The parents of a man shot dead by masked immigration agents in the US city of Minneapolis on Saturday have condemned what they say are “sickening lies” by the Trump administration.
Video circulating on social media shows the 37-year-old American man being pinned to the ground by federal agents and then shot multiple times as he resists.
The man was identified by his parents as Alex Pretti, a registered nurse working in the intensive care unit at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, which serves veterans.
In a statement, his parents said they were “heartbroken but also very angry” after US president Donald Trump and his officials referred to Mr Pretti as a “gunman” who had approached US border patrol officers.
READ MORE
“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly Ice thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman Ice just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed,” the family statement said.
“Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
Two witnesses to the killing of Alex Pretti have said in sworn testimony that the 37-year-old was not brandishing a weapon when he approached federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, contradicting a claim made by Trump administration officials as they sought to cast the shooting of a prone man as an act of self-defence.
Their accounts came in sworn affidavits that were filed in federal court in Minnesota late on Saturday, just hours after Pretti’s killing, as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of Minneapolis protesters against Kristi Noem and other homeland security officials directing the immigration crackdown in the city.
One witness is a woman who filmed the clearest video of the fatal shooting; the other is a physician who lives nearby and said they were initially prevented by federal officers from rendering medical aid to the gunshot victim.
The names of both witnesses were redacted in the publicly available filings.
[ Alex Pretti shooting: Minneapolis in the aftermath - in photosOpens in new window ]
In her testimony, the woman who filmed the shooting from just behind Pretti wearing a pink coat identified herself as “a children’s entertainer who specialises in face painting”. She testified that she came to the scene on her way to work because “I’ve been involved in observing in my community, because it is so important to document what Ice is doing to my neighbours”.
The woman testified that she saw no sign of Pretti holding a gun at any point.
The second witness, a 29-year-old physician, said in their testimony that they saw the shooting from their apartment window near the scene. Before the shooting, the witness said, they could see Pretti yelling at agents, but “did not see him attack the agents or brandish a weapon of any kind”.
[ Who was Alex Pretti, the man shot dead in Minneapolis by federal agents?Opens in new window ]
US border patrol commander Greg Bovino said at a news conference that an officer with eight years of experience at Mr Bovino’s agency shot and killed Pretti.
Federal agents involved in the shooting scene have been reassigned outside of Minneapolis “for their safety”, Bovino said on Sunday.
Bovino added that they still don’t know how many shots were fired and “all agents that were involved in that scene are working, not in Minneapolis but in other locations; that’s for their safety”.
Mr Trump posted a long statement about the shooting on his Truth Social account, in part accusing the city’s mayor and the governor of “inciting insurrection”.
“The Mayor and the Governor are inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric!” he wrote.
“Instead, these sanctimonious political fools should be looking for the Billions of Dollars that has been stolen from the people of Minnesota, and the United States of America.
“LET OUR ICE PATRIOTS DO THEIR JOB! 12,000 Illegal Alien Criminals, many of them violent, have been arrested and taken out of Minnesota. If they were still there, you would see something far worse than you are witnessing today!”
On Sunday, former president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama called Pretti’s killing a “heartbreaking tragedy”.
“It 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 assault,” the couple said.
In a statement, the Obamas went on: “For weeks now, people across the country have been rightly outraged by the spectacle of masked Ice recruits and other federal agents acting with impunity and engaging in tactics that seem designed to intimidate, harass, provoke and endanger the residents of a major American city.”
They added that the Trump administration “seem eager to escalate the situation” and have tried to explain the shootings of Pretti and Renée Good without “any serious investigation - and that appe–r to be directly contradicted by video evidence”.
“This has to stop.”
The shooting of Pretti comes less than three weeks after Renee Good was fatally shot by an Ice agent in her car at demonstration elsewhere in Minneapolis on January 7th.
Pretti “wanted to help people,” said Dimitri Drekonja, chief of infectious diseases at the VA hospital and professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, who worked with him at the hospital and on a research project. “He was a super nice, super helpful guy – looked after his patients. I’m just stunned.”
