Flowers and candles make up a memorial to Alex Pretti on January 25, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

Last Wednesday, a video surfaced of Alex Pretti kicking out the taillight of an ICE vehicle, 11 days before Border Patrol agents shot him to death.

Right-wing influencers quickly cast the incident as somehow exonerating the 37-year-old’s killers. In Megyn Kelly’s telling, the footage proved that the anti-ICE protester “had been victimizing” Border Patrol — not the other way around — and advised “illegal-loving Leftists” to “find another poster boy.” President Donald Trump, for his part, declared Pretti an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist” whose “stock has gone way down.”

Of course, Pretti’s prior conduct has no actual bearing on the legitimacy of his killing. In the United States, the punishment for kicking a government SUV is not summary execution. The reason why it was wrong for Border Patrol to pump bullets into Pretti’s back is not that he had always been respectful toward them and their vehicles, but rather, that he was a human being.

Evidence of Pretti’s past aggression might have been relevant, had his fatal confrontation with Border Patrol not been recorded. In such a circumstance, the public would need to make an educated guess about whether Pretti gave agents cause for using lethal force, based in part on his prior behavior. In our universe, however, we know that he did not.

Instead of disputing the relevance of Pretti’s first encounter with Border Patrol, however, some liberals chose to deny its very existence.

In the left-wing corners of social media, it quickly became canon that the new video of Pretti was “AI.” Few liberals of any........

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