The federal government owes Americans a thorough investigation and a truthful accounting of the Saturday shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti on a Minneapolis street.
When the government kills, it has an obligation to demonstrate that it has acted in the public interest. Instead, the Trump administration is once again engaged in a perversion of justice.
Mere hours after Pretti died, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, declared without evidence that Pretti had “committed an act of domestic terrorism.” Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official, offered his own assessment: “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
These unfounded judgments preempt an investigation, which the Department of Homeland Security has promised. They also appear wholly inconsistent with several videos recorded at the scene.
Those videos showed that Pretti had nothing but a phone in his hands when he was tackled by Border Patrol agents, and that he never drew the gun he was carrying (and reportedly had a license to carry). Indeed, videos seem to show that one federal agent took the gun from Pretti moments before a different agent shot him from behind. Separate analyses by various news organizations all concluded that the videos contradict the Trump administration’s description of the killing.