Internal review contradicts Trump administration on Alex Pretti shooting
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, immigration policy correspondent Ximena Bustillo, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.
This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs and Lexie Schapitl, and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:21.8 | you get your podcasts. |
| 0:28.6 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast for Wednesday, January 28th, 2026. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover |
| 0:35.7 | the White House. I'm Hima Bustillo and I cover immigration policy. |
| 0:38.7 | And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And we are recording this at |
| 0:42.9 | 1152 a.m. Immediately after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis, |
| 0:50.1 | top government officials labeled him a domestic terrorist on a mission to kill law enforcement. |
| 0:56.3 | That was immediately contradicted by bystander video and court testimony. Now, Customs and Border |
| 1:02.5 | Protection has done its own initial internal review and its description matches the videos seen |
| 1:09.0 | across social media, but bears little resemblance to what had been the official line. |
| 1:15.2 | Hemanah, you got your hands on this review. Tell us more about it and what it said happened. |
| 1:20.8 | So this was a review that had to be delivered to congressional committees because DHS labeled Preddy's death of death in custody. |
| 1:30.3 | And so that's why we got this review so quickly. |
| 1:34.2 | You know, essentially it was conducted by DHS's own employee conduct review teams. |
| 1:40.2 | And what it says is that Border Patrol officers were actually at first confronted by two women who were blowing their whistles like we've seen other observers do. You know, the whistles are assigned to other people in the neighborhoods that immigration officers and agents are there. And essentially, officers ordered the two women to move out of the roadway. |
| 2:03.9 | We see this matchup with videos of, you know, some of the agents approaching the women and kind of |
| 2:09.0 | shoving them out of the road and into the sidewalk. That is then when the officers encountered |
| 2:15.9 | Alex Prettie, who is the 37-year-old U.S. citizen that was killed. |
... |
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