DHS Again Promises a Thorough Investigation of a Fatal Shooting After Prejudging the Outcome
"The victims are the Border Patrol agents" who killed Alex Pretti, says one DHS official, who previously claimed Pretti wanted to "massacre law enforcement."
Hours after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot 37-year-old Minneapolis protester Renee Good on January 7, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Good was engaged in "domestic terrorism" because she had "weaponize[d] her vehicle" and "attempted to run a law enforcement officer over." Noem averred that Good therefore posed a potentially deadly threat to Ross, "the other officers around him," and the general public, which she said justified Ross' "defensive shots."
After U.S. Border Patrol agents fatally shot 37-year-old Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti on Saturday, Noem likewise portrayed that use of deadly force as obviously justified. "This individual went and impeded their law enforcement operations, attacked those officers, had a weapon on him, and [had] dozens of rounds of ammunition" in two magazines, she said. Pretti, Noem claimed, was "wishing to inflict harm on these officers" by "brandishing [a gun] like that and impeding their work that they were doing." Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino drew a similar picture, saying "this looks like a situation where the individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."
In both cases, video evidence immediately contradicted what Noem and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials had said. The footage suggested that Good was not deliberately trying to run Ross down and that Pretti—an ICU nurse who, like Good, was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record—neither assaulted Border Patrol agents nor threatened them with his handgun, which he was licensed to carry. And in both cases, DHS promised a thorough internal investigation, the outcome of which Noem had already prejudged.
These misleading DHS claims are part of a persistent pattern. "In case after case" across the country, Reason's C.J. Ciaramella noted in October, DHS has shown "a willingness to put false information out to the public and never correct it." Those self-justifying statements suggest that DHS cannot be trusted to tell the truth about its employees' use of force, let alone to ascertain whether it was justified based on a careful and dispassionate consideration of the circumstances.
Bovino illustrated the department's habitual obfuscation and slipperiness during an interview with CNN's Dana Bash on Sunday. Although Noem asserted that Pretti was "brandishing" his pistol, Bash noted, "multiple angles of this incident show him holding up a cell phone and recording it, not a gun." Did Pretti "at any point pull out his weapon?" she asked.
Bovino did not want to answer that question, and the reason seems clear. The videos indicate that the Border Patrol agents did not see the gun until after they tackled Pretti, who apparently provoked their ire by intervening to help a protester whom they had pepper-sprayed and pushed to the ground. After the agents grab and restrain Pretti, someone can be heard saying "gun, gun, gun," and an agent can be seen removing what looks like the pistol that DHS says Pretti was carrying.
Only then do the agents shoot Pretti. They first shoot him in the back at close range as he is kneeling, then fire more rounds into his prone body after he collapses on the pavement. The New York Times reports that "at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds."
In the face of that evidence, Bovino neither confirmed nor denied his boss's claim that Pretti was "brandishing" a gun. Instead he said, "We do know that the suspect did bring a weapon, a loaded 9-millimeter, high-capacity handgun, to a riot." That answer included several tendentious labels, describing Pretti as "the suspect," a handgun with a standard magazine as "high capacity," and the situation the agents faced as "a riot." But it notably did not include any clarification of whether Pretti ever drew the gun or tried to do so.
Bash asked whether it was reasonable to view Pretti as a threat simply because he was exercising "his Second Amendment right" to bear arms in compliance with state and local law. "We respect that Second Amendment right," Bovino replied, but "those rights don't count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct, and impede law enforcement officers, and most especially when you mean to do that beforehand."
Bash wondered how Bovino knew that was Pretti's intent. "When you show up to an active crime scene, don't leave the crime scene, and you're armed," he said, "the decision-making process for that individual doesn't seem to be very good."
According to Bovino, the Border Patrol agents were in the process of detaining "a violent illegal alien" when Pretti showed up. That arrest had attracted the attention of several protesters. Pretti, who initially used his cellphone to record the agents' interaction with those people, evidently was moved to intervene when the agents began wielding their pepper spray. He can be seen holding his cellphone in one hand while trying to block the pepper spray with the other.
As Bovino sees it, Pretti thereby was "actively impeding and assaulting law enforcement." He cited 18 USC 111, which applies to someone who "forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes with" federal law enforcement officers who are engaged in "the performance of official duties." But the videos do not show Pretti "forcibly" doing anything, let alone "assaulting law enforcement," before the agents decide to take him down.
