Outrage grows over Alex Pretti shooting in Minnesota – The Latest

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:13These killings, they are galvanizing public opinion quite strongly in the U.S. against ICE. You know what you saw. And then you heard the most powerful people in the world sullying his name within minutes. What we know of Alex Preddy from those who knew him is very different from the picture of a domestic terrorist being put forward by the Trump administration. Right. He worked in a hospital for veterans. There is more outrage across America as the Trump administration continues to push lies over the killing of a man in Minneapolis. From the Guardians today in Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hoth.

1:01I'm joined by Moira Donegan, Guardian columnist. Thank you for being with us, Moira. I know it's early where you are in California. Yeah. So let's talk about what happened on Saturday where 37 year old Alex Pretty was shot by federal agents on a street in Minneapolis less than a month after another shooting of another 37 year old US citizen, René LeColgoode, earlier this month. And the footage, I mean, lots of our listeners will have seen the footage that was captured by multiple eyewitnesses at the scene. But tell me what we can ascertain as facts from the footage that's available. Yeah. So what seems to have happened is that Mr.

1:43Pretty, like Renee Good, had been observing an ICE operation in Minneapolis. So in footage taken by bystanders, he can be seen directing traffic around an ICE vehicle in the street in Minneapolis. He can be seen going to the aid of a woman who had been attacked and was being pepper sprayed by ICE agents. and one of his hands is free, sort of shielding himself from the pepper spray, and another is holding his phone. Several agents then grab Mr. Pretty and they take him to the ground on the street. He is being beaten there. He seems to be trying to get up and free himself when one of the agents on the left can be seen removing his gun from its holder quite slowly and then about 10 shots are fired and Preti is dead on the ground.

2:49The gun is what's proving to be contentious in the two very different accounts of what happened. The Department of Homeland Security say that their federal officers were acting in self-defense, which is the same more or less message that they used in the case of Renee Goode. But what is clear from the footage is that Alex Preti is not brandishing the gun at the time that he's shot. He's not threatening officers with it. He's on the ground. It's also worth saying that he had a license to carry the gun. Yeah. Mr. Pretty had a license to carry a concealed firearm. He seems to have been carrying in a holster a nine millimeter handgun.

3:30This is, you know, a law in Minnesota and elsewhere that is subject to some controversy. people on the right have advocated for a near absolute right to carry firearms in public. And, you know, that right has been upheld by the Supreme Court in a pretty maximum way. Mr. Pretty in the videos does not have the handgun in his hand. Analysis of videos by The Guardian, the BBC, The New York Times and others have all shown the handgun being removed from him, from its holster before the shots were fired. So let's just talk about Alex Preti for a moment. So he was a 37-year-old ICU nurse, right? The governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, has described him as a beloved member of his community and Preti's family have put out a very powerful statement about him.

4:23Yeah, what we know of Alex Preti from those testimonies from those who knew him is very different from the picture of a domestic terrorist being put forward by the Trump administration, right? He is a guy who loved hiking and biking. Minnesota is a very beautiful place. He seems to have taken a lot of advantage of the outdoors. And he worked in a hospital for veterans, right? So he was taking care of people who had served in the military of the U.S. who were in states of sort of like acute physical need, right? So the picture coming forth of Alex Pretty from those who knew him is of somebody who is devoted to caretaking and who seemed in their histories of his life to have been quite a gentle man.

5:09Were we living in ordinary times, there would be a moment of pause, there would be calls for a full scale transparent inquiry into the tragic events of the weekend. But unlike a couple of weeks ago, within the case of René Nicole Good, there are now pretty widespread calls for there to be a joint federal state investigation into the circumstances of Alex Pretti's death, right, from Democrats in the state of Minnesota, but also in the Republican Party and even from unlikely places like the National Rifle Association. Like there needs to be some accountability. There needs to be a clear account of what happened and what went wrong.

5:47Yeah, you know, there is rapidly eroding support for ICE operations and for Trump's method of his mass deportation, if not the mass deportations themselves, even in the Republican coalition, right? These killings have a cumulative effect and they are galvanizing public opinion quite strongly in the U.S. against ICE. And, you know, there is a degree to which the calls for a joint investigation, I think, are a little bit of wishful thinking, because one thing you're seeing, particularly in Minnesota, but also across the country, is rapidly eroding trust between state and municipal authorities on the one hand and federal authorities on the other.

6:32So in the wake of Freddie's killing, for instance, federal authorities tried to clear Minneapolis police and Minnesota state police from the scene and are now being charged with perhaps tampering evidence and ordered by federal judges quite rapidly to not tamper with that evidence and in fact preserve it. Right. So what you see is sort of jurisdictional competition between state authorities and the federal authorities who they don't trust to tell the truth. Yeah, which we've seen in the case of Renee Goode on the 7th of January in the week since then. There have been attempts to bring a criminal investigation against the ICE shooter in that instance, Jonathan Ross, but there has been big obstacles in getting that criminal investigation underway, right?

7:19And multiple resignations at a state level for those trying to do so. Yeah, there were many resignations in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota following Good's death because authorities there, the higher ups in the Justice Department, directed that office to not launch a civil rights investigation of the shooter, Jonathan Roth, and instead to investigate the dead woman, Renee Good, and her wife, Becca Good. And this, you know, prompted the removal of talent. So one thing that I think is interesting is that you do see, you know, in waves, these kind of exodus of expertise from the Trump administration, which leaves those still occupying these federal agencies, largely those who are more loyal to the Trump agenda, but also frequently those who are less competent to carry it out.

8:14The person within the Trump administration who seems to be very central to all of this is Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff, who says, and I quote here, to all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you, to obstruct you, is committing a felony. Trump's language has softened slightly in the case of Alex Pretty from some very Trumpian tweets on Truth Social over the weekend. And he's now saying that there will be a full review of what happened and he's refusing to say whether or not the officers acted appropriately.

8:49So some sense that perhaps he's starting to feel the pressure on both sides of this. Yeah, I think these differing responses show some of the differing incentives within the Trump administration. Right. So you have people like Stephen Miller and like Vice President J.D. Vance, who are really committed anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideologues. who are pushing a very maximalist vision of ICE agents' prerogatives. J.D. Vance, after he made comments about the supposed absolute immunity of ICE officers, he had to actually walk those statements back. It wouldn't shock me if some more qualified statements started coming from Stephen Miller as well, because the law about what ICE officers are allowed to do without facing prosecution is actually much more ambiguous.

9:40Then the Trump administration is presenting it. And, you know, things like murder does not have a statute of limitations. Right. These are charges to which some of these officers might still be vulnerable in, say, a few years when there might be a different regime in power. However, Donald Trump is making different calculations, right? He's much more attuned to popular opinion, which has swung dramatically away from support for ICE. He is much more comfortable and willing to change his mind and change his rhetoric. So I think one thing that will be interesting to watch is to see whether, you know, Trump's sense of his own interests might curtail the agendas of the likes of Miller and Vance.

10:32It has not in the past, but different things could happen if these dramatic swings in public opinion and these mass protest movements continue. Well, Moira, it's deeply, deeply horrifying times. Thank you so much for your reporting. Thank you for having me. That's it for today. My huge thanks again to Moira Donegan. You can keep up with her writing over at theguardian.com as well as breaking news on this story. That's it for today. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Latest, the new evening edition of Today in Focus. Today in Focus will be back in your feeds tomorrow morning and we'll be back with you tomorrow night.

11:06This episode was presented by me, Lucy Hoff. The producer was Bryony Moore. The lead producer was Zoe Hitch.

11:16This is The Guardian.