Law and Order, ‘Law and Order’

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, January 29, 2026

 

Thank god, not everyone at The Dispatch is as pleonastic as I am. This week’s excellent new editorial cuts to the chase in its opening paragraph: The salient fact about our government right now is how chaotic it is.

 

In that spirit of brevity, I’ll spare you the usual lecture about how voters knowingly and unforgivably assumed the risk of chaos when they offered a second chance to a guy whose singular achievement in his first term as president was attempting a coup. “One of the ironies repeated throughout world political history is that autocrats rarely bring the order they are elected—or installed—to deliver, even the servile kind that can be imposed through state terror,” our editorial notes at one point. “No, more reliably, autocrats bring disorder.”

 

The genius of the constitutional scheme had largely spared Americans from having to learn that lesson. We’re learning it now belatedly, the hard way.

 

Still, I don’t think Donald Trump’s political problem is that he promised law and order during his campaign and betrayed supporters by delivering chaos. I think it’s that he’s caught between two distinct concepts of “law and order” among his voters, one liberal and the other postliberal.

 

The administration’s shifting posture in Minneapolis reflects the distinction.

 

I cringe at using the word “liberal” to describe Tom Homan, the White House immigration czar who was put in charge of operations in the city after Alex Pretti’s death, but his vision of “law and order” is plainly more traditional than Stephen “Mass Deportation” Miller’s is. This morning, for instance, with Homan now at the helm, the Department of Homeland Security ordered immigration agents to halt the disruptive dragnets they’ve been conducting and instead exclusively target “aliens with a criminal history.” Catching the baddest of bad guys is “law and order” as any reasonable human would understand it.

 

The order also instructed agents to “NOT COMMUNICATE OR ENGAGE WITH AGITATORS. It serves no purpose other than inflaming the situation.” If “law and order” means anything as it’s traditionally been understood, it means police shouldn’t encourage confrontations by deliberately antagonizing bystanders who are most prone to engage in them. If—and it’s a big if—enforcing immigration law truly is the administration’s goal in Minneapolis, the new emphasis on self-restraint will calm the atmosphere and make that goal easier to achieve.

 

So Tom Homan is de-escalating and his officers will soon begin drawing down. Most Americans will be glad. But postliberals, who represent a meaningful number of the president’s supporters, will not. They have their own understanding of “law and order,” and de-escalation is very much not a part of it.

 

On Wednesday new footage circulated online of Alex Pretti confronting immigration agents on January 13, 11 days before he was killed. The videos “show him spitting and cursing at them and kicking a taillight on one of their SUVs,” per the New York Times. The kick (two kicks, actually) came as agents began to drive off—meaning that it was Pretti, not the agents, who chose to escalate an altercation that otherwise would have ended. After the agents got out of the SUV and wrestled him to the ground, they ultimately opted to let him go rather than detain him.

 

Many Very Online right-wingers seem to believe the new footage is highly relevant to Pretti’s death on January 24. Whether you agree will depend mostly on whether you define “law and order” in the liberal or postliberal sense.

 

Relevant or not?

 

Mostly, but not entirely. I can think of two not-very-compelling arguments for why normies who understand “law and order” through a traditional liberal lens might regard the January 13 footage as important.

 

One is that, because Pretti had made himself known to agents before, the ones who confronted him on January 24 may have recognized him and believed he was prone to violence. That in turn might have caused them to be jumpy when they dragged him to the pavement that day and discovered a gun on his hip, setting up the fatal misunderstanding that killed him.

 

There’s no evidence to support that, though. It’s not even clear that the officers whom Pretti berated on January 13 were members of the Border Patrol, as the ones who killed him on January 24 were. (The Times claims that “at least some” in the earlier incident were with Homeland Security Investigations.) Was his name in a database? Did the agents identify him before shooting him?

 

If you clear that logical obstacle somehow, you’re still stuck with the fact that Pretti had been disarmed in the moments before he was shot point-blank in the back. It’s one thing for agents to be jumpy when confronting him in the street but quite another for them to plug him 10 times when he was already under their thumb and defenseless.

 

The other argument that the footage is relevant is that if local law enforcement had been diligent about punishing Pretti for his behavior on January 13, he might not have been looking for trouble on January 24. Possibly he would have been locked up on that day for having vandalized the agents’ SUV. Or possibly he would have been home, scared straight by criminal charges filed against him after the first incident and unwilling to risk further legal jeopardy by confronting immigration officers again.

