Judge Blocks DHS From Destroying Evidence From Alex Pretti’s Execution By Federal Officers

from the possibly-won’t-get-away-with-this-one dept

First, there’s the lies: the immediate, reflexive flurry of posts meant to portray anyone federal immigration officers kill as a threat to public safety. When an officer murdered Renee Good, the administration claimed she was a terrorist who was trying to run over the officer that killed her. Recordings proved this was all a lie.

Even before multiple recordings of the incident surfaced (including one leaked by the murderer himself), the administration was locking everything down. Whenever a law enforcement officer — federal or otherwise — kills someone, an investigation is opened. In almost every case, a parallel investigation is run by an outside agency to at least give the impression that the fix isn’t in.

That didn’t even happen in the Renee Good execution. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension arrived at the scene of the shooting assuming it would be opening an investigation. After momentarily granting the BCA access, the feds not only kicked the BCA out, but changed the locks.

Joseph H. Thompson, a career federal prosecutor who was running the office the day Ms. Good was killed, called on the Department of Homeland Security to halt immigration enforcement operations while the F.B.I. and state investigators began gathering evidence, according to an email he sent to colleagues that morning.

Yet, shortly after Mr. Thompson set out to launch a conventional review of Ms. Good’s killing, senior officials in the Trump administration overruled him on two fronts.

They sent immigration agents back into the streets of Minneapolis that same day and they barred the B.C.A. from the investigation.

A few days after that, former Trump personal lawyer/current deputy attorney general Todd Blanche made it clear there wasn’t going to be an internal investigation either.

“Look, what happened that day has been reviewed by millions and millions of Americans because it was recorded on phones,” Blanche said. “The department of justice, our civil rights unit, we don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody putting his life in danger. We never do.”

“The department of justice doesn’t just stand up and investigate because some congressman thinks we should, because some governor thinks that we should,” Blanche said. “We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate and that is not the case here.

Todd, maybe this is something this administration never does/never will do, but internal investigations (and outside investigations) have been the status quo for decades, even if the officer claims they were acting self-defense.

Instead, the FBI decided to investigate Good’s surviving partner as well as the person ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered. This prompted a wave of resignations by DOJ prosecutors in the Minnesota US Attorney’s office. The shedding of talent continues in the aftermath of this abhorrent miscarriage of justice:

The FBI agent who initially began working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good has resigned from the bureau, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Soon after the agent opened the civil rights investigation, she was ordered to reclassify it as an investigation into an assault on the officer. The FBI blocked the BCA from participating in the investigation.

Anyone with half a soul should be exiting this administration as quickly as possible. When an administration chases lies with an absolute refusal to even take a second look at a killing by an officer, it’s pretty clear the DHS’s roving kidnapping squads are also allowed to be roving death squads.

Federal officers have done it again. They’ve executed another protester who posed no threat, shooting Alex Pretti 10 times while he lay face down in the street. Again, the administration led with lies that were soon exposed by multiple recordings of the shooting. And again, the feds are locking local law enforcement out to prevent an independent investigation of the shooting.

After a federal agent shot and killed a man on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said he was told over the radio his local officers weren’t needed.

O’Hara ordered his officers not to leave the crime scene. He then requested the state’s top criminal investigators take the case, but when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators arrived they were blocked by federal Homeland Security officers, the bureau said.

The BCA wasn’t going to fall for this a second time. State investigators headed to court to secure a search warrant to access evidence held by the DHS and FBI. That warrant was approved. This one may not be so easy to sweep under the Trump regime rug, as Minnesota Public Radio reports:

Judge Eric Tostrud’s order bars the federal government from “destroying or altering evidence related to the fatal shooting involving federal officers that took place in or around 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, 2026, including but not limited to evidence that defendants and those working on their behalf removed from the scene and/or evidence that defendants have taken into their exclusive custody.”

Nice. Granted, we know the administration tends to blow off court orders it doesn’t like. So, there’s not much stopping the feds from destroying or altering evidence, other than the threat of contempt charges, which isn’t quite the deterrent one would hope it to be.

But this is all on the public record now. And it leaves the administration with basically only one response to the lawsuit filed by state investigators: argue for its “right” to destroy or alter evidence related to a killing committed by one of its own officers. I mean, it’s obviously not going to show up to court and claim this is something it can legally do. There will be lots of stuff said about jurisdiction and other procedural steps, but underneath it all, the government will basically be fighting for judicial blessing of its planned disappearing of everything that might indicate this wasn’t a clean kill. Remember that because what follows from here will be the administration trying to lock the judicial system out as well.

Filed Under: alex pretti, border patrol, dhs, eric tostrud, execution, kristi noem, mass deportation, minneapolis, minnesota, trump administration