DOJ Won’t Properly Investigate Alex Pretti Killing in Minneapolis

The Justice Department is not pursuing a civil rights probe into Alex Pretti’s death at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis, with the Department of Homeland Security instead investigating its own officers. 

MS NOW reports that Customs and Border Protection will be investigating whether the agents followed department policy, while Homeland Security Investigations, which normally investigates human trafficking and drug rings as part of ICE, will be investigating whether Pretti broke any laws before being killed.

Normally, the FBI would handle such an investigation, considering that it has the lab facilities and investigators experienced with shootings. In fact, Border Patrol agents requested the FBI’s help to gather evidence after the shooting, but in the end, “All evidence, excluding firearms and casings, were turned over to DHS,” according to an FBI memo.

The DOJ appears to be following the same playbook it used after an ICE agent killed Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this month. In that case, too, the DOJ announced there would be no civil rights investigation. 

“This is absolutely the kind of investigation that should be led by the FBI as it has the authority, experience, capability, and credibility to conduct a thorough, objective, and unbiased investigation,” MS NOW contributor and former FBI Agent Chris O’Leary said. “Unfortunately the current Director of the FBI and leadership in DOJ are blocking this from happening, and are therefore part of the problem and not part of the solution.”

Questions have already been raised as to how evidence, such as Pretti’s phone and handgun, have been handled by the federal government, with the government even arguing in court that they have the right to destroy evidence. Now, the fact that DHS and Border Patrol will essentially be investigating themselves seems to indicate the agents who killed Pretti will soon be exonerated. 

State authorities say that the federal government has not shared evidence with them, and current and former investigators with the FBI and DOJ say that the government is already violating DOJ policy and previous practices, according to MS NOW. 

“The fact that this investigation has already been taken by the agency involved speaks to them not wanting any outside agency having access to the evidence nor the ability to take statements from the agents involved,” former FBI agent and MS NOW contributor Rob D’Amico said. “No matter how good an investigation was conducted it gives the perception of a cover-up if … charges aren’t brought against the agents.”  

Federal agents in Maine are now threatening ICE watchers at their homes.

Liz Eisele McLellan, a volunteer ICE watcher monitoring the intensifying federal operations in Maine, told the Portland Press Herald that a federal agent came to her home to threaten her. “It was one of the scariest things that ever happened to me,” McLellan said.

McLellan said she spoke to one agent, while three cars blocked the street outside. “This is a warning,” one agent said, according to McLellan. “We know you live right here.”

McLellan said she called 911 and recounted what had happened to the dispatcher, who told her she should comply with orders from federal agents.

Last week, a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent warned a woman filming their activities in Portland that her information would be entered into a “nice little database” that would label her a domestic terrorist.

This comes just weeks after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of two, while she was observing federal immigration operations in Minneapolis. The Press Herald report came out the day before CBP agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA ICU nurse who was attending a Minneapolis protest in the wake of Good’s death.

Two people who work as volunteers in Minneapolis, driving supplies to immigrants hiding in their homes from federal agents and following ICE vehicles, told The Atlantic that agents had gone to their homes to threaten them too.

While legal threats against observers may sound absurd, a recent security threats assessment leaked from the Department of Homeland Security revealed the department’s intention to broaden the definition of domestic terrorism.

Federal officials claimed to have arrested more than 200 people as part of their operations in Maine, and that they are targeting the worst of the worst. But, as is the case in other cities targeted by President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement operations, local officials and community members say that people without criminal records are being detained too.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says that the Trump administration is misrepresenting a phone call the two had following Carney’s remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“To be absolutely clear, and I said this to the president, I meant what I said in Davos. It was clear—it was a broader set of issues—that Canada was the first country to understand the change in U.S. trade policy that he had initiated. And we’re responding to that,” Carney told reporters Tuesday.

The night before, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed on Fox News that Carney was “very aggressively walking back some of the unfortunate remarks he made at Davos” in a phone call he had with President Trump earlier in the day. Over the weekend, Trump threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs against Canadian goods if Carney finalized a trade deal with China.

China and Canada did reach an agreement on canola oil exports from Canada and Chinese electric vehicles, but Carney ruled out a free trade agreement with Beijing on Monday, and flatly denied Bessent’s description of his conversation with Trump Tuesday morning. 

