On January 24, 2026, 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and ICU nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti was shot and killed by federal Border Patrol agents during a sweeping immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. Reports indicate that Border Patrol and ICE were conducting what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) termed “Operation Metro Surge”, an incredibly costly large-scale immigration crackdown, that had already seen thousands of arrests and the earlier killing of another Minneapolis resident, Renee Good.
Whether or not anyone will ever label it this way, the effect is terrorizing: saturated enforcement in civilian neighborhoods, lethal outcomes, and an official script that treats civilian fear as acceptable collateral; this is how coercion gets normalized.
Within minutes of the shooting, DHS spokespeople and political allies framed Pretti as a “violent threat”, claiming he approached agents with a handgun and resisted disarmament. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem echoed this frame in public briefings, asserting that federal agents “acted according to their training”… the same justification invoked after other high-profile use-of-force incidents.
But that line, “acted according to their training”, that is not an explanation. It is a shield. And it tells you everything you need to know about where we are as a nation right now.
What Happened
Independent video footage from multiple angles, eyewitness testimony, shows a far more complex and disturbing picture than the official DHS narrative suggests:
- Pretti was legally licensed to carry a firearm but video clearly shows him holding a cellphone, not a gun, in the moments before he was pepper-sprayed and pinned to the ground by federal agents.
- Witnesses and family representatives say Pretti was trying to help a woman who’d been knocked down, not assault officers.
- After being wrestled to the ground, video shows an agent with a gun, allegedly pulled from Pretti’s waistband, but at no point does Pretti appear to brandish it.
- Within seconds of being pinned, agents opened fire with at least 10 shots. That is 10 shots too many for the situation at hand.
Let’s say the gun was Pretti’s; that doesn’t make it any better, because if that were true, Federal agents disarmed him, and then shot him anyway.
Local officials and family members alike condemn the federal account as misleading, even false, and have called for transparency and accountability.
When Lawful Gun Owners Can be Killed for “Noncompliance” The Problem is Bigger Than Policing
There is a deeper, more dangerous implication in cases like Alex Pretti’s that should alarm people well beyond immigration politics or law enforcement reform.
If a person who is lawfully carrying a firearm, not brandishing it, not firing it, not threatening anyone, can be killed by federal agents simply because an encounter escalates or compliance is imperfect, then the issue is no longer about officer discretion.
It is about whether disagreement with the government itself has become a lethal risk.
For years, Americans have been told that lawful gun ownership is a protected right, often framed as a safeguard against “government overreach.” But that promise collapses entirely if the same government can kill a civilian during an enforcement action and later justify it by saying the person was armed, regardless of how that weapon was actually handled. A right that disappears the moment it becomes inconvenient is not a right. It is a talking point.
What makes this especially troubling is that agencies like Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were never designed to operate as community-facing law enforcement. Their training is paramilitary, it emphasizes command, control, and threat dominance, not civilian ambiguity, de-escalation, or constitutional nuance. When that training is dropped into neighborhoods, parking lots, and city streets, ordinary human hesitation or disagreement is treated as defiance. Defiance becomes threat. Threat becomes justification.
That is how civil liberties erode without a single law being repealed.
A society where lawful behavior does not protect you from lethal force, where rights depend entirely on how calm an armed agent feels in a given moment, is not suffering from a few bad decisions. It is facing a structural breakdown in the relationship between citizens and the state.
If carrying legally does not protect you, and compliance is defined after the fact by the same agency that pulled the trigger, then the question Americans need to ask is not partisan or ideological. It is foundational:
What, exactly, are our rights worth if they vanish the moment the government feels challenged?
That question does not go away with one investigation or one press conference. It only grows louder the longer it is avoided.
“ACTED ACCORDING TO THEIR TRAINING”
When a law enforcement spokesperson says an officer “acted according to their training,” it functions less as an explanation and more as a pre-emptive defense against scrutiny:
- Evades Responsibility
Training is used as a halo of legitimacy to wrongfully place the burden on the victim: if something goes wrong, it wasn’t the fault of the officer, it was the fault of the tactics and procedures. Real accountability would require acknowledging those procedures are flawed; something institutions almost never do voluntarily. - Insulates Agencies from Liability
Admitting procedural failure opens the door to civil suits, criminal accountability, and deeper structural questions. Preemptive reliance on training as justification is a legal strategy as much as a rhetorical one. - Normalizes Lethal Force
Federal agents have authority and anonymity. When every shooting is justified with “training,” the public is conditioned to accept lethal outcomes as routine, even when data and evidence contradict official accounts.
