NIt was the worst of times and then even worse; it was the age of lies and then more lies; it was an epoch of preening and cowardice. In the winter of despair, it was a day of the vile and a night of the obscene. It was a tale of two films, one featuring the stark killing of a protester on a cold Minneapolis street and the other starring Melania Trump striking poses in a “documentary” shown at a private screening at the White House.

Throughout the day of Saturday 24 January videos of the killing by ICE agents of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Veterans Administration hospital, on a street in Minneapolis were broadcast endlessly on TV news channels and seen by tens of millions online. The videos clearly showed Pretti with his phone in his hand, holding his hands up as he approached ICE agents who had pepper-sprayed a woman. He was coming to her aid, a Good Samaritan. The ICE agents instantly attacked him. One frame of a video shows one agent with his gun drawn, pointed at Pretti’s back as he fell, hands still in the air. Agents appear to have shot him 10 times in five seconds.

The videos plainly refuted the falsehoods instantly contrived by Trump administration officials. Pretti, as it happened, had been legally carrying a gun in his waistband, which there is no evidence he tried to wield. Despite the facts apparent from multiple videos, Donald Trump declared that “ICE patriots” had to “protect themselves”, and that the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, and Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, were “inciting insurrection”, attempting to assert a predicate for his invocation of the Insurrection Act.

The senior border patrol officer Gregory Bovino, officially known as the commander-at-large, who had been directing operations in the city as he had elsewhere, claimed that Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement” and that the ICE agents were the “victims”. Stephen Miller, the ultimate authority in the White House issuing orders on ICE operations, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin”. His accusations were dutifully echoed by Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who also said that Pretti was guilty of “domestic terrorism”. These falsehoods were used goods taken off the shelf. Their condemnation of Pretti was exactly the same as their malign characterization of Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother of three murdered on 7 January in Minneapolis at point-blank range as she was driving away from a protest, saying “I’m not mad at you,” as her last words before an ICE agent suddenly shot her in the head and chest.

Trump dispatched Tom Homan, his so-called “border czar”, to investigate the Pretti incident. Homan’s re-emergence in a significant public role finally concludes his withdrawal into a subterranean version of the witness protection program after MS Now revealed on 20 September 2025 that the FBI had recorded him receiving a paper bag marked from the Cava restaurant chain containing $50,000 in cash from FBI agents posing as contractors seeking federal largesse. Homan has denied any wrongdoing. Trump’s Department of Justice refused to pursue the case. Homan is Trump’s idea of someone to get to the bottom of a Trump administration cover-up.

If Homan has the slightest desire for restoring any credibility, he might begin his investigation into the Pretti killing by speaking with a physician who was an eyewitness and interacted with........

© The Guardian