“We had a very good conversation on a wide range of subjects, ranging from the situation in Ukraine, in Venezuela, Arctic security. We discussed as well what Canada is doing, positively, and this is the context of our discussion, what Canada is doing positively to build new partnerships around the world,” Carney added. 

It’s pretty clear that Bessent is trying to save Trump’s dignity after Carney warned last week at  Davos that the global trade order is in the middle of a “rupture” thanks to Trump’s economic bullying. Trump did not take the speech well, calling Canada ungrateful for all of the “freebies” he claimed the U.S. has provided over the years, and now Bessent is trying to paint Carney as regretful. However, it’s Bessent who is actually causing economic damage with his words. 

Prolific pianist and composer Phillip Glass is boycotting the Kennedy Center, adding his name to a growing list of performers who have pulled their performances in the wake of President Trump’s hostile takeover.

“After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” he announced in a statement Tuesday.

“Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.”

That “current leadership” would be none other than Board of Trustees Chair Donald Trump, whose overhaul of the once esteemed arts and culture venue has struggled mightily of late. Big names like Issa Rae and Rhiannon Giddens pulled out of shows, and as of last fall, ticket sales at the Kennedy Center were the worst they’ve been since the Covid-19 pandemic. In December, the Kennedy Center was forced to cancel its annual New Year’s Eve concert as artists pulled out to boycott Trump changing the center’s name to “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

President Donald Trump decided to abandon regulations protecting elderly residents, after nursing home executives poured millions into a pro-Trump super PAC, The New York Times reported Tuesday.  

In early December, the Department of Health and Human Services repealed a federal provision requiring nursing homes to increase staffing levels in order to reduce the rates of resident neglect. In a statement, HHS claimed that new staffing rules “disproportionately burdened facilities.”

That decision can be traced back to millions of dollars directed toward one of Trump’s favorite super PACs, a donation that won a group of nursing home executives a meeting with the president. 

After Trump’s gargantuan budget bill won nursing home companies a 10-year moratorium on the Biden-era staffing requirement, a group of industry executives wanted to try to get the rule permanently revoked—and knew exactly how to get the president’s attention. 

Beginning in August 2025, nursing home executives donated a total of roughly $4.8 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC run by the president’s allies, according to campaign finance disclosures. Later that month, a group of the largest donors joined industry lobbyists at Trump’s golf club outside of Washington, D.C., in order to plead their case to the president himself.  

The group of executives “urged the president to formally repeal the harmful minimum staffing mandate, which would have surely forced providers throughout the country to close their doors to new residents—or possibly close their doors altogether,” according to Bill Weisberg, the founder and chief executive of Saber Healthcare Group, who recounted the meeting in a message to the Times.

Less than a month later, federal prosecutors stopped defending the rule from legal challenges mounted by nursing home companies, and in December, they scrapped the rule entirely. A White House spokesperson dismissed the claims of corruption, saying that repealing the rule was a “commonsense, anti-red tape policy decision.”

Some of the biggest donors to MAGA Inc. in August 2025 included Pruitt Health Corporation, which operates more than 100 eldercare facilities across the southeast United States. Pruitt paid a whopping $750,000 to the super PAC.

Several other companies and executives donated $100,000, including Reliance Health Care Inc., which operates more than two dozen locations across Arkansas and Missouri; Northshore Health, which operates more than 70 facilities across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and North Dakota; and Teddy Price, the administrator of Central Management, which operates 21 nursing facilities across Louisiana.

There is perhaps reason to believe that even more corruption took place through MAGA Inc., which raked in an unprecedented $198.9 million between Trump’s election and June 2025—far too early to be tied to any upcoming election cycle. The super PAC was previously run by Taylor Budowich, who went on to join Trump’s White House communications team.

Even Republicans can see that there’s nothing normal about how the Trump administration has handled Alex Pretti’s killing.

Republican Senator Rand Paul took to social media Tuesday to highlight ICE and CBP’s long leash Tuesday, pointing out on X that no other law enforcement agency would permit offending officers to walk free after an extrajudicial killing.

“Local police routinely put officers involved in deadly shootings on administrative leave until an independent investigation is concluded,” Paul wrote. “That should happen immediately.”

He further scolded the Department of Homeland Security for its attempts to write off Pretti as a violent criminal, arguing that the agency had failed to accomplish the bare minimum to calm the tensions boiling among the American public.

