Obama says Alex Pretti killing a ‘tragedy’ as calls mount for full investigation

Pressure mounted on Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday to fully investigate the previous day’s killing by federal immigration officers of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Calls for an investigation have come from all sides of the political divide after video analysis showed officers had removed from Pretti a handgun he was reportedly permitted to carry – and which he was not handling – before fatally shooting him.

Former president Barack Obama called the killing “a heartbreaking tragedy” and “a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault”.

In a statement released on Sunday, Obama said federal law enforcement and immigration agents were not operating in a lawful or accountable way in Minnesota.

“For weeks now people across the country have been rightly outraged by the spectacle of masked ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] recruits and other federal agents acting with impunity and engaging in tactics that seem designed to intimidate, harass, provoke and endanger the residents of a major American city,” he said. He said these tactics had now resulted in the fatal shootings of two US citizens – Pretti and Renee Good, both in Minneapolis. Yet he said Trump and other administration officials appeared eager to escalate the rhetoric before an investigation had been undertaken – and despite the fact that they “appear to be directly contradicted by video evidence”.

Still image of a video of the moment that Alex Pretti’s firearm is retrieved from a waistband holster by a federal agent as another agent draws his weapon before Pretti was fatally shot. Photograph: Video Obtained By Reuters/Reuters

Obama called on Americans to support the wave of peaceful protests in Minneapolis and other parts of the country.

“They are a timely reminder that ultimately it’s up to each of us as citizens to speak out against injustice, protect our basic freedoms and hold our government accountable,” he said.

Republican US senator Bill Cassidy said the “credibility” of ICE and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were “at stake”.

“There must be a full joint federal and state investigation,” Cassidy wrote in a post on X, after an ICE officer shot Good to death on 7 January and border patrol officers fatally shot Pretti on Saturday. “We can trust the American people with the truth.”

Other Democrat lawmakers, including US House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, both of New York, also issued calls for federal immigration authorities to leave Minnesota. They urged Senate Democrats to vote against funding the US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and border patrol, during budget negotiations in the coming days.

“We have a responsibility to protect Americans from tyranny,” Ocasio-Cortez posted on X.

On Sunday morning, US senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Adam Schiff of California, both Democrats, said they would vote against the impending department of homeland security funding.

People take part in a demonstration on Sunday, a day after a man identified as Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal immigration agents trying to detain him, in Minneapolis. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

“When they’re killing two constituents in my state, and they’re taking two-year-olds out of the arms of their mom, and they are taking an elder Hmong man out of his house and putting him out there in his underwear, and then figuring out they have the wrong man … no, I am not voting for this funding,” Klobuchar told NBC’s Meet the Press, alluding to incidents involving federal immigration agents that have drawn heavy media scrutiny.

Schiff said he was “not giving ICE or border patrol another dime, given how this agency, these agencies are operating”.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, first announced on Saturday that he and his fellow Democrats would not provide the necessary votes if DHS funding remains in the measure. A spokesperson for Senate majority leader John Thune said DHS and other government funds will be voted on as a single package. Without a compromise, the government faces a partial shutdown at the end of January.

Schiff warned that a government shutdown would result if Republicans “insist” on combining immigration enforcement funding with other government appropriations. “It will be a Republican decision,” he said. “They understand we’re not going to go along with this.”

Connecticut US senator Chris Murphy, also a Democrat, told CNN’s State of the Union that Democrats “can’t vote to fund this lawless Department of Homeland Security … that is murdering American citizens, that is traumatizing little boys and girls all across the country, in violation of the law.”

People gather on Sunday at a makeshift memorial at the site where Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Photograph: Tim Evans/Reuters

The New Jersey governor, Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, told CNN that the confrontations in Minneapolis was not about sanctuary cities.

“This goes far beyond that,” she said. “This is about a basically Stasi-type force of secret police that wear masks, that are unidentifiable, that are unaccountable, that have leadership in the Trump administration blatantly lying about what’s going on, when the American people can see the video.”

Meanwhile, Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan, called for “the truth” to be told about their son.

“We are heartbroken but also very angry,” they said. “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.”

The family’s statement came after US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem made the claim that Pretti brandished a gun before agents fired “defensive shots” at him. None of the ubiquitous video evidence shows Pretti brandishing a gun.

Klobuchar also said that the Trump administration had described the shooting, which is shown in several eyewitness videos circulating widely on social media, “in ways that simply aren’t true.

“I just keep thinking, your eyes don’t lie,” Klobuchar said. “Law enforcement is based on trust, and we have had a total breakdown of trust.”

She called for a “transparent” investigation into the shooting and called for the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agents to leave Minnesota.

The deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, told Meet the Press that “there’s obviously an investigation that’s ongoing”.

