The bottom line
January 24, 2026. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA nurse in Minneapolis, was shot and killed by two federal agents. DHS immediately called it self-defense and said he attacked officers with a 9mm handgun. Multiple video analyses from Bellingcat, FactCheck.org, and CNN appear to contradict significant parts of that account. And I am here to tell you something that I know will frustrate some of you: I am not sure what happened. That’s the correct position to hold right now, and I’m going to explain why.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What the footage actually shows
The footage circulating on January 24th is, to put it plainly, not good enough to reach a definitive conclusion. There are multiple angles. None of them are clean. The confrontation happens fast, partially obscured, surrounded by movement. In the most-shared clip, you can see agents take a man to the ground, there is significant resistance, something gets thrown or dropped, and shots ring out. That is genuinely most of what you can determine from the footage without enhancement.
A slower version of one clip was being shared widely with conservative commentators pointing to what they said was a firearm being drawn. I looked at it. I looked at it a lot. The area where the gun was allegedly visible is obscured. I cannot make that confirmation. I’m not saying the gun wasn’t there. I’m saying the footage doesn’t prove it to me at the quality I’m seeing it.
What CNN’s video analysis found is more specific and more troubling. Their analysis appears to show a federal agent reaching into the scrum of officers surrounding Pretti and retrieving a firearm before the shots were fired. That would be consistent with DHS’s claim that Pretti had a gun on him. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed to CBS News that Pretti did hold a valid carry permit for that handgun. But a permit to carry is not the same as brandishing a weapon at federal agents, and the footage does not clearly show Pretti raising the weapon, pointing it at agents, or taking any action with it prior to being shot.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stated publicly that Pretti “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” That is an extraordinary claim. The evidence available does not support it.
The context that doesn’t change the analysis
Pretti had attended earlier protests in Minneapolis following the January 7th shooting of Renée Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. A recording from a January 13th protest showed Pretti cursing at federal agents, spitting at them, and breaking a taillight on their vehicle. That conduct is relevant to understanding who Pretti was in these situations. It is not relevant to whether the January 24th shooting was legally justified.
You do not get to shoot someone for cursing at you two weeks ago. Use of deadly force is evaluated in the moment, on the specific facts of the specific encounter. Pretti’s prior behavior at protests might matter in a civil suit. It does not change the use-of-force calculus on January 24th, and anyone telling you it does is substituting tribalism for analysis.
Pretti was filming agents with his phone. He stepped between an agent and a woman the agent had shoved to the ground. He was pepper-sprayed. He was then wrestled to the ground with roughly six agents involved in the takedown. If a gun was in play at that point, it was apparently recovered by an agent during the scrum. What happened in the next few seconds is where the dispute is, and that is exactly where the footage is least clear.
Why both sides got this wrong immediately
Within hours of the shooting, the political machinery was in motion. On the left, Pretti became a martyr, a peaceful protester gunned down for opposing ICE. On the right, he was a violent aggressor who charged armed federal agents and got exactly what he had coming. Neither of those framings is accurate based on what I can actually see.
The left ignored the gun issue entirely in most of its initial coverage. Pretti legally carried a firearm. That is a fact that matters and it was being memory-holed in early reports. The right circled the wagons around the agents before any serious analysis had been done. Several commentators I generally agree with on Second Amendment issues were confidently calling it a clean shoot before the CNN video analysis existed. That’s not analysis. That’s loyalty signaling.
I’m conservative. I support aggressive immigration enforcement. I think ICE serves a critical function and I believe the protest movement surrounding Operation Metro Surge has been largely dishonest about what that operation was. None of that means I have to pretend federal agents are incapable of bad shoots. They are people. Some of them will make mistakes, and some of those mistakes will be criminal. The standard for deadly force does not change based on the political environment the officer is operating in.
What a legitimate standard looks like
Under Tennessee v. Garner (1985) and Graham v. Connor (1989), the Supreme Court established that deadly force by law enforcement is only lawful when an officer has probable cause to believe a suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others. The reasonableness standard in Graham is evaluated from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, not with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. That standard applies to federal agents.
The question is whether, at the moment the shots were fired, a reasonable agent in that position would have believed deadly force was necessary to prevent death or serious injury. If Pretti had the gun in his hand and was raising it, yes. If an agent had already disarmed him and he was being held down by six people, the calculus is very different. The footage does not clearly resolve which of those is true.
DOJ’s Civil Rights Division opened an investigation into the shooting. ProPublica identified the two agents as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and CBP officer Raymundo Gutierrez, both placed on administrative leave. That process should run. It exists for exactly this kind of situation, and I have no particular reason to assume it will be corrupted, nor do I have particular reason to assume it will be entirely honest.
Why it matters that we can say “I don’t know”
One of my biggest frustrations with the current political moment is this: the expectation that you have a fully formed, confident opinion within an hour of a shooting. It is treated as a failure of loyalty if you don’t immediately validate your team’s narrative. That is genuinely dangerous.
The reflexive conservative response to police-involved shootings is a reaction to what happened during the BLM years, when any officer-involved death was immediately and confidently called murder before investigations concluded. That overcorrection was understandable as a reaction. It is not defensible as a practice. The same behavior in reverse, the presumption of full justification for any federal agent who shoots anyone while executing a politically popular mission, is just as intellectually bankrupt.
Two things are simultaneously true right now. Federal immigration enforcement is a legitimate government function. Federal agents are not immune from the use-of-force standards that govern every law enforcement officer in this country. Those two things do not contradict each other.
I also think about the Second Amendment dimension here. Pretti legally carried a firearm. He had a permit. The presence of a legally carried gun appears to have become a factor in the sequence of events that led to his death. If we’re going to have any intellectually consistent position on armed civilians and their interactions with law enforcement, it has to apply regardless of the political identity of the person carrying the gun or the agency involved in the encounter. A legal carry permit holder who was not clearly brandishing a weapon deserves the same analysis you would apply to any other person in that situation.
The investigation is what matters now
I have watched every piece of footage available as of January 24th. I’ve watched the slow-motion clips. I’ve studied the angles. My genuine conclusion is that the footage is insufficient to make a confident determination about whether this was a justified shooting. Investigators with access to body camera footage, CCTV from multiple angles, ballistics analysis, and agent testimony are in a better position to make that determination than I am watching grainy clips on my phone.
The ABC News timeline and the Star Tribune fact-check both found that multiple specific DHS claims do not match what the video shows. That is a serious problem for the government’s account and it warrants real scrutiny. It also does not automatically mean the shooting was unjustified, because what video does not show is not the same as evidence that something did not happen.
The DOJ Civil Rights investigation needs to produce a transparent, thorough report with actual evidence. Until that exists, the honest position is the one I am holding: the available footage does not support DHS’s narrative in full, it does not clearly prove the shooting was unjustified, and anyone who has locked in a confident verdict in either direction is working from something other than the evidence.
I say this as someone who supports enforcement, believes in the right to carry, and thinks the federal agents conducting these operations are doing work that matters. That position is completely compatible with demanding accountability when the evidence raises legitimate questions. In fact, demanding that accountability is how you protect the legitimacy of the mission.
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