"Where did he assault [a] federal officer in any of the video that you have seen?" Bash asked. "It looked to us from every angle, sir, that he was approached by them when he was helping another individual who was pushed down. What evidence do you have that he was assaulting any law enforcement?"
Again, Bovino did not want to answer the question. "Dana, we don't need a suspect's help in an active law enforcement scene," he said. "We don't need his help. We didn't ask his help."
Noting that Bovino kept describing Pretti as a "suspect," Bash asked, "What [was] he suspected of?" Bovino implied that the suspected offense was a violation of 18 USC 111. "He knew that was an active law enforcement scene, especially when the officers approached him and it was very evident he did not need to be where he was," Bovino said. "And he decided on his own to stay there."
Even if Pretti's nonviolent conduct could be interpreted as "forcibly" impeding federal law enforcement, that is a far cry from Bovino's statement on Saturday that "this looks like a situation where the individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." Bash asked Bovino to explain the basis for that statement.
"What evidence do you have that he wanted to massacre law enforcement?" Bash wondered. "It doesn't look anything like he's trying to massacre law enforcement. In fact, he was filming, and then it looked like he was trying to help another individual there who was pushed down by law enforcement, and then they went after him."
Once again, Bovino dodged the question. "I believe that the fantastic training that our law enforcement partners have, the fact that they're highly trained, prevented any specific shootings of law enforcement," he said. Was Pretti "simply walking by and just happened to walk into a law enforcement situation," he wondered, "or was he there for a reason?"
The reason, Bovino suggested, might have been that Pretti had been swayed by anti-DHS rhetoric "trying to portray Border Patrol agents and ICE agents as Gestapo, Nazi, and many other words." In light of what DHS critics such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey had been saying, Bovino suggested, it was reasonable to ask, "Did this individual fall victim, as many others have, to that type of heated rhetoric?"
Bovino's assertion that Pretti seemed to be bent on mass murder, in other words, was based on nothing but sheer speculation, combined with the fact that Pretti was legally armed—a fact that the Border Patrol agents did not discover until after they tackled him. That leap gives you a sense of how reckless DHS officials can be when they try to justify the use of deadly force.
Whatever Pretti's intent, Bovino implied, he had it coming because he had made bad choices. If you want to stay alive, he said, you should not "inject yourself knowingly beforehand into a law enforcement situation."
When Bash observed that "it feels as though in some ways you're blaming the victim here," Bovino corrected her: "The victims are the Border Patrol agents. I'm not blaming the Border Patrol agents. The victim[s] are the Border Patrol agents. The suspect put himself in that situation. The victims are the Border Patrol agents there."
Even as he repeatedly asserted that the agents did nothing wrong and that the blame for Pretti's death falls squarely on him, Bovino also repeatedly cautioned against making premature judgments based on the evidence available so far. "Let's don't freeze-frame adjudicate this now," he said. "That's why we have investigators. That's why we have an investigation that is going to answer those questions. How many shots were fired? Who fired shots?…Where were the guns located? All those questions are going to be answered in the investigation."
As in the Good case, however, we cannot have any confidence that an internal investigation by the same department that has preemptively exonerated its employees will clarify the circumstances that led to the use of lethal force. "There must be a thorough and impartial investigation into yesterday's Minneapolis shooting, which is the basic standard that law enforcement and the American people expect following any officer-involved shooting," Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.) said in an X post on Sunday. "For this specific incident, that requires cooperation and transparency between federal, state, and local law enforcement. Any administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins [is] doing an incredible disservice to the nation and to President Trump's legacy."
On Saturday night, U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud, a Trump appointee, issued a temporary restraining order barring DHS from "destroying or altering evidence" related to Pretti's death, including "evidence that Defendants and those working on their behalf removed from the scene and/or evidence that Defendants have taken into their exclusive custody." Tostrud was responding to a request from Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which was cut out of the Good investigation and complains that DHS likewise prevented it from examining the scene of the Pretti shooting. The need for such an order speaks volumes about the trustworthiness of a department that has consistently sacrificed transparency and accountability on the altar of self-justification.