 

The problem with the “scared straight” theory is that it implies Pretti actually was looking for trouble on January 24 by monitoring ICE. To all appearances, he wasn’t. He had a right to be where he was and committed no obvious crimes (although some might say he committed a not-so-obvious one) as far as anyone’s able to tell. It could even be that his earlier run-in with agents did scare him straight: He appears restrained in the footage taken in the minutes before he was shot, seemingly content this time to hang back and record instead of spitting, cursing, and kicking.

 

But what about the first point, that if local cops were doing their jobs on January 13 then Pretti might have been detained and indisposed on January 24? There’s no way to disprove it—but any argument about Minneapolis PD being derelict in its duties should probably start with the fact that it’s wildly outnumbered by immigration agents at the moment by a ratio of 5 to 1. Even if the city assigned every cop on the force to shadow a federal officer full-time, 80 percent of those federal officers would still be on their own.

 

There simply aren’t enough local police to respond to every incident between ICE and protesters, particularly low-priority incidents like the one on January 13 in which no one was hurt. Before mobilizing 3,000 agents for a quasi-military occupation of Minneapolis, maybe the Trump administration should have done that math and considered the logistics of how order would be kept if the natives turned out to demonstrate.

 

To my traditionally liberal eye, the lesson of the new footage from January 13 is that immigration agents were capable of dealing with Alex Pretti without killing him. He was looking for a fight that day and the officers he confronted wouldn’t give it to him, to their credit. But I can’t think of any reason his behavior then would or should influence an analysis of whether lethal force was properly used on January 24.

 

If you want to travel from that Point A to Point B, only a postliberal understanding of “law and order” can get you there.

 

Rough justice.

 

Liberalism routinely accepts worse outcomes on policy as a trade-off for fairer process. An easy example is providing a lawyer paid for by the state to all criminal defendants. A lot of bad guys stand a much better chance of going free and menacing society than they would if we made everyone pay for their own counsel. But liberals believe it’s worth running that risk to ensure that innocents who can’t afford an attorney still get to mount an effective defense against false accusations by the state.

 

Postliberalism believes that liberalism’s tolerance for trade-offs between outcomes and fair process has gone too far. It finds immigration policy especially infuriating because our baroque, byzantine system is so backlogged with process that Americans occasionally end up being murdered because of it. It’s one thing to provide a bad guy with a lawyer who’ll improve his odds of being acquitted at trial, it’s another thing to release a bad guy into the country before he’s had a hearing because “fairness” left the authorities with no means to detain him.

 

If we want fewer bad guys roaming around America, we need to worry less about whether they’ve been treated fairly and prioritize making sure they can’t roam around. The ends justify the means—if not always, then certainly more often than liberalism would like to pretend.

 

That’s the mindset that’s led many Trumpers to view the new Pretti footage as relevant to his death. It might not prove anything about the specific circumstances of the fatal confrontation on January 24 but it does prove to them that he was a bad guy, a violent leftist agitator. Those agitators have made it difficult to enforce the law in Minneapolis, and the de-escalation that’s now under way might incentivize agitators in other parts of the country to make it difficult to enforce in those places too.

 

And so, if you want true “law and order,” what choice do you have but to condone extreme forms of deterring left-wing resistance, up to and including sporadic displays of violence pour encourager les autres? If you want to discourage illegal immigration, what more effective way is there than a campaign of intimidation carried out haphazardly by unaccountable masked goons? The process may be rough, sure, but rough justice is still justice. It’s the outcome that’s important.

 

More than that: As a matter of postliberal morality, the January 13 footage “proves” that Pretti’s death on January 24 was warranted after all. “Any ‘conservative’ who folded on this case and bought the left wing narrative should never be trusted or taken seriously again,” a triumphant Matt Walsh sneered on Wednesday as video of the earlier confrontation circulated, which is moronic under the liberal definition of “law and order” but comprehensible under its postliberal counterpart. Discovering that Pretti was a “bad guy” has retroactively transformed what looked like indefensible police brutality, which may have tugged at what little is left of the MAGA conscience, into justifiable homicide.

 

All of this explains why postliberals palpably don’t give a rip about the federal government’s dubiously legal and blatantly illegal conduct. Yesterday, as folks like Walsh were claiming vindication from the January 13 video, a federal judge in Minnesota issued a ruling noting that ICE has failed to comply with at least 96 court orders this month alone—a number greater than some federal agencies have flouted over their entire history, the judge noted. (How’s that for legal “nullification”?) Elsewhere, court affidavits substantiated that numerous U.S. citizens who simply witnessed Pretti’s shooting were arrested by federal officers and detained for hours afterward for reasons that are unclear.