Open-source experts have begun to parse the apparent video evidence online, which appears to capture the sound of an initial shot causing the agents to retreat from Pretti before one fires at him repeatedly on the ground. At least one analyst suggested that the initial video might show that Pretti had a gun taken away from him before the shots were fired.
A second, more comprehensive video of the shooting, obtained and posted online by Drop Site News, shows that Pretti appeared to come to the defence of an observer who was shoved to the ground by a federal officer. That officer then sprayed Pretti with a chemical agent, repeatedly, before tackling him to the street along with other agents.
As at least five agents surrounded Pretti on the ground, one appeared to fire a shot at him at close range, followed by a volley of 10 more shots.
At a news briefing earlier on Saturday, Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara made it a point to say Pretti lived in Minneapolis and was an American citizen.
His “only interaction that we are aware of with law enforcement has been for traffic tickets, and we believe he is a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry”, Mr O’Hara said.
Minnesota law allows citizens to obtain permits to carry handguns in public. The law does not require the concealment of those weapons.
At the news conference, Mr O’Hara also said: “Our demand today is for those federal agencies operating in our city to do so with the same discipline, humanity and integrity that effective law enforcement demands.
“We urge everyone to remain peaceful and recognise there is a lot of anger and questions around what has happened.”
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey directed comments at Mr Trump, telling him to remove the agents from the city before more Americans were hurt or killed.
Contrary to what the president has claimed about arrests and detentions being needed to take violent immigrants off the streets, Mr Frey said it was the arrest operation that was bringing the unrest.
“Just yesterday we saw 15,000 people peacefully protesting in the streets, standing up for their neighbours, not a single broken window,” he said.
“Conversely the masked militarised force and unidentified agents occupying our streets, that is what weakens our country and trust.”
“How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?”
The state’s governor Tim Walz and two US senators also called for federal agents to leave.
Mr Walz posted on X: “I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning ... This is sickening. The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.”
In a statement, assistant homeland security secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the shooting occurred at about 9.05am local time, “as ... officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis” against a person they said was present in the country illegally and wanted for assault. Ms McLaughlin’s statement said “an individual approached US border patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun”, and that “officers attempted to disarm” him.
Ms McLaughlin’s statement accused Pretti of having “resisted” and, without elaborating, said “more details on the armed struggle are forthcoming”.
“Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots,” she said. “Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.”
She added that the man later identified as Pretti also had “two magazines and no ID”.
The department distributed a photo of a handgun they said was on Pretti.
Live video of the scene after the shooting shows dozens of federal agents surrounding the scene, and a tense confrontation between hundreds of protesters who gathered in the area following the shooting as local police attempted to secure the area for crime scene investigators to move in. The agents were seen deploying what appears to be chemical irritants into the crowd. People were seen yelling at agents, honking horns and recording.
One officer responded mockingly as he walked away, telling protesters: “Boo hoo.” Agents elsewhere shoved a yelling protester into a car.
Protesters dragged rubbish bins from alleyways to block the streets, and people who gathered chanted: “Ice out now”.
Federal officers wielded batons and deployed flash bangs on the crowd.
The intersection where the shooting took place was blocked off, and border patrol agents were on the scene wielding batons.
Ms McLaughlin said that “crowd control measures were deployed for the safety of the public and law enforcement”.
She described the situation as “evolving, and more information is forthcoming”.
In a statement on Saturday afternoon, officials with the city of Minneapolis asked community members “who wish to demonstrate to continue to do so safely, and we advise staying away from the scene at this time”.
“Your right to protest is protected; however, vandalism and violence is not,” they said. “Your safety is paramount.”
On Sunday, FBI director Kash Patel suggested Pretti had broken the law by carrying the gun that he had a legal permit to carry, and provided no evidence to support the Trump administration’s claims that Pretti posed a threat to federal officers.
“You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple,” Patel said in an interview with Fox News. “You don’t have that right to break the law and incite violence.”
Assertions such as that from the administration have received fierce pushback from gun rights groups such as Gun Owners of America, which said in a statement after the shooting that “the second amendment protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting – a right the federal government must not infringe upon.” – Additional reporting Guardian/Reuters/AP
