At 6.38pm CST on Saturday January 24, Indiana Pacer star Tyrese Haliburton posted on X: “Alex Pretti was murdered.”
The NBA star was one of the first athletes to respond to what can only be described as the public execution by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Pretti’s death was the culmination of a weeks-long campaign of terror conducted against residents of the city, including Renee Good, who was herself killed by DHS forces just two weeks earlier. Indeed, “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis has accounted for two-thirds of homicides in the city in 2026.
Of course, Minneapolis has not been the only site of depravity. In 2025, DHS reported a “historic” surge in deportations, gleefully noting that it had removed over 622,000 people from the US. During the same period, 32 people died in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, which marked the deadliest year for the agency in its over two decades of operation. In January 2026 alone, at least nine people have been killed directly by DHS or died in their custody. Additionally, an October 2025 investigation revealed a pattern of sexual assault and forced labour targeting transgender and queer detainees at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.
In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that many current and former athletes followed Haliburton’s lead, including Victor Wembanyama, Breanna Stewart, Karl-Anthony Towns, Spencer Strider, Isaiah Thomas, De’Aaron Fox, JR Smith and John Randle. The NBA Minnesota Timberwolves held a moment of silence for Pretti, as did the PWHL’s Minnesota Frost. (The Minnesota Wild did not, nor did either NFL conference championship game, despite this practice being deployed by many teams across the league for Charlie Kirk).
Some former athletes offered a rather more depraved perspective, including Chipper Jones, who posted, “Less talk…..more handcuffs!” and noted tied-for-fifth-place college swimmer Riley Gaines, who added: “It’s so easy not to get shot by ICE.”
In the aftermath of Pretti’s killing, prior to the news that ICE had effectively been forced to retreat from Minneapolis, we spoke to three current and former athletes about their views on the rising tide of American fascism.
“I am sickened and outraged by the most recent public executions carried out by the state in Minnesota,” former Harvard and USC women’s basketball star, and Athletes Unlimited player McKenzie Forbes told us. “I think it is representative of the current state of our country that these government officials act with such audacity and impunity in broad daylight. Fascism is here now and if we as the people do not get organized with our neighbors it will only continue to get worse.”
Two-time MLB All-Star Sean Doolittle agreed. “Like so many people, I was horrified and heartbroken as I watched the murder of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti on my phone,” said Doolittle who won the World Series with the Washington Nationals in 2019, and is now a coach with the team.
“It doesn’t make it any less infuriating that on some level, this has felt inevitable since the federal surge began in LA and DC last summer. DHS has an incredibly violent history. What we’re seeing play out in our cities feels like the natural progression of militarizing our police forces, providing endless taxpayer dollars at the expense of schools and social safety net programs.
“Many people have said that things like this don’t happen in America. But in many ways the violence exhibited by DHS and federal agents mirrors the tactics used by law enforcement in Black and Brown communities for decades. And it’s reminiscent of tragic deaths at the hands of law enforcement – like Philando Castile – another man who was killed by police during a traffic stop in 2016, just a 15-minute drive from where Alex Pretti was killed.”
Forbes echoed this sentiment: “Be wary of state and local level government officials, police departments … trying to separate themselves from ICE,” she said. “They are all a part of the same apparatus that does the dirty work for the ruling class.”
Former Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Doug Baldwin Jr has been saddened, but not surprised, by the violence in Minnesota.
“How could you not be upset? I mean, no matter where you land on the political spectrum, I would hope that human decency would consider the human toll of these situations,” said Baldwin, who won the Super Bowl with Seattle in 2013. “… We shouldn’t be surprised though. Human history is riddled with our struggle to live on this planet together. History also gives us a blueprint of how to combat these challenges. In my humble opinion, love, discipline, and endurance towards the struggles currently, and the ones that may or may not come, is what will be necessary. Our ancestors did it, and so I know we will as well.
“It does feel bleak, at times, right now. And, sadly, I am expecting it to get worse before it gets better. But I know it will get better.”
Doolittle is a little more pessimistic but sees hope in the strength of community. “The problem with the freest country in the world having a masked secret police force that directly serves the President of the United States kidnapping people and disappearing them in a web of for-profit prisons, or executing innocent people on the street with total impunity isn’t that they’re ‘untrained,’ as some politicians have suggested – it’s that it exists at all,” he said.
“But despair is not and can never be the answer. What we saw here in DC – community organizers, rapid responders, legal observers, random neighbors and bystanders coming together and stepping up – is what we are seeing in every other city experiencing similar DHS enforcement surges. The stories from other cities of neighbors volunteering to help walk kids to school, getting groceries, doing laundry and walking pets for other community members who are at risk, documenting arrests, working to get information out to families who might not have known that their loved ones were taken.”
Doolittle says he has seen ICE activity and knows other athletes will be aware of it too.
“Passing national guard tanks on my way into work, seeing agents stationed all around the neighborhood near the stadium. I don’t have a special perspective on this because I’m involved in sports. I have a perspective because I saw it happening in my city to my neighbors,” he said.
“And for anyone currently employed in any of our major American sports leagues, most of them have seen it too. Soon we will be hosting athletes from all over the world in the World Baseball Classic, the Olympics, and the World Cup. Those athletes will see it too, and some of them may be at risk.”
Baldwin agrees that this moment is significant. “In my humble opinion, we are in another pivotal moment in our human history,” he said. “The path we take here, now, will be determined by how we each show up in the world to influence that path.”
Forbes and Baldwin slightly disagree on the responsibility of athletes in this moment.
For Forbes, “athletes 100% have a responsibility to speak out against state repression as we have plenty of eyes on us at all times … You force the viewer to reckon with the harsh reality of what we are living through which I think is really important.”
Baldwin, on other other hand, believes that “everyone has a responsibility to contribute to our collective consciousness in whatever way they are able to do so. However, that is an individual choice and journey. I try hard not to judge those decisions because those are deeply personal.”
Doolittle is most concerned with his own responsibility for players under his charge. “Now that I’m a coach it’s my job to create an environment based on things like trust and mutual respect,” he said. “Major League Baseball is the best baseball league in the world because we have players from all over the globe. I love my guys and I feel protective of my players. It breaks my heart that I can’t keep them safe from getting caught up in these federal operations once they leave the ballpark; that their families can’t visit because it’s too dangerous; because they come from a different part of the world.
“Athletes aren’t uniquely positioned to speak on this because they’re in the public eye. But they are uniquely positioned to speak on this because they live and work all over the country and many have seen it themselves.”
In the end, Doolittle offered perhaps the most authentic possible distillation of this moment: “I’m really mad so thank you for letting me vent. Abolish ICE. We keep us safe.”
Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Derek Silva is Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, December 2024) and co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis, Anna Posbergh, and Priyansh) of The End of Sport podcast.
