The Man Who Brought His Phone to a Protest

Alex Jeffrey Pretti was a nurse. He worked in the ICU. He held a legal permit to carry a firearm. On January 25th, he went to observe an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis and was shot dead by a Border Patrol agent.

Within hours, his body became a rhetorical device. To some, he proved the danger of "far-left agitators." To others, he demonstrated federal overreach. Officials debated whether he carried a gun or just his phone. Politicians argued over whether agents were "untrained" or protesters were "impeding law enforcement."

But somewhere in the fog of engineered narratives and viral videos, we lost the man himself. We don't know what Alex Pretti believed about immigration policy. We don't know if he went to that street corner out of conviction, curiosity, or compassion. We know only that he's gone, and that his absence has been swallowed by the argument his death created.

This is the particular cruelty of our moment: we cannot let the dead simply be mourned. We need them to prove our point. And in doing so, we practice a kind of resurrection in reverse—turning people back into abstractions, stripping away their humanity for parts we can use.

Christianity asks us to see the image of God in every person. Not the political utility. Not the symbolic value. The irreducible, irreplaceable person. When we lose that capacity—when we can look at a body and see only ammunition—we have lost something we may not get back.