Killing of Alex Pretti

Alex Pretti died on the morning of January 24, 2026, near the intersection of 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, after being shot multiple times by two federal officers, Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. He was 37 years old.

He had gone to observe and film federal agents who were part of Operation Metro Surge, a Department of Homeland Security immigration enforcement push in the Minneapolis area, and at one point placed himself between an agent and a woman who had just been pushed to the ground. He was pepper sprayed and tackled, and within seconds of being pinned down, agents shot him at least ten times over about five seconds, continuing to fire after he had stopped moving. Bystander video reviewed by Reuters, the BBC, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press showed an agent had already pulled Pretti's own legally carried handgun from his holster roughly a second before the first shot, and that he was holding his phone, not a weapon, when he was hit.

A physician who happened to be at the scene said agents initially blocked him from treating Pretti and appeared to be counting his bullet wounds rather than giving first aid; once allowed near Pretti, the physician began CPR and later testified under oath to what he observed. Emergency medical services arrived afterward, and Pretti was pronounced dead; the medical examiner later listed his place of death as Hennepin County Medical Center, and ruled the manner of death a homicide caused by multiple gunshot wounds.

News of the shooting spread quickly through a city already on edge from weeks of enforcement actions and an earlier fatal shooting by an ICE agent. Within hours, crowds gathered at the site of the shooting and were met with tear gas and stun grenades from federal agents, and that night thousands of people across the Twin Cities attended candlelight vigils in his memory. Protests also took place in cities including Seattle, Portland, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York, and students at the University of Minnesota called for a second general strike in the days that followed. A GoFundMe campaign for Pretti's family raised more than a million dollars within a day and surpassed 1.6 million dollars within a few days of his death.

Pretti's parents said in a statement that they were heartbroken and angry, and rejected the administration's early portrayal of their son, saying he was not holding a gun when he was attacked. As of this writing no funeral or memorial service details have been made public.