Hundreds gather around a growing memorial site at 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue, where federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old Alex Pretti Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026 earlier in the day. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

The federal killing of a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis this month, captured from multiple angles by witnesses recording on their cell phones, kicked off a dizzying day here and in Washington. Democratic politicians and ordinary Americans reacted with a mix of outrage and incredulousness, backfooting the Trump administration as the federal operation Democratic Gov. Tim Walz has called an “occupation” approached its third month.

By late Saturday, a Trump-appointed Minnesota federal judge had ordered the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies to refrain from “destroying or altering evidence.” 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said his party would block a must-pass government appropriations package — and partially shut down the government next week — if it contained additional funding for the Homeland Security Department. 

As it did earlier this month after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed 37-year-old Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good, senior Trump administration officials worked swiftly on Saturday to blame the incident on the victim. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Alex Jeffrey Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” echoing language used by Vice President JD Vance to describe Good. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino said Pretti appeared eager to inflict “maximum damage” on the federal agents assembled near the intersection of Nicollet Avenue and 26th Street Saturday morning. Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s chief domestic policy advisor, called Pretti an “assassin.” 

Videos taken at the scene — as well as what’s known about Pretti’s background — belie the Trump administration’s claims. Pretti was a lawful gun owner with a concealed carry permit and no criminal record, according to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara. 

Moments before he was shot, Pretti could be seen on video with his phone — not a gun — recording federal officers, as has become standard practice among anti-ICE activists. 

A cell phone video shows a gaggle of Border Patrol agents wrestling him to the ground and beating him; an agent removes Pretti’s holstered gun, and Pretti appears to pose no threat to the officers surrounding him. Moments later, about 10 shots ring out. 

In a sworn affidavit filed Saturday evening, a physician who lives nearby said Pretti had no pulse when they arrived at the scene. The physician, whose name and identity were not made public, said agents did not appear to be rendering lifesaving aid and initially refused the physician’s offer to help. Pretti was pronounced dead at the scene a short time later.

Pretti’s name had emerged in media reports by early afternoon. It’s unclear whether federal, state or local officials attempted to notify his next of kin beforehand. Michael Pretti, his father, said he first learned of the shooting from an Associated Press reporter.

“I can’t get any information from anybody,” Michael Pretti told the AP, detailing a runaround with the Border Patrol, local police and area hospitals. He said the Hennepin County Medical Examiner eventually confirmed they had Alex Pretti’s body.

“We are heartbroken but also very angry,” Pretti’s parents said in a statement released later on Saturday that described Pretti as a “hero” who “wanted to make a difference in this world.”

“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting,” they said. “Please get the truth out about our son.”

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said DHS officials blocked their investigators from the crime scene even after they returned with a judicial warrant. The details of the warrant are unclear, as is the BCA’s recourse if Homeland Security continues to stymie its efforts. Federal officials said Saturday that Homeland Security — not the FBI or the Minnesota BCA — would lead the investigation.

The names of the agents involved in the shooting have not been released. Bovino told CNN on Sunday that he did not know whether more than one agent fired shots.

Minnesota officials questioned Homeland Security’s handling of the shooting’s aftermath and indicated they did not trust the department to conduct a fair investigation. 

The Minnesota Department of Corrections unveiled a new website this weekend to combat “ongoing misinformation” from Homeland Security. In a lengthy statement on Saturday, the department called into question Bovino’s initial explanation for the operation that led to Pretti’s death. The statement said the individual named by Bovino as the target of the operation did not have a significant criminal history, as Bovino alleged, and was previously released from immigration custody in 2018 — during the first Trump administration.

A recent article by Stateline, which is a States Newsroom outlet like the Reformer, found that eyewitness testimony and other evidence often contradicts DHS’ initial description of incidents involving its agents.

On Sunday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said he expects Homeland Security to heed Saturday’s court order to preserve evidence to support the state’s own investigation.

“We’ve had to threaten them with contempt a few times, but open defiance of court orders is not something that we’ve experienced,” Ellison told the Star Tribune.

Signs had emerged by Sunday that at least some elected Republicans and gun rights groups were uncomfortable with the official line that Pretti posed a clear and present danger before his death. Few elected Republicans wholeheartedly endorsed the administration’s narrative, and even some right-wing influencers who typically hew to the party line recoiled.

Republican Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who faces a primary challenge from his right this year, called Saturday’s shooting “incredibly disturbing.”

“The credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake,” he said on Sunday. “There must be a full joint federal and state investigation.”

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus also issued a statement calling for an independent investigation.