“I can’t recall ever hearing a police chief immediately describing the victim as a ‘domestic terrorist’ or a ‘would-be assassin,’” Paul continued. “For calm to be restored, an independent investigation is the least that should be done.”

Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked in Veterans Affairs, was slain Saturday while he protested the death of another U.S. citizen, Renee Nicole Good, who was shot by agents weeks earlier.

Pretti was assisting a woman who had been shoved by a masked officer, when he was grappled by several agents and thrown to the ground. At least seven agents held him down or knelt on his back, and another agent drew his gun and shot Pretti. Widely circulated video of the incident that was filmed from multiple angles captured audio of 10 gunshots ringing out within five seconds.

In the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s death, top Homeland Security officials attempted to induce national amnesia, retroactively labeling him a domestic terrorist while insisting that he had “approached officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun,” forcing officers to fire “defensive shots.” They also blamed Pretti for lawfully owning a gun, suggesting that his death was justified since he had a weapon on him.

Pretti’s and Good’s needless deaths—and their dystopian handling by Trump officials—have made conservatives and their longtime donors recoil from Donald Trump’s immigration agenda for the first time since he returned to office. Wary of public backlash, Republicans are attempting to remap their routes toward midterm elections, steering clear of the polarizing subject. The National Rifle Association, meanwhile, made an unexpected strike against the administration when it tore into Customs and Border Protection commander Greg Bovino for suggesting that Second Amendment rights “don’t count” for protesters.

By Monday, it appeared that Trump was finally grasping the need to overhaul the administration’s messaging. He announced that border czar Tom Homan would seize control of ICE and CBP operations in Minneapolis, effectively ousting Bovino in the process.

But not everybody had caught wind of the makeover: DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin still wasn’t willing to backtrack on the department’s smear campaign against Pretti during an interview with Fox News Tuesday, sidestepping questions by the network as to whether DHS still deemed the nurse to be a “domestic terrorist.”

The Trump administration is being sued by the families of two people killed in U.S. military boat strikes.

Civil rights attorneys filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court on behalf of the families of Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, both of Las Cuevas, Trinidad. Both were killed in a U.S. military strike on October 14. The lawsuit was filed under admiralty law by Lenore Burnley, Joseph’s mother, and Sallycar Korasingh, Samaroo’s sister, and alleges that the U.S. bombing campaign in the southern hemisphere is illegal.

“These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification,” the lawsuit states. “Thus, they were simply murder, ordered at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”

The families are represented by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Seton Hall University in the first federal lawsuit filed over the strikes. Their lawyers echo concerns made by legal scholars and members of Congress that the bombings may constitute war crimes.

“This is uncharted water. Never before in the country’s history has the government asserted this type [of] power,” Seton Hall law school professor Jonathan Hafetz told The Guardian. “This is a clear example of unlawful killing by the United States. The U.S. is assuming the prerogative to kill victims in international waters.”

The October 14 bombing in the Caribbean was the fifth such strike by the U.S. Since then, the Trump administration has launched 31 more, including one on Friday in the eastern Pacific Ocean that killed two people. The government claims that they are targeting drug cartels and stopping drugs like fentanyl from making their way into the United States. The families of Joseph and Samaroo assert that the pair were fishermen who were arbitrarily targeted.

“This is killing for sport, it’s killing for theater and it’s utterly lawless,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “We need a court of law to rein in this administration and provide some accountability to the families.”

Melania Trump’s new documentary, Melania, is looking like an opening-week box office flop—after Amazon’s MGM studios paid tens of millions of dollars for the rights to it.

The documentary detailing the first lady’s return to the White House is projected to make just $1 million in its first week. While documentaries generally do worse at the box office, the sheer amount of money Amazon spent—$40 million for the rights, $35 million for an aggressive marketing blitz—and the constant stream of Truth Social posts from President Trump make this a particularly pitiful showing.

Melania’s early failure comes as a new report from Rolling Stone details serious labor issues behind the scenes and a whopping two-thirds of the film’s staff requesting not to be credited at the end of the film. Director Brett Ratner, who made headlines after six women accused him of sexual assault and harassment during the #MeToo movement in 2017, was perhaps the most loathed person on set. (Actress Natasha Henstridge alleged that Ratner forced her to perform oral sex on him when she was 19, Olivia Munn claimed that Ratner masturbated in front of her, and more recently, he was pictured shirtless in the Epstein files.)

