Posted by Alumni from The Atlantic
April 8, 2026
Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, the two federal immigration agents who killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, are Latinos from South Texas'Ochoa a Border Patrol agent, Gutierrez a Customs and Border Protection officer. Statistically speaking, this should come as no surprise. Over the past half century, Latinos went from making up a negligible fraction of Border Patrol agents to constituting half of the entire force. Latinos have been central to the work done by the Border Patrol for decades. But when ProPublica first revealed the agents' identities, back in February, I noticed progressives recoiling online at the thought that Latinos would participate in Donald Trump's mass-deportation campaign, and in the most violent way possible. That impulse, I think, stems from a still-common inclination to see Latinos as one-dimensional actors motivated primarily by their sense of solidarity with other Latinos. An accompanying, usually unspoken, belief is that feelings of ethnic solidarity... learn more