Structural Impunity: How US Immigration Enforcement Culture and DOJ Inertia Enable Lethal Violence Against Civilians
Original framing: “‘Shameful’: Alex Pretti parents accuse Trump officials of shielding son’s killers” — The Guardian - World
The Pretti case is part of a long history of US state violence against civilians, particularly in immigration contexts, dating back to the 19th-century US-Mexico wars and the forced removals of Indigenous peoples. The 1999 Amado Serdán shooting, where a Mexican national was killed by US agents and the killers were never held accountable, sets a direct precedent for the current impunity. Similarly, the 2010 Sergio Hernandez case—where a 16-year-old was killed by Border Patrol agents and no one was convicted—demonstrates how these patterns persist across decades. The DOJ’s consistent failure to investigate or prosecute such cases reflects a structural refusal to address historical injustices, treating each incident as an anomaly rather than a symptom of systemic racism.
The Pretti case is not an isolated tragedy but a symptom of a deeply entrenched system where the DOJ’s structural biases, qualified immunity protections, and the militarization of immigration enforcement converge to enable lethal violence against civilians—particularly marginalized communities.
Historical precedents like the Amado Serdán shooting and the Sergio Hernandez case reveal how these patterns persist across decades, demonstrating that the problem is not individual malfeasance but a feature of institutional design. The mainstream narrative’s focus on the Pretti family’s individual grief obscures the broader context of racialized state violence, where the lives of non-white civilians are systematically devalued, and justice systems are structured to protect enforcement agents rather than the public. Solutions must address this systemic impunity through legal reforms (like abolishing qualified immunity), community-led safety initiatives, and transnational accountability mechanisms, all while centering the voices of Indigenous and Latinx communities who have long documented these patterns of harm. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of a system that claims to seek justice while simultaneously shielding its perpetrators, forcing us to confront the deeper question: What would justice look like if the DOJ were not the arbiter but the accused?