“Every peaceable Minnesotan has the right to keep and bear arms — including while attending protests, acting as observers, or exercising their First Amendment rights. These rights do not disappear when someone is lawfully armed, and they must be respected and protected at all times,” the group said.

Kevin Stitt, the outgoing Republican governor of Oklahoma, hinted in a Sunday interview with CNN that the administration should rethink its immigration enforcement efforts.

“And so what’s the goal right now? Is it to deport every single non-U.S. citizen? I don’t think that’s what Americans want,” he said. “We have to stop politicizing this. We need real solutions on immigration reform.”

Dozens of Minnesota business leaders released an open letter that gently called for a change in approach by the federal government, risking the ire of Trump, who is known for his retribution against those who oppose him. 

“With yesterday’s tragic news, we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions,” the CEOs wrote. 

Among them were top officers of Medtronic, 3M, Target and the sports franchises. This is notable because as the Reformer previously reported, the state’s biggest companies had been publicly silent until now. Business leaders, the chamber letter asserts, have been “working behind the scenes” since the federal siege began. 

Some in the Trump administration may be looking for an escape hatch, even if on their terms.  On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Minnesota could end the federal law enforcement surge if it repealed pro-immigrant “sanctuary” policies and turned over its voter rolls to the federal government. (Minnesota is not a “sanctuary state”; an effort to pass a sanctuary law the last time Democrats controlled the Legislature went nowhere.)

That Bondi made such an offer at all is notable. But it’s unlikely to lead to a resolution. On Sunday, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon brushed off the idea of providing state voter information to the federal government in a caustic statement.

“The answer to Attorney General Bondi’s request is no. Her letter is an outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota into giving the federal government private data on millions of U.S. Citizens in violation of state and federal law,” Simon said.

False claims of voter fraud have become a staple of the Trumpist political movement. A group of right-wing activists led by Mike Lindell — the pillow mogul currently running for governor as a Republican — claimed widespread voter fraud after the 2020 election. But as part of the state’s usual election auditing process, a random group of precincts in every congressional district were chosen for review, totaling roughly 440,000 votes after the 2020 election, spanning more than 200 precincts. The hand tallies were virtually identical to the machine tallies.

Local police officers stand guard as Renee Good's car is towed away after ICE officers shot and killed a woman through her car window Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026 near Portland Avenue and 34th Street. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

The Trump administration made its opinion known almost immediately after an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday: The officer acted heroically in defending himself from Renee Nicole Good, who was intent on running him over with her Honda Pilot in an act of “domestic terrorism.”

“The officer, fearing for his life and other officers around him and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training to save his own life and that of his colleagues,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a news conference in Minneapolis.

A jury might very well disagree after seeing footage of the incident, like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey who called ICE’s claim of self-defense “bullsh*t.”

But the Trump administration seems intent on blocking local prosecutors from even bringing charges against the ICE officer, who the Star Tribune identified as Jonathan Ross.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office took the unusual step soon after the shooting of ousting the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from the investigation into the killing.

The BCA typically investigates police shootings in the state, and was on the scene in south Minneapolis on Wednesday collecting evidence as part of a joint investigation with the FBI.

Then the U.S. Attorney’s Office “reversed course” and decided the investigation would be led solely by the FBI, said Drew Evans, BCA superintendent, in a statement.

“Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands,” Evans said. “As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation.”

Gov. Tim Walz during a Thursday press conference expressed doubt about the results of any investigation conducted by the federal government because Minnesota officials have been purposefully excluded.

“Now that Minnesota has been taken out of the investigation, it feels very, very difficult that we will get a fair outcome,” Walz said. “People in positions of power have already passed judgment … and told you things that are verifiably false.”

If federal investigators don’t share their findings with local prosecutors, they’ll struggle to put together a case to bring charges, said former Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Anders Folk, who brought federal charges against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd in 2020.

“I don’t know how any prosecutor could make a charging decision without facts,” Folk said. “The local authorities are going to have to figure out a way to do their own investigation if they want to be able to evaluate whether a criminal charge can be brought.”

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who has jurisdiction in Minneapolis, said in a statement on Thursday that her office is searching for a way for a state level investigation to continue.

“If the FBI is the sole investigative agency, the state will not receive the investigative findings, and our community may never learn about its contents,” Moriarty said in a statement.

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who will make charging decisions based on the FBI investigation, pointed the Reformer to a post on X when asked if she has commented on the case and if she believes the use of force was justified.

“Obstructing, impeding, or attacking federal law enforcement is a federal crime. So is damaging federal property. If you cross that red line, you will be arrested and prosecuted. Do not test our resolve,” the post says.