This pattern is familiar from local policing: officers who kill in ambiguous circumstances routinely get the same defense, investigations rarely overturn the initial narrative, and prosecutors rarely press charges. That is not happenstance; it is our old friend containment.
Containment at Scale
At lower court and municipal levels, the containment model works like this:
- Incident occurs
- Law enforcement issues a defensive justification
- Local prosecutors defer to departmental narratives
- Civilian oversight is sidelined
- Lack of charges
- Public frustration rises
Now, with federal agencies like DHS deploying agents deep in urban America, far from traditional border contexts; we are seeing that same containment model play out on a much larger scale. Federal agencies have enormous prosecutorial and investigatory cover. In Pretti’s case, state investigators were reported to have been blocked from the scene and the DHS was ordered by a judge to preserve evidence.
This is containment writ large.
What You Can Do
This does not change by outrage alone. It changes when pressure is applied in places institutions cannot ignore and when that pressure is sustained, documented, and public.
1. Force Congressional Oversight
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE answer to Congress, not the public. That means oversight is the pressure point.
People should be calling and requesting appointments with:
- Their U.S. Representative
- Both U.S. Senators from their state
- Members of the House Homeland Security Committee
The ask is specific:
Demand public hearings on interior DHS enforcement operations, use-of-force standards, and civilian deaths, including the killing of Alex Pretti.
Congressional offices track calls and meetings. Patterns matter. Written complaints matter more when they are followed by in-person or virtual meetings.
2. Demand DOJ Civil Rights Investigations
When federal agencies investigate themselves, accountability stops at the press release.
People should file complaints and follow up with:
- The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice
- The Office of the Inspector General for DHS
These complaints should request pattern-and-practice investigations, not just incident reviews. The question is not whether one agent acted improperly, but whether DHS and ICE are structurally unfit to conduct armed operations in civilian communities.
3. Engage State and Local Officials Even When They Claim Powerlessness
Local officials often say, “This is federal. Our hands are tied.” That is only partially true.
People should request meetings with:
- Their mayor
- City council members
- County commissioners
- State legislators
The demand:
Public resolutions opposing militarized federal interior enforcement and requiring transparency, data-sharing, and limits on cooperation with DHS and ICE operations.
Even symbolic resolutions matter. They create records. They create conflict the federal government does not want documented.
4. Support Civil Litigation and Public Records Requests
Civil lawsuits are often the only mechanism that forces truth into the open.
People can:
- Support families pursuing wrongful death and civil rights claims
- File Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for body camera footage, training manuals, deployment orders, and inter-agency communications
- Pressure local governments not to redact or delay disclosures
Litigation is slow. But it is one of the few tools institutions cannot fully control.
5. Stop Accepting “Acted According to Their Training” as an Answer
This phrase only survives because it is allowed to.
When officials say it, the follow-up must be immediate and public:
- What training?
- Written by whom?
- Approved by which oversight body?
- Updated when?
- Audited how?
- Evaluated against what civilian harm data?
If the training produces predictable deaths, then the training itself is evidence of systemic failure.
Why This Matters
Alex Pretti’s death isn’t an isolated tragedy. It reveals a system that protects its own narratives far more aggressively than it protects communities. It illustrates how lethal force is justified first and investigated later, if investigated at all. Federal agents, like local police forces, are rarely held to account when their internal training is invoked as both shield and excuse.
And when political leadership, whether at DHS or in state houses, doubles down on those defenses rather than acknowledging ambiguity, accountability becomes nearly impossible. That posture doesn’t just deny justice; it erodes trust and escalates conflict.
Pretti was a nurse, a caregiver, and a neighbor. Yet his death has been folded into a broader enforcement narrative that privileges institutional self-protection over finding truth. That’s the core lesson of “acted according to their training”: it teaches officers they will not be held to the same standards they are authorized to enforce.
Sources and Additional Reading
- AP News, The man killed by a US Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says
- CBS News, Border Patrol kills Alex Pretti in Minneapolis; judge grants restraining order against DHS
- IPR, 5 things to know about the latest Minneapolis shooting
- People, ICU Nurse Alex Pretti Killed by Feds in Minn. Held Phone, Not a Gun, Video Shows
- North Star Policy Action, FACT SHEET: ICE Enforcement is Disrupting Minnesota’s Economy
- The Guardian, Video contradicts Trump’s claim man killed in Minneapolis was a ‘gunman’
