This undated photo provided by Michael Pretti shows Alex J. Pretti, the man who was shot by a federal officer in Minneapolis on Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026. (Michael Pretti via AP)
The parents and siblings of Minneapolis ICU nurse Alex Pretti say the government did not just take their son, it tried to rewrite who he was. In the days after federal agents shot and killed him during an immigration enforcement operation, they watched officials describe him as a violent threat and even a would-be killer. To them, those claims are not just wrong, they are, in their words, “sickening lies” that compound their grief.
What has followed is a collision between a family’s intimate portrait of a “kindhearted soul” and a hard-edged narrative from the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration. Caught in the middle are videos, body cameras that DHS now admits exist, and a federal civil rights investigation that will test whose story holds up.
The shooting, the videos, and a family’s fury
Federal agents shot Alex Pretti during an operation in Minneapolis that officials say was tied to immigration enforcement, turning a city already familiar with high-profile police violence into a national flashpoint again. Early accounts from DHS framed the confrontation as a life-or-death struggle with an armed man, but footage that later surfaced online showed a more complicated scene, with videos capturing Alex Pretti in a chaotic clash with federal personnel on a Minneapolis street. In those clips, he appears in scrubs, consistent with his work as an ICU nurse, and his family says the images show a terrified son, not the aggressor officials described.
Relatives have been blunt about what they see as a smear campaign. In public statements, they have stressed that Alex Pretti had no criminal history beyond traffic tickets and that he was known for volunteering extra shifts in the ICU, details that match descriptions in Newly released footage and reporting. They say watching officials paint him as a menace while they were still identifying his body felt like a second killing, and they have repeatedly called the DHS account “reprehensible and disgusting,” language echoed in a Jan statement where They described the official narrative as an attack on their son’s memory.
Trump officials double down as family pushes back
Inside the Trump administration, senior figures quickly leaned into a hard line. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem initially labeled Alex Pretti’s actions “domestic terrorism,” language that stunned his parents, before later trying to soften her tone and claiming she grieved for them, a shift noted in coverage of Noem and her remarks. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller went further, calling Pretti an “assassin” who “tried to murder” federal agents, rhetoric that Alex’s sister later blasted as “disgusting lies” during a news conference, according to a Jan account of her comments. For the family, those words were not just political spin, they were a direct assault on the person they knew.
Relatives have responded with their own detailed narrative, describing Alex Pretti as a devoted ICU nurse and “kindhearted soul” who loved his patients and his city, a portrait captured in a feature on the Family of ICU by federal agents. They have said they are “We Are Heartbroken,” accusing officials of pushing an account that is both misleading and inflammatory and insisting that Alex Pretti never tried to execute anyone, as described in a piece on how his Family Blasts Trump. Local officials have also complicated the federal story, with Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, identified in one report as Hara, noting that Alex Pretti was believed to be a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry, a detail included in a broader look at Follow the case and his Family.
Body cams, civil rights probe, and a city on edge
As the rhetoric escalated, the legal stakes rose too. The Justice Department has now opened a federal civil rights investigation into the shooting, with Deputy Attorney General comments confirming that the case is under review and that DHS is under pressure to explain its actions, as described in coverage of how the DOJ In the probe into Pretti. The FBI and DHS have not rushed to fill in the gaps, with one report noting that The FBI and DHS did not immediately respond to questions about the investigation or about earlier encounters with Alex Pretti, including recordings from 11 days before his death that show him shouting at immigration agents to leave a neighbor alone before fleeing on foot, details laid out in a Jan breakdown of those Questions.
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