 

No big deal. Legal process is irrelevant to postliberal “law and order.” Only outcomes matter.

 

And so we return again to the question of what outcome the president’s fans are truly seeking from fascist pageants like the one in Minneapolis. If this is really about removing as many illegal immigrants as possible, it’s strange that Homeland Security has deployed to Minnesota instead of hunting where the ducks are. It’s also strange that the White House is basing its decisions on where to send agents partly on midterm electoral politics instead of immigrant crime rates. And it’s strange that few on the MAGA right are clamoring loudly for mandatory universal E-Verify,  which would kill foreigners’ economic incentive to enter the United States but lacks the authoritarian allure of watching people be brutalized by the secret police on American streets.

 

Mass deportation of illegal immigrants isn’t actually the endgame of “law and order” for postliberals. Their highest aspiration is terrorizing their cultural enemies into capitulating to their broader vision for the country, and those enemies are by no means limited to foreigners. “This is an inflection point—you blink now and you’re going to blink forever. You bend the knee now, you’ll bend the knee forever,” Steve Bannon warned Trump on his podcast yesterday. Bannon and MAGA can tolerate illegals slipping the noose in Minneapolis; what they can’t tolerate is losing a test of wills with the left when the entire point of reelecting the president was that he would be as ruthless as needed in a second term to impose his will on them.

 

The January 13 footage of Alex Pretti’s confrontation with agents confirmed for postliberals that he was one of their cultural enemies and the January 24 footage confirmed that he was handled with appropriate ruthlessness—and instead of celebrating, Donald Trump and Tom Homan are preparing to withdraw. No wonder some Trump supporters consider it a “rug pull.” What happened to the “law and order” they were promised?

 

Electoral consequences.

 

That’s what I meant when I said earlier that the president is trapped between two competing definitions of the term. His diehard fans, like Bannon and Walsh, believed he would act in accordance with their definition. And he did, until now, when suddenly he’s pivoting to the more traditional definition.

 

I don’t know how else to explain it except by pointing to the polling. Trump spent his first year apparently believing that he was bulletproof on immigration because of his success in ending the Biden border disaster. The public was durably and irreversibly behind him on the issue, he may have assumed, and so he felt free to indulge his base by executing Stephen Miller’s darkest enforcement fantasies.

 

This week was his rude awakening that, thanks to ICE, his best issue has become a liability. According to Politico, Democratic internal polling finds “not only a growing number of likely voters who disapprove of ICE, but also a majority in favor of Democrats’ strategy of demands for reform even if it means a partial government shutdown, with 54 percent also saying they would blame the GOP and Trump for the shutdown and not accepting ICE reforms.”

 

Trump is on the brink of losing his second game of shutdown “chicken” in four months and his party faces being crushed in the midterms because of it. I continue not to understand why he cares about losing the House—getting impeached twice didn’t matter in 2024—but he does seem to care. If he wants to reduce the electoral salience of renegade immigration enforcement before November, he has no choice but to start shifting now from a Walsh-ian notion of “law and order” to a more Homan-esque one.

 

A Dispatch colleague even speculated this morning that the White House might end up removing ICE from hostile blue states and deploying them to more cooperative red ones like Texas and Florida (i.e. where illegals actually live, unlike Minnesota). Trump could put big deportation numbers on the board that way, which might lead swing voters to give his enforcement agenda a second look. Postliberals would hate it, though: What was the point of reelecting Donald Trump if he’s going to deport foreigners without owning the libs?

 

Eventually, I suspect, we’ll hear empty threats in right-wing chud media about boycotting the midterms over the president’s climbdown. It’ll be pure crapola—these people would crawl through fire to vote against Democrats—but it will serve the useful purpose of pre-spinning any blue wave that ensues to populists’ advantage. Never mind the thousand polls showing that Americans disapprove of ICE’s conduct: The results prove that the people want more ruthlessness. If only the president had droned protesters in Minneapolis like we wanted, Republicans would have won in a rout.

 

Oh well. They’ll still have the January 13 footage of Alex Pretti to console them, the smoking gun that proves he was an aggressor and therefore that the men who shot him in the back were, in a way, only acting in self-defense. The right was the real victim in that incident, you see. It always is.