide whose rights matter and whose don’t, and backs that decision with force, violence, and lies.
You don’t have to agree with every protest. You don’t have to like the people in the streets. But once you accept that the government gets to decide who is allowed to assemble, who is allowed to resist, and who can be killed with impunity for stepping out of line, the rest of your political beliefs stop mattering.
The reality, though, is that right now the party largely toeing the line and defending the indefensible is the Republican Party. There have been a few outliers calling for a full and independent investigation, but not nearly enough. Most are still cowering behind empty rhetoric and blatant lies told by the increasingly unhinged maniac they allowed to hijack their party a decade ago.
When I wrote my last piece about the Renee Good shooting, the response was mostly positive. The negative emails and DMs were predictable—mostly derogatory comments about “fucking liberals” or “Democrats,” usually misspelled and sometimes vaguely threatening. I’m used to that by now and don’t lose sleep over it. I’m not a registered Democrat or Republican, and I don’t write to defend a party. I’m an independent who has voted across the spectrum, sometimes out of agreement, sometimes out of harm reduction in the face of open authoritarianism, and I believe opposing state violence, due-process violations, and unaccountable power shouldn’t be a partisan position. If that somehow earns me a label in some corners, that’s fine.
But this article isn’t about me. It’s about an administration with a clear and consistent allergy to staying within constitutional limits. No matter where you land politically, most people aren’t in favor of a regime that tries to overturn elections, calls the free press the enemy of the people, attacks judges who don’t rule in its favor, ignores due process, or treats constitutional rights as optional. And most people aren’t in favor of unleashing an unaccountable, masked, poorly trained federal force into American cities as a political intimidation tactic.
Trump likes to say he has a mandate from the American people. In reality, he won about 34% of eligible voters. Harris won roughly 33%, and another 34% stayed home. When two-thirds of the country either votes against you or can’t be bothered to show up for you, that’s not a mandate. It’s a narrow plurality. And for all of the swagger and chest-thumping, the Trump administration knows it, which is why they govern like they’re afraid. Because they are.
Like most desperate authoritarian governments, this one is operating from a place of fear. They know that losing the House and Senate would begin to strip away their ability to control the narrative. They know that losing the presidency in 2028 would likely mean legal accountability for the damage they’ve inflicted on the country and the Constitution. And so they are doing what fearful regimes always do: provoking, threatening, coercing, and using violence to cling to power while insisting you disbelieve what you know to be true.
That same pattern shows up in their response to the killings in Minneapolis. They demand that we believe obvious lies rather than trust our own eyes. They insist they know what’s best, that we are too ignorant or stupid to understand what is plainly in front of us, that what we saw didn’t actually happen, that we should accept the official story, shut the fuck up, and fall in line like good, loyal subjects. And then they escalate.
This escalation is intentional.
They see the crowds growing. They see Americans showing up in the streets despite subzero temperatures, despite the real risk of being shot and labeled a domestic terrorist. They see that, for more than a year now, these protesters have remained peaceful and have held the moral high ground, and because of that, they are trying to provoke a violent response. They want an excuse: an excuse for martial law, an excuse to justify real repression, an excuse to suppress elections and consolidate power.
This movement has understood something fundamental from the start: nonviolent resistance is how we win. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this deeply when he said, “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.”
But King, a brilliant man who understood human nature, also said that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” He recognized that if even a peaceful people are ignored, beaten, and terrorized long enough, survival instinct will eventually override restraint. That is precisely what authoritarian regimes rely on. They provoke, escalate, and wait for restraint to break so they can bring the full force of the state down on dissent. We must avoid giving them what they want.
***
We shouldn’t even know the names Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We know them only because federal agents, operating with flimsy administrative warrants and political cover from a corrupt administration, were turned loose on the public and did exactly what anyone paying attention could have predicted. They killed American citizens in the street. And we are going to know more names before this is over.
I ended my CounterPunch piece on the Renee Good killing by saying that if federal agents are treated as if they’re above the law, we shouldn’t expect it to be the last time an unarmed civilian dies at their hands. That unfortunately, but predictably, proved true less than five days after I hit submit. And it will happen again.
It doesn’t take special insight or a crystal ball to see where this is headed: the killing of Alex Pretti is what happens when armed federal agents are given free rein, political cover, and explicit permission to operate as if they are above the law, and Pretti will not be the last peaceful American citizen gunned down by a reckless, poorly trained force operating in American cities as if it has been granted a blanket pardon by the President of the United States for whatever harm it causes.
So no, we shouldn’t be surprised when it happens again. But we should be angry when it does. We should be angry now.
Anger isn’t the problem. What matters is what we do with it.
Regardless of party affiliation or how you voted, the murder of Alex Pretti should be the breaking point. Not only because it’s shocking in isolation, but because it fits a pattern we can no longer pretend not to see. Masked agents. No accountability. Dead civilians. And the demand that we doubt our own eyes.
This is the moment where the abstractions fall away. No one is asking you to agree with every protester or adopt anyone else’s politics. You do, however, have to decide whether you’re willing to accept a country where the state kills its own people in public and lies about it afterward, confident that nothing will happen.
In the end, this won’t be remembered as a dispute between left and right. It will be remembered as a choice between standing on the right side of history or standing by while the state dismantled the limits on its power.
The American experiment is unusual not just because of who we are—a nation shaped by immigrants and refugees, and the children and grandchildren of immigrants and refugees—but because of what we built: a system that deliberately limits state power and gives ordinary people the right to say no. But the protections of the Constitution only exist if the people are willing to defend them. And once they’re gone, they aren’t coming back.