“Secretary Noem talked about that yesterday, which is what we would expect anytime a tragedy like this occurs,” Blanche said.

But he disagreed with the premise that the videos of the encounter told the whole story. “We don’t know what happened in the minutes leading up to what we just watched. We don’t know what ICE saw, what ICE heard,” Blanche said of Pretti’s killing by federal agents. “That’s part of the investigation that’s going to be happening.

Officers from Minnesota’s bureau of criminal apprehension (BCA) work at the scene where Alex Pretti was fatally shot by a border patrol officer on Saturday, in Minneapolis, on Sunday. Photograph: Adam Gray/AP

“You see a violent interaction with the man who was shot. And so we don’t know. No matter how many times you look at it, no matter how many different angles that we see, there’s a lot that we don’t see.”

Blanche re-iterated the government’s position that the anti-immigration enforcement protesters were not peaceful. “They are trying to impede and obstruct ICE, and it makes the job that our men and women have to do virtually impossible to do without interactions like that,” he said.

But, alluding to Minnesota governor Tim Walz and his fellow Democrat Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, Blanche added: “Make no mistake about it. This was entirely avoidable if we had a governor, if we had a mayor, if we had leadership in Washington and over in Minnesota that actually cared about their citizens.”

Border patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino was asked why federal agents shot and killed Pretti.

“You don’t know he was unarmed,” Bovino told CNN’s Dana Bash. “I don’t know he was unarmed. That’s freeze-frame adjudication of a crime scene via a photo. That’s why we have investigators.

“The facts are going to come to light as to what exactly happened with an investigation.”

When asked by Bash whether he was blaming the victim, he said, “The victims are the border [atrol agents.”

During a Sunday afternoon press conference, Bovino was asked about the videos that show Pretti was unarmed before being shot and killed. He said there are, “Many videos out there, many different accounts that you may see that I may see.”

“Folks, this is why we have something called an investigation, to take what you’re talking about, to take those videos, to take witness statements, to take, officer statements, all those minute details that will paint a true picture, not a freeze frame concept, and paint a larger picture of what really happened.

“That is why we investigate, so we can get to the truth, so there’s not speculation.”

He added that they still don’t know how many shots were fired. And he said “all agents that were involved in that scene are working, not in Minneapolis, but in other locations that’s for their safety”.

Bovino had pushed that the operation in Minneapolis had really been about targeting Jose Huerta-Chuma, someone they described as an undocumented immigrant who needed to be taken off the streets. He said Huerta-Chuma was in the process of being taken into custody when “agitators, rioters and anarchists” prevented the arrest.

But Minnesota’s Department of Corrections (DOC) contradicted Bovino’s characterization of Huerta-Chuma as having a “significant criminal history”. According to DOC records and Minnesota court data, the individual identified by federal officials has never been in the state’s custody and has no felony commitments.

DOC records also indicated that someone with Huerta-Chuma’s name was previously held in federal immigration custody in a local Minnesota jail in 2018, during Trump’s first presidency. The decision to release him from federal custody would have been made by Trump administration officials. DOC said it had no information explaining why Huerta-Chuma was released. And Bovino had no explanation when asked by a reporter on Sunday.

He instead remarked about Pretti, saying: “When someone makes the choice to come into an active law enforcement scene, interfere, obstruct, delay or assault a law enforcement officer, and they bring a weapon to that, that is a choice that individual made.”

Republican US senator Lindsey Graham also took the line that “an armed man trying to impede a lawful arrest is a recipe for disaster”. The South Carolina Republican said he expects law enforcement officers to use good judgement “but not to foolishly risk their lives or the lives of others”.

“If you go to such events with a loaded gun, bad things can happen,” Graham added, though it is legal in Minnesota to possess guns in public places with a permit. Permit holders who don’t have both the document and a license on them can face a misdemeanor $25 fine.

Late Saturday, a federal judge issued an order blocking the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence” related to Pretti’s killing, after Minnesota officials sued DHS.

The Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, said the suit demanded “a full, impartial, and transparent investigation into [Pretti’s] fatal shooting at the hands of DHS agents [that] is non-negotiable”.

Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara, meanwhile, said information about what led up to the shooting was limited. As protests erupted in Minneapolis on Saturday, federal officers impeded state investigators from accessing the scene of Pretti’s killing.

Trump responded to Pretti’s shooting with his typical combativeness. The Republican president accused Walz and Frey of “inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous and arrogant rhetoric”.

Vice-President JD Vance for his part claimed events in Minneapolis were “engineered chaos” resulting from “far-left agitators, working with local authorities”.

ICE and border patrols officials were scheduled to hold a news briefing early Sunday afternoon in Minneapolis.