This stabilized version is devastating to watch, because you can see the killer watch his colleague pull the firearm off of Alex, then look back him and start shooting. He waited until Alex was unarmed to murder him and should be in cuffs tonight. https://t.co/eDi3dyKJLI
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 25, 2026
Tapper plays Noem’s words over the video of the shooting and wow, is it damming. https://t.co/hfCtmTFvtR
— Rebecca Katz (@RebeccaKKatz) January 25, 2026
Devon Lum and Haley Willis at NYT:
Videos on social media that were verified by The New York Times appear to contradict the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the fatal shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday morning.
The Department of Homeland Security said the episode began after a man “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun” and they tried to disarm him. The statement did not specify whether the gun was in the man’s hands or merely on his body.
Footage shows Mr. Pretti was clearly holding a phone, not a gun, before the agents took him to the ground and shot him.
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:
If this were all that had happened it would have been bad enough. But it got worse.
At least some of the DHS agents involved in the killing attempted to leave the scene.
When local law enforcement arrived to begin an investigation, the DHS agents attempted to send them away and deny them access to the crime scene.
Someone—presumably within DHS—leaked to Fox that Pretti had a gun.
DHS put out a statement (repeated by Border Patrol official Greg Bovino in his press conference) claiming that “an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. . . . The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. . . . Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. . . . The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
These statements seem to be lies.
According to local law enforcement, Pretti had a concealed-carry permit and so was legally allowed to possess a firearm in public.
There is no evidence to suggest that Pretti brandished—or even touched—his weapon.
Instead, the available video evidence shows him holding his phone in front of him, in his right hand, and his left hand empty before being pepper-sprayed while attempting to help a fellow observer.
The deputy White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin.” In fact, Pretti was a registered nurse working in intensive care at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.
So the government didn’t just use masked, armed, unidentified agents of the state to execute a citizen on the street, in broad daylight and in front of dozens of witnesses—it lied about the victim and what happened in the most brazen manner possible.
The government killed him. Then it smeared him.
And there is one more layer to consider: Less than three weeks ago DHS agents murdered another Minneapolis resident, Renee Nicole Good, in cold blood. And the agency’s response to that killing was not to regroup, retrain, and investigate, but to surge hundreds more of its agents into the city and deploy even more force against the city’s residents.
Which is where our obligation to witness comes in. The murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti was not a mistake, or a tragedy, or a misunderstanding. It was a choice. The president of the United States and his regime saw what its masked agents had done to Renee Good and decided to do more of it, at a larger scale.
Killing Alex Jeffrey Pretti was the Trump administration’s policy.