Demands for accountability mount in Alex Pretti killing

What happened

A growing number of Republicans on Sunday joined unified Democratic calls for a thorough, transparent investigation of an immigration agent’s killing Saturday of Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at Minnesota’s Veterans Affairs hospital, was pushed to the ground by a Border Patrol agent after stepping in to shield a woman being hit with pepper spray, then surrounded, beaten and shot in the back several times, multiple bystander videos show. Trump administration officials quickly blamed Pretti, baselessly calling him a “terrorist” intent on shooting federal agents with a legally concealed handgun. Videos show Pretti had a phone in his hand but never touched his gun, which was removed from his waistband by an agent before he was shot.

The Department of Homeland Security is investigating the shooting by its own agent, officials said, and it barred Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators from the scene of the shooting on Saturday, despite a signed search warrant. A federal judge late Saturday agreed to Minnesota’s request for a temporary restraining order barring DHS “from destroying or altering evidence related to” Pretti’s shooting.

Who said what

Minnesota’s “extraordinary legal maneuvers” are “meant to counter what state officials and legal experts framed as unprecedented obstruction by federal authorities” into Pretti’s shooting, Axios said. They also “appear geared toward avoiding a repeat of the aftermath of an ICE agent’s fatal shooting of Renee Good.” The FBI blocked state investigators and “briefly opened a civil rights investigation” into Good’s shooting, The Washington Post said, “but closed it and instead focused on investigating Good’s partner and protesters.”

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Having DHS investigate Pretti’s killing is “not normal,” a former senior ICE official told CBS News. The Trump administration is “lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes,” urging us to “reject the evidence” of our own “eyes and ears,” The New York Times said in an editorial, so it “will be impossible to trust any federal investigation that it conducts.” Pretti’s killing is the “worst incident to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump presidency,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. The president “would be wise to pause ICE enforcement in the Twin Cities” and “consider a less provocative strategy.”

What next?

The “gentle and equivocal” public pushback from a “small but growing number of Republicans” is “increasingly conspicuous” as the political costs rise, Politico said. The “growing fury” among Democrats, “even among moderates,” said The Associated Press, pushed Senate Democrats on Sunday to say they would block a government spending bill unless the DHS funding was removed, raising the odds of a partial government shutdown starting next weekend.