Obama-Era Report on ICE-Related Deaths Proves How Hypocritical Hysteria Over Alex Pretti’s Death Really Is

In case America missed it, Barack Obama hypocrisy is back.

The 42nd president — the man who gave Joe Biden the platform to win the presidency five years ago — deigned to weigh in this week on the death of armed protester Alex Pretti during a confrontation with Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis.

But a report from the last year of Obama’s presidency shows how hypocritical that statement actually was.

In a post published Sunday on the social media platform X, Obama called Pretti’s death a “tragedy” that “should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under attack.”

Any needless death is a tragedy, so there’s not much of an argument with Obama on that score. (Still, there’s a case to be made that Pretti contributed a good deal to the circumstances that led to his demise.)

But what exactly are the “core values” that are under attack?

The value in law enforcement officers enforcing the law? That’s not only what they get paid taxpayer money for, the laws they’re enforcing were passed by the Congress of the United States and signed by various presidents of both parties. (That’s a fact that seems to get lost in the shuffle.)

Or maybe Obama’s statement was prompted by the fact that there was a death involved — the second death related to President Donald Trump’s illegal immigration crackdown in Minneapolis in the span of a month.

Well, here’s where things get interesting. Years before the Biden presidency launched an era of border lawlessness unprecedented in U.S. history, and caused the illegal immigration invasion Trump is cleaning up, Obama had a reputation in leftist circles as “deporter in chief.”

Over the course of Obama’s eight years in office, more than 3 million individuals were deported, according to USA Today, citing Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

The difference is that leftists in the streets are opposing Trump, where they greeted Obama’s actions with muffled moans.

Nobody tried to prevent his ICE deportations or rioted with organized criminal organizations

— Steve DeLozier (@DelozierSt39376) January 25, 2026

More to the point, on matters of life and death, an Obama-era report published by the leftist American Civil Liberties Union found that by February 2016, there had been 56 deaths of individuals in ICE custody since Obama took office in 2009. Leftists blamed the majority of the deaths on substandard medical care.

Remember the establishment media hysteria that greeted the news that more than half a hundred individuals had met their ends while in ICE’s hands during the Obama years? Probably not.

Remember the screeds branding Obama a “Nazi”? No.

Remember Obama himself grandstanding on the topic of American “core values” under assault? Of course not.

That’s because for Democrats, for leftists as a whole, and for their establishment media allies, outrage is based on politics, not principle.

Obama can issue statements with impunity, placing implicit blame on Trump for Pretti’s Jan. 24 death, as well as the Jan. 7 death of anti-ICE protester Renee Good, also in Minneapolis, when the reality is that both Good and Pretti had plenty to do with their own deaths — starting with the fact they had no business being present in the first place.

He knows as well as anyone in American politics how much the Democratic Party has the establishment media in its pocket.

He knows the hysteria surrounding Pretti’s death — and the death of Good before him — will be engineered in newsrooms around the country to cause maximum harm to Trump while minimizing its impact on any politician favored by liberal media outlets.

He knows the hypocrisy at work in American media, and he plays it like a fiddle.

Republicans and conservatives need to make sure their fellow American voters understand it, too. Or they’ll be getting played themselves.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

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