Footage of several federal agents shooting dead ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis has intensified scrutiny of Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown and have raised fresh questions about the use of lethal force far from the US border.

On 24 January, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affair Health Care System, was shot and killed by federal agents on Nicollet Avenue, where the Department of Homeland Security officers were carrying out an immigration arrest. The incident came over two weeks after another US citizen, Renee Good, was fatally shot by a federal agent in the same city, fuelling local fears about an escalating pattern of force. Video uploaded on X by @nexta_tv

DHS said Pretti died after an “armed struggle” and suggested he had wanted to “do maximum damage”. But videos filmed by bystanders and forensically examined by the investigative group Bellingcat tell a different story. In synchronised, slowed down footage from multiple angles, an agent in a grey jacket can be seen removing a handgun from a holster in Pretti’s waistband and walking away with it.  Around 10 seconds later, the first of ten shots were fired.

We’ve placed the available videos of the shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis today into the same synchronised timeline and are continuing to analyse further.

— Bellingcat (@bellingcat.com) January 24, 2026 at 8:39 PM

The analysis indicates Pretti’s hands were on the ground in front of him as agents piled on top, and that he did not have the gun when the shooting began. There is, Bellingcat notes, no evidence that Pretti’s weapon was fired, while one agent in a black beanie appears to fire repeatedly at Pretti’s back and then into his motionless body, alongside a second agent in a brown beanie.

Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara appeared on CBS’s Face The Nation and has said Pretti was a legal gun owner with a permit to carry and no criminal record. Earlier footage shows him holding a phone, apparently recording agents and stepping between them and two women who had been shoved.

The case has become a flashpoint in the broader struggle over Trump’s second-term agenda, which has centred on empowering federal immigration forces and portraying them as frontline victims rather than potential abusers of power. A senior Border Patrol commander told CNN, “the victims are the Border Patrol agents”, and said that Pretti “put himself in that situation”, while the deputy attorney general insisted it was still unknown whether Pretti was unarmed, despite the widely shared footage.

For critics of the Trump administration, the shooting epitomises a political climate in which expansive federal authority, opaque internal investigations and hard-line rhetoric on immigration combine to erode accountability – and to shift the balance of power away from cities and states seeking to rein in armed agents operating on their streets.

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