World Series winner Sean Doolittle, Super Bowl champion Doug Baldwin and college star McKenzie Forbes have strong opinions on a troubled era
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.
