Trump team is peddling some Pretti big lies about the latest ICE murder in Minnesota

An administration led by a pathological liar has invented a fantasy to explain the death of the second American citizen murdered this month in Minnesota.

In the chill of a Minneapolis morning, a man is dead. His name was Alex Jeffrey Pretti. He was thirty-seven years old, a registered nurse who spent his days tending to the wounds of veterans at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.

By all accounts, he was a man who built his life on the principle of care, an outdoorsman with no mark upon his record.

He died on a city street, shot to death by agents of the United States government.

And now, we are presented with two starkly different tales of his final moments—one from the official podium of power, the other from the fractured, digital truth of the public square.

The Department of Homeland Security tells us a lie about a violent, armed man, intent on massacre, approaching officers with a 9mm handgun.

They speak of intent to cause “maximum damage,” and falsely describe “violent resistance.”

It would be a clean, clinical narrative, designed to fit a file folder and close a case. It is the story we are meant to accept despite being utterly false, as we can see in video evidence.

There is a counter-narrative, meticulously assembled by a group calling itself the ResistMap National Watch Center, led by one David Dodds.

It is a story told not in press releases, but in frozen frames of video, in sequences that unfold with the grim cadence of a truth that wishes it were fiction.

It shows a man in tan pants and a brown jacket, holding a cellular telephone, not bradishing a pistol.

It shows him, filming as a federal agent, bereft of identification, who pushed a woman to the ground.

It shows Alex Pretti stepping forward, his hands raised and empty, placing his body between that agent and another woman.

It shows the law-abiding American citizen being pepper-sprayed in the face, staggering, yet keeping his hands aloft.

After Pretti tries to protect the women from further harm, an agent uses non-lethal mace and sprays him in the face. Despite likely being in severe pain and unable to see, Pretti kept his hands raised while filming to show he poses no threat.

It’s clear he never acted aggressively or tried to harm anyone, contrary to the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that he intended to “inflict maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

It shows Pretti on the ground, curled, as fists and boots fall upon him, his hands clearly used only to shield his face from the savage blows.

Pretti was carrying a permitted weapon, fully within his legal rights. He was exercising both his Second Amendment right to bear arms and his First Amendment right to protest and document the actions of federal agents.

DHS painted him as a dangerous domestic terrorist, claiming that after being tackled and beaten, he reached for his weapon, prompting them to shoot. But the reality is far more troubling.

And then, the video shows the crucial divergence from the official tale.

The evidence shows that a federal agent, in a grey jacket, removed Pretti’s legally carried firearm from its holster. The government later displayed that distinctive weapon—a Sig Sauer with white grips and a gold barrel—as the centerpiece of their justification.

Yet the frame-by-frame account asserts this disarmament happened before the fatal shots were fired.

As this visual testimony shows, Alex Pretti was not shot while reaching for a weapon. He was shot after it had already been taken from him.

This is more than a discrepancy. It is a chasm.

On the one hand, the government insists that this killing was necessary.

On the other hand, a digital mosaic, revealing a man was beaten and killed after being rendered defenseless, for the crime of filming and attempting to protect others from what appeared to be unwarranted aggression.

The Watch Center’s report concludes with a charge that lands with the weight of a gavel: complicit murder.

We are left, then, with a profound and unsettling American question: whom and what do we see?

Do we see the dangerous terrorist imagined by the deceitful DHS authorities who command the Gestapo-like immigration enforcement agencies that employ these killers, or the VA nurse the video frames depict as someone trying to protect innocent Americans from a violent assault?

Do we see a lawful use of force, or a grotesque abuse of it?

The administration demands trust in its version. The Watch Center, through David Dodds, demands accountability.

One might believe that in the middle lies the body of Alex Pretti, a man who cared for those veterans who served our country, now at the center of a battle over truth itself.

However, there is no middle because the facts of his death are uncontested, and the only disputed points are the rage of the pepper spray, the fury of the kicks, and the final, terrible lies meant to silence truth.