Greg Cunningham Calls Two U.S. Citizens Killed by ICE “Collateral Damage”

The GOP nominee for New Mexico’s 2nd District, who is campaigning on his roots in Albuquerque’s heavily Hispanic South Valley, says bystanders killed in ICE raids “got to go”.

WASHINGTON — Renee Good was 37. Alex Pretti was 37. Both were U.S. citizens. Both were shot dead by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in January — Good on the 7th, Pretti on the 24th. Greg Cunningham has a word for what happened to them: collateral damage.

Cunningham, the Republican nominee for New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, is building his campaign around a hometown story — a South Valley kid, born and raised in one of Albuquerque’s most heavily Hispanic communities, roughly 82% Hispanic by the numbers. But on camera, in the same weeks federal agents were killing citizens in Minneapolis, Cunningham described the people caught up in ICE operations — including bystanders who might be family or coworkers — as expendable.

“They got to go, so they are collateral damage to a system that put ICE in the position where they have to go locate this person,” Cunningham said, describing what happens when agents raid a home or workplace and find others present. “Chances are there’s going to be other people there… you’re creating a situation where there are other people now in danger.”

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A Career Built on “Finding People”

Cunningham doesn’t frame this as a regrettable side effect. He frames it as a method he knows firsthand.

“From someone that made a career out of finding people and watching people, you find them at their homes or where they lay their head, and you find them at their place of employment,” he said. “So when we do that, we are naturally — it’s self-evident. We’re going to put other people at risk.”

Asked about the deaths piling up around enforcement operations nationally — federal agents shot 14 people between September 2025 and February 2026, according to the record — Cunningham didn’t point at ICE. He pointed at the public.

“The public needs training too,” he said, adding that while people have a right to protest, they “do not have the right to actively interfere with law enforcement… and that’s what happened in both cases.”

People who show up to protest ICE, in Cunningham’s telling, aren’t exercising a constitutional right. They’re the enemy.

“I can tell you that they are anarchists. They hate America. They hate authority,” he said. “To call these things anti-ICE protest… is a misnomer… they are just professional antagonists, and they have to be dealt with individually.”

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The Assimilation Line

Cunningham has also embraced rhetoric borrowed directly from Charlie Kirk, telling one interviewer that “immigration without assimilation is an invasion” — then adding his own coda: “if you’re going to come here and you’re going to be a criminal and you don’t want to assimilate into my culture, I’m sorry, but you’re not welcome.”

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What the Record Actually Shows

Cunningham’s defense of ICE rests on a single claim: that the agency is only after criminals. The data says otherwise. As of January 5, Stateline reported 74.2% of people in ICE detention had no criminal conviction; by July, that number was still 70.6%. The Cato Institute found in November that 73% of detainees had no criminal record at all. Good and Pretti — the two citizens killed in Minneapolis — had no criminal cases either. They were shot by federal agents firing into their cars. Not by protesters.

The South Valley community Cunningham says shaped him has already lived this. Jesus Jose Carrero-Marquez, 30, was arrested in the South Valley on May 31, 2025, and hospitalized after the arrest. He was transferred to a Texas detention facility; his wife then lost contact with him entirely, and records showed he was no longer listed in custody. He’d recently been photographed at his daughter’s school graduation.

Days earlier, in the first week of March 2025, ICE swept up roughly four dozen New Mexico residents across Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Roswell. ACLU-NM called it a forced disappearance in a civil-rights complaint. ICE’s own announcement showed most of the 48 had been picked up for civil immigration violations — not crimes — despite assurances from local mayors that only people with convictions would be targeted.

That is the “collateral damage” Cunningham is talking about. Not an abstraction. Neighbors.

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