The man fatally shot by a federal Border Patrol officer Saturday morning on a Minneapolis street was described by the Trump administration as a “domestic terrorist,” but friends and family rejected that label.
They say he was merely trying to do what thousands of residents have been doing for weeks—record the actions of federal agents operating in the area as part of an unprecedented immigration enforcement action—when he was killed.
Before the shooting, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, can be seen in widely shared videos as filming federal officers and then being confronted by them. Agents appeared to spray a chemical irritant at Pretti and another person. In the milliseconds before shots were fired, it was less clear what happened during a scuffle in which Pretti was on the ground.