Who might do a local investigation is unclear. Folk, who is now running for Hennepin County attorney, said he’s not aware of any cases of officers shooting someone in Minnesota in which the BCA was not involved.

“They are the law enforcement organization that we as Minnesotans look to do this kind of investigative work,” Folk said.

If the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office is able to complete a criminal investigation and file charges, they face another difficult task: convincing a federal judge that the ICE officer was not acting reasonably in carrying out his lawful federal duties.

If state charges are filed, the officer will likely ask to move his case to federal court to assert immunity under what’s known as the Supremacy Clause, which protects federal officials from state criminal prosecution if they are reasonably carrying out their duties. Attorneys with the Department of Justice may then assist with his defense.

Whether the officer’s actions are deemed reasonable could hinge on a range of facts from his training to his duties to his subjective beliefs and the U.S. Supreme Court has provided only minimal guidance on how to answer that question, according to Bryna Godar, a staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Still, she emphasized local prosecutors can and have brought charges against federal officials.

“The baseline understanding here is that states can prosecute federal officials when they violate state criminal laws,” Godar said.

If state prosecutors convince a federal judge the officer’s actions were not reasonable, they could continue bringing the case in federal court on state crimes. That’s significant because a conviction for a state crime cannot not be pardoned by the president.

Godar points in a recent article to cases going back to antebellum, when free states charged U.S. marshals for capturing enslaved people under the Fugitive Slave Act. During the Prohibition Era, local prosecutors charged federal officers for using excessive force in shutting down distilleries.

More recently, local prosecutors in Idaho brought a charge of involuntary manslaughter against an FBI sniper who shot and killed an unarmed woman during the siege on Ruby Ridge in 1992. A divided federal appeals court ruled that the case could proceed because of disputed facts over whether the agent acted “reasonably.”

“Where we see those state prosecutions going ahead is where the use of force is deemed unreasonable or excessive or unlawful,” Godar said.

But that case may offer a cautionary tale for Minnesota: The case wasn’t allowed to proceed until 2001, nearly a decade later. Then the case was dropped by the newly elected prosecutor.

Good’s killing was the ninth shooting by an immigration officer in just the past four months and at least the second killing, with all of them involving firing at people in vehicles, according to a New York Times report. On Thursday, federal agents shot two more people in Portland, Ore.

In each of the recent ICE shootings, the government has claimed the officer was acting in self-defense.

A 2024 investigation by The Trace and Business Insider found in 23 fatal shootings by ICE officers from 2015 to 2021, no officers were indicted.

Minnesota prosecutors have won convictions in recent years against officers for killing people in the line of duty — Chauvin, Kim Potter and Mohamed Noor — but they are rare and juries are generally reluctant to convict.

Yet even if a conviction seems unlikely, filing charges allows local prosecutors to register a strong protest against ICE’s aggressive enforcement actions in the state and communicate that officers may not operate with impunity. Not charging would be an admission that federal agents are immune from local accountability as the Trump administration pushes for mass deportation.

Folk said a transparent investigation with clear standards is also important for the public’s faith in the justice system.

“Minnesota has seen firsthand how important it is to do these high-profile investigations the right way,” Folk said. “We deserve a good, thorough investigation, free of any kind of influence.”

Judge Hannah Dugan leaves court in her federal trial, where she was convicted of a felony for obstructing immigration officers. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

According to the Eastern District of Wisconsin’s Interim U.S. Attorney Brad Schimel, freshly appointed to his position by President Donald Trump, the federal trial of Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan had nothing to do with politics. “There’s not a political aspect to it,” Schimel told reporters after Dugan’s felony conviction on charges she obstructed U.S. immigration agents as they tried to make an arrest inside the Milwaukee courthouse. “We weren’t trying to make an example out of anyone,” Schimel said. “This was necessary to hold Judge Dugan accountable because of the actions she took.”

Schimel didn’t say whether Dugan’s very public arrest and perp walk through the courthouse was also necessary, along with the social media posts by Trump’s FBI director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, crowing about the arrest and sharing photos of Dugan in handcuffs. 

There is no doubt that the Dugan case was highly political from the start. 

As a coalition of democracy and civic organizations in Wisconsin declared in a statement after the verdict, Dugan’s prosecution threatens the integrity of our justice system and “sends a troubling message about the consequences faced by judges who act to protect due process in their courtrooms.”

But Schimel is right about one thing: Dugan’s trial this week was mainly about “a single day — a single bad day — in a public courthouse.”

