A 37-year-old US citizen was shot and killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis.

 

Photo Alex Pretti. Photograph: Dimitri Drekonja

By Nuestra America News Desk

Shooting of Alex Pretti comes less than three weeks after Renee Nicole Good was killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis.

US federal law enforcement officers on Saturday January 24 fatally shot Alex Pretti, 37, comes after Renee Nicole Good, also a 37-year-old American citizen, was shot to death on January 7^th by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis, with video showing her trying to drive away from a confrontation, sparking protests nationwide.

City and local police officials said in their statement that Pretti’s shooting happened around West 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue. It asked, “the public to remain calm.”

Pretti was a registered nurse working in the intensive care unit at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, which serves veterans.

Minneapolis’s push for a temporary restraining order (TRO) against federal immigration operations is a legal escalation born out of a rapidly intensifying public-safety crisis—one that local leaders say crossed a new line killing of Pretti.

According to federal officials (including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem), Pretti “approached” Border Patrol officers during a “targeted” immigration operation while armed; officers say they tried to disarm him, he “reacted violently,” and an agent fired “defensive shots.”

But multiple bystander videos described by local officials and reported by major outlets show a more contested sequence—Pretti appearing to hold a phone shortly before he is tackled, and an agent emerging from the scuffle with a gun before the shooting. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara also said local police had not received a clear “public safety statement” from federal agents explaining what happened before the recording begins.

For Mayor Jacob Frey, that gap—plus the visible chaos—became the immediate justification for emergency court action. In a Saturday afternoon briefing, Frey said the city would file a declaration in its federal lawsuit to press the judge to rule Monday on a TRO that would provide “immediate relief” and help stop the operation.

The legal backdrop: Minneapolis is not starting from scratch.

This TRO request isn’t a standalone idea—it’s tied to an existing, broader lawsuit already filed by Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul on January 12, 2026, seeking injunctive relief against what they describe as “Operation Metro Surge,” an unprecedented deployment of federal immigration personnel in the Twin Cities.

In that complaint, the plaintiffs paint the surge as a public-safety and constitutional emergency—alleging “militarized raids,” unlawful stops and arrests, operations in “sensitive” locations like schools and hospitals, and a pattern of escalation including shootings. The suit explicitly invokes state and local sovereign interests (including Tenth Amendment framing) and argues the federal tactics undermining residents’ ability to live, work, attend school, and access services without fear.

So, after Pretti’s killing, the city’s message to the court is essentially: the harms we warned about are not hypothetical—they are ongoing and escalating.