Trump officials continue to push lies after fatal shooting of Alex Pretti

In the moments after federal officers shot Minneapolis ICU nurse Alex Pretti dead, Trump administration figures almost immediately made public statements in press conferences, televised interviews and social media posts that were at best indifferent to the evidence available at the time and at worst completely fabricated.

A pattern is emerging, in which the Trump administration prioritizes the vilification of the dead victim as to blame for the incident over preserving the neutrality of any investigative process.

In a statement sent to the Guardian around 12.30pm EST, assistant homeland security secretary Tricia McLaughlin sent a news release asserting that “the officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted” and that “an agent fired defensive shots.”

The statement went out about two and a half hours after agents killed Pretti. Video from the event began circulating immediately, which showed half a dozen officers taking Pretti – who had a phone, not a gun, visibly in his hand – to the ground after spraying him with a chemical agent.

“This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” McLaughlin said, noting that Pretti had two magazines and no identification.

From these assertions, Pretti’s imputed intentions grew increasingly sinister in the statements of public officials.

At 1.39pm EST, about three and a half hours after agents killed Pretti, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” The post referred to comments by a Democratic party account calling for ICE to withdraw from Minneapolis.

The reader note on X beneath Miller’s statement reads: “Videos of the encounter shows that the gun was never drawn. The weapon remains in the victim’s holster until one agent removes it. After the victim is disarmed, a second agent shoots him repeatedly.”

“An assassin tried to murder federal agents and this is your response,” Miller wrote three minutes later, responding to the call of Democratic senator Chris Murphy to withhold funding for ICE.

At that point, the scene of the incident in Minneapolis had not even been cleared. There is no evidence that Pretti attempted to lethally harm federal agents or had the intention to be “an assassin”.

At 2.14pm ET, border patrol commander Gregory Bovino assembled reporters to claim that Pretti had approached agents with a handgun, intending to “massacre law enforcement” and had “violently resisted” before his men killed him.

Border patrol commander Greg Bovino looks on at a gas station during an immigration raid in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 21 January. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Bovino said Pretti had interfered with the attempted arrest of Jose Huerta-Chuma, and that Huerta-Chuma’s criminal history included domestic assault to intentionally inflict bodily harm, disorderly conduct, and driving without a valid license.

Minnesota officials later disputed Bovino’s assertion about Huerta-Chuma, saying he had never been in custody, based on the department’s data records and court data and had committed no felonies in the state, nor was he currently under supervision from the state.

A reporter then asked when, exactly, Pretti’s gun came out. “This situation is evolving,” Bovino said. “This is under investigation. Those facts will come to light.”

On Saturday afternoon, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference in which she declared, definitively, that the shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti hours earlier was justified.

“Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots,” she said. “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”

Noem said that the shooting would be investigated, “just like we do all other officer-involved shootings”.

A reporter asked her if Pretti brandished a gun, and at what point he had been disarmed – key questions that news organizations had begun to clarify with carefully examined video evidence. At the time of the press conference, analysis from several videos indicated Pretti had been disarmed before being shot.

“This individual showed up to impede a law enforcement operation and assaulted our officers,” Noem replied. “They responded according to their training and took action to defend the officer’s life and those of the public around them … This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers.”

No evidence has emerged to suggest that Pretti used a weapon to assault anyone.

“It is nonsense and it’s lies,” said Minnesota governor Tim Walz at a press conference about six hours after the shooting. “I’m rejecting the rush to judgment within 15 minutes of this … They already will slander this individual. They’ve already made this the case, and I will just say, you will all start to see it, and some of you probably have. There’s multiple angles of this, and I’ll go back to what we talked about before. They’re telling you not to trust your eyes and ears, not to trust the facts that you’re seeing in front of them.”