Thuggish Pretti killing wasn’t collateral damage. It was Trump reality TV | Opinion
After being thrown out of Minnesota by Donald Trump in the wake of the murderous Alex Pretti shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is probably mad enough to shoot another dog. Americans should be equally mad at Trump, who has treated getting a grip on the undocumented immigrant problem in the United States more like reality TV than tough policy.
If Trump wanted to remove the millions of undocumented immigrants Joe Biden let in when he lost control of the border, a far heavier lift than merely deporting those accused and convicted of crimes, he has two important levers at hand that would get the job done: taxes and restrictions on remittances and strict requirements for all businesses to use the federal E-Verify system before hiring anyone.
The reason Trump doesn’t use them is that they would make tens of thousands of businesses owners and executives, disproportionately Republican voters, barking mad.
Make sending money home expensive
While remittances drain between $100 billion and $200 billion from the U.S. economy when migrants send it home, that is big business for the financial institutions that process the transfers, with fees averaging over 6%.
If Trump wanted them to stop, he would get Congress to pass confiscatory taxes on the practice taking for federal coffers 20%, 30% or even 60% of the transfer. Once migrants discovered that earning money here to support families at home was really expensive, some would voluntarily return home, where their earnings wouldn’t be taxed so heavily.
What’s great about a remittance tax is that it even takes a bite out of the earnings of undocumented migrants who work illegally off the books, often paid in cash. That makes up a big part of the $2.5 trillion U.S. shadow economy that escapes federal notice and, thus, taxation.
And I happen to know we can do it because the One Big Beautiful Bill Trump is so proud of included a loose 1% tax on remittances as a pilot effort to get a better understanding of just how much money flows out of the U.S. in such ways, which I think is significantly underestimated. It went into effect this month, though it has significant loopholes.
We could skip the exploration effort and just impose a much bigger tax now.
E-Verify, violation of US immigration law
E-Verify takes a different approach. Right now, for most jobs, the check of your right to work in the United States is done on the honor system. Businesses ask new employees to fill out the federal I-9 form, which requires you to provide documentation of your right to work – for instance, a U.S. birth certificate or a passport show you are a citizen. Businesses keep the documentation on hand in case they are ever inspected.
E-Verify takes that effort up a notch by checking the information workers report against databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. You can’t start your job until the feds double-check your right to work.
That would put an end to two problems with the current honor system. Right now, there is little scrutiny of documentation to see if it is fraudulent, and the federal government has insufficient capacity to make sure that employers are being honest.
In just one bust a few months back not too far up the Missouri River from Kansas City, the feds found more than 100 illegal workers at a meatpacking plant, all of them with properly filled out I-9 forms on files, but with fraudulent or stolen documentation to back them up.
That’s why businesses would be so furious if they had to use E-Verify. Important industries rely on their ability to fudge the I-9 and overlook the wholesale violation of U.S. immigration law. You know who they are: agriculture, landscaping, construction, anything that requires a lot of hands and where the pay is lower.
As much as Trump has changed the Republican Party from a traditionalist, free-market business party into a populist blue-collar party, some things haven’t changed. Republicans depend on the votes of businessmen from both small and big firms to deliver their votes on election day. They aren’t going to irritate those voters if they can avoid it.
So, even though wide use of E-Verify would drive suddenly-jobless undocumented immigrants from our shores by the thousands, we’re not going to do it.
Besides, Trump enjoys the tough-guy spectacle of street-level enforcement. It is part of the Trump administration’s reality TV show, just as the Department of War antics in the Caribbean, the Make American Healthy Again guys and the daily televised debasement of Republican politicians forced to repeat administration lies all are.
The fact that there are humane ways to push undocumented immigrants out of our country reveals what is truly awful about Trump. The thuggish violence, the harassment of U.S. citizens and even the killings on the street aren’t the necessary collateral damage from doing a tough job — they are the sickening spectacle chosen by our boorish president. A decent man wouldn’t even treat dogs this way.
David Mastio is a national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published January 28, 2026 at 6:08 AM with the headline "Thuggish Pretti killing wasn’t collateral damage. It was Trump reality TV | Opinion."
