A Minnesota woman who recorded Alex Pretti’s killing by Border Patrol agents from her vehicle revealed Thursday that just prior to the incident, officers had threatened to drag her out of her vehicle and called her a misogynistic expletive, The Daily Beast reported Friday.
“Before the video even starts, several federal agents crossed the street to come over to my window to tell me that I was obstructing and they would pull me out of my car and arrest me for that,” said Minneapolis resident Kayla Schultz, speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday.
“I told them I wasn’t obstructing anything. We exchanged some not-so-nice words back and forth. The last thing that that federal agent who came up to my window said, and he screamed it at the top of his lungs, right in my face, was that, I’m a f------ c---.”
Schultz was one of several bystanders who recorded the killing of Pretti, an incident that has sparked outrage across the nation and bi-partisan calls for stricter guardrails to be placed on immigration enforcement officials.
Countless videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Border Patrol officers aggressively engaging with protesters have circulated online, with agents’ behavior so pervasive that an agency-wide memo was circulated recently, instructing agents to stop engaging with "agitators."
Schultz told Cooper that she’d never been called the derogatory term in her life, and that when threatened to produce identification, she "absolutely refused to show them.” As to why immigration enforcement agents carried themselves in such an aggressive manner, Schultz theorized that it was institutional policy for agents to sow chaos.
“I think, and we saw this in the video, that they feed off of that,” Schultz told Cooper. “They want us to be afraid. And they want us to be intimidated.”