“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one crew member shared, “but Brett Ratner was the worst part of working on this project.”

“He did actually chew a piece of gum and throw it in a coffee cup on my cart,” a staff member told Rolling Stone, [but] “didn’t acknowledge my existence for even one nanosecond.”

Another member recalled a day when Ratner feasted on his own meal in a set space where food was not allowed, on a day when no one else on the crew got a break to eat.

“Brett, unknowingly or maliciously, got his own food, went up there, was just eating it and just licking his fingers in grubbiest way possible, either being a dick or [having] no awareness whatsoever to the fact that everybody else is working and no one’s eating,” a staffer said.

“Unfortunately, if [the film] does flop … I would really feel great about it,” said another.

Melania herself is pocketing $28 million from the licensing sale. She and President Trump plan to attend a premiere of the documentary at the Kennedy Center on Thursday.

The president’s favorite TV network still has some sway with the Oval Office.

On Monday morning, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade floated a novel idea on air: Solve the collapsing environment in Minnesota by introducing border czar Tom Homan into the situation. Kilmeade mentioned the idea at 6:15 a.m., again an hour later, and then a third time at 8:10 a.m.

As CNN’s Brian Stelter put it, “Maybe Trump was watching, maybe he wasn’t,” but just 20 minutes after Kilmeade’s third suggestion, Donald Trump followed his advice and announced Homan’s imminent involvement in the North Star State. Shortly afterward, it appeared that Customs and Border Patrol boss Greg Bovino—who had until Monday overseen Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP activity in Minnesota—was getting the shove.

Homan’s inclusion appears to be a Hail Mary by the White House to salvage a highly advertised immigration crackdown that has turned sour for even the most conservative of Republicans.

The GOP has balked at the national backlash to ICE’s violence in Minnesota, which so far has involved the senseless killing of two U.S. citizens: Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti and award-winning poet Renee Nicole Good.

In the aftermath of their deaths, thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in protest. Trump’s job score has nosedived, hitting a net approval of -19 percent. In an attempt to pivot ahead of midterms, Trump is headed to Iowa Tuesday to reframe his administration’s priorities. Suddenly, the word of the day is affordability, with the president set to give a speech on energy and the economy while the White House decides what to do with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The country, by all means, appears fed up with the reality of Trump’s immigration agenda, which has thus far deported people from the United States without due process, ripped children from their parents, and ushered thousands of untrained ICE agents into cities and neighborhoods where they are not wanted. A CBS News poll published days before agents killed Pretti found that 61 percent of surveyed Americans felt that ICE agents were “too tough” when stopping and detaining people.

On air, Kilmeade implored Trump to display calm leadership, reading aloud an editorial in the New York Post (another Rupert Murdoch–owned entity) positing that the American left will utilize the situation in Minneapolis to instigate a “civil war.”

“The bottom line is, these images are not the ones that are going to help you keep the majorities,” Kilmeade said Monday.

Following the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents over the weekend, the cell phone Pretti was holding moments before his death has disappeared into federal custody.

The New York Times reports that the FBI initially collected evidence from the shooting, including Pretti’s handgun and phone, but has turned over that evidence to Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, which is now handling the investigation into Pretti’s death.

Pretti’s family told the Associated Press Monday that they have no idea where the phone is, and his father, Michael Pretti, said they have yet to be contacted by federal law enforcement. But perhaps most troubling, officials told CBS News that there was no documented chain of custody for Pretti’s gun, raising the question of whether evidence has been improperly handled (or footage erased). The Department of Homeland Security has refused to publicly confirm whether it has the video he was recording.

Minnesota state authorities were denied access to the crime scene, despite obtaining a judge’s warrant. The state even had to obtain a temporary restraining order to stop the federal government from altering or destroying evidence, which the Trump administration shockingly is trying to overturn.

“We’ve never had to do anything like this before,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, adding that the situation was “uncharted territory.”

All of this raises the question as to whether the investigation into Pretti’s death will be anything close to fair and independent. Border Patrol is part of DHS, so essentially the department is investigating itself, and the Trump administration isn’t exactly known for accepting negative rulings or restrictions.