That narrow focus helped the prosecution win a conviction in a confusing mixed verdict. The jury found Dugan not guilty of a misdemeanor offense for concealing Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, the defendant she led out a side door while immigration agents waited near the main door of her courtroom to arrest him. At the same time, the jury found Dugan guilty of the more serious charge of obstructing the agents in their effort to make the arrest. The two charges are based on some of the same elements, and Dugan’s defense attorneys are now asking that her conviction be overturned on that basis.

An observer watching the trial from afar with no inside knowledge of the defense strategy might wonder why Dugan’s defense team didn’t enter a guilty plea on the misdemeanor charge and then strongly contest the felony obstruction charge as an outrageous overreach in a heavily politicized prosecution. That might have led to a more favorable mixed verdict, in which the jury found that Dugan was probably guilty of something, but that it did not rise to the level of a felony with a potential penalty of five years in prison.

I’m no expert, but daily reports from the trial this week gave me the strong impression that things weren’t going well for Dugan as long as witnesses and lawyers focused on a blow-by-blow account of the events of April 18. Witness testimony described an agitated Dugan, whose colleague, Judge Kristela Cervera, testified — damagingly —  that she was uncomfortable with how Dugan managed the federal agents she was outraged to find hanging around outside her courtroom. 

It’s not surprising that the jury agreed with the prosecution that Dugan was not cooperative and that she wanted to get Flores-Ruiz out of her courtroom in a way that made an end-run around the unprecedented meddling of federal immigration enforcement inside the courthouse. Like other judges and courthouse staff, she was upset about the disruption caused by ICE agents stalking people who showed up to court.

But, as Dean Strang, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and a long-time Wisconsin criminal defense lawyer, told me in April just before he joined the defense team and stopped talking about the case to the press, “Whatever you think of the actual conduct the complaint alleges, there is a real question about whether there’s even arguably any federal crime here.” 

The government’s behavior was “extraordinarily atypical” for a nonviolent, non-drug charge involving someone who is not a flight risk, Strang added.

The handcuffs, the public arrest at Dugan’s workplace, the media circus — none of it was normal, or justified. When Bondi and Patel began posting pictures of Dugan in handcuffs on social media to brag about it, “what is it they are trying to do?” Strang asked. His conclusion: “Humiliate and terrify, not just her but every other judge in the country.”

The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Voces de la Frontera, and Common Cause-Wisconsin agree with that assessment, writing in their statement reacting to the conviction that Dugan’s felony conviction threatens the integrity of our justice system as a whole, and undermines the functioning of the courts by scaring away defendants, witnesses and plaintiffs who are afraid they might be arrested if they show up to participate in legal proceedings.

But that big picture perspective was not a major feature of the defense’s closing arguments, which relied heavily on raising reasonable doubt about Dugan’s intentions and her actions during a stressful and chaotic day.

That’s frustrating because, contrary to Schimel’s assertions, the big picture, not the events of “a single bad day” is what was actually at stake in this case.

One of the most distressing aspects of the Dugan trial was the prosecution’s through-the-looking-glass invocation of the rule of law and the integrity of the courts.

The federal agents called to the stand, the prosecutors in the courtroom, and Schimel, in his summary of the case, made a big point about the “safety” of law enforcement officers. 

Repeatedly, we heard that immigration agents prefer to make arrests inside courthouses because they provide a “safe” environment in which to operate. 

In his comments on the verdict, Schimel emphasized that Dugan jeopardized the safety of federal officers by causing them to arrest Flores-Ruiz on the street instead of inside the courthouse: “The defendant’s actions provided an opportunity for a wanted subject to flee outside of that secure courthouse environment,” Schimel said.

This upside-down view of safety has become a regular MAGA talking point, with Republicans claiming that when citizens demand that masked agents identify themselves or make videos of ICE dragging people out of their cars, they are jeopardizing the safety of law enforcement officers — as opposed to trying to protect their neighbors’ safety in the face of violent attacks by anonymous thugs. 

Churches, day care centers and peaceful suburban neighborhoods are also “safe” environments for armed, masked federal agents. But their activities there are making our communities less safe. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Brown Watzka, delivering the prosecution’s closing argument, told the jury it must draw a line against judges interfering with law enforcement, or else “there is only chaos,” and that “chaos is what the rule of law is intended to prevent.”

But chaos is what we have now, with federal agents terrorizing communities, dragging people out of courthouses and private residences, deporting them without due process and punishing those who stand in their way in an attempt to defend civil society.

The real questions raised by Dugan’s case are whether we believe the “safety” of the agents making those dubious arrests matters more than the safety of our communities, and whether we want the courts to be able to regulate the conduct in their own courthouses as a check on the government’s exercise of raw power.