A former federal law enforcement trainer says the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers raises serious concerns about their tactical decision-making and use of force.
Marc Brown, who spent five years training officers at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, said video of the confrontation leaves “a lot of unanswered questions,” particularly about why officers confronted Pretti, who appeared to be filming a deportation operation using only his cellphone.
“We live in a digital age. People are going to record law enforcement,” Brown said. “So the question is, what was the need to engage him in the first place?”
Brown, now the academic director of University of South Carolina’s Excellence in Policing and Public Safety Program, criticized the officers’ decision to deploy Oleoresin Capsicum spray — or OC spray — in a crowded area, calling it both tactically risky and potentially dangerous.
“OC is an aerosol,” Brown said. “Everybody around is going to get exposed — demonstrators, bystanders, and other officers. Now everyone has chemical irritant in their eyes.”
Brown also questioned the escalation that followed, particularly the moment officers opened fire after Pretti’s firearm appeared to have been removed from his waistband.
“A firearm in someone’s waistband is a concern,” Brown said. “A firearm in someone’s hand is an immediate threat. But those are very different things.”
The former police officer also noted that video appears to show multiple officers restraining Pretti at the time of the shooting. This, he said, raises doubts about whether the legal threshold for deadly force had been met.
“Use-of-force policy generally requires an imminent threat,” he said. “I don’t know if that threshold was met here… Just because someone has a gun doesn’t automatically justify lethal force. You need more facts.”
More of the facts emerged Tuesday, after a government report sent to Congress and obtained by CBS News revealed two U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents fired their weapons during the fatal shooting of Minneapolis ICU nurse Alex Pretti over the weekend. Additional information about their identities has not been released.
The report, shared with congressional officials Tuesday and authored by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility revealed that a Border Patrol agent discharged his CBP-issued Glock 19, and a CBP officer also discharged his CBP-issued Glock 47 at Pretti, after attempting to apprehend him.
The new information provided by CBP differs from the initial accounts offered by the Department of Homeland Security, which said in a statement over the weekend that one Border Patrol agent had fired “defensive shots.”
Beyond the shooting itself, Brown questioned the broader tactical approach, saying officers may have failed to disengage once their mission was complete.
“Once you’ve accomplished your objective — whether it’s an arrest or serving a warrant — it’s time to leave,” he said. “There’s no reason to stay and engage with crowds or protesters.”
ICE training ramp-up
The training of Department of Homeland Security law enforcement officers is under heavy scrutiny after the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Pretti this month, both by federal agents in separate incidents during deportation operations in Minneapolis.
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has been ramping up its recruitment efforts since late last summer, and officials say they shortened and restructured its basic training program as part of their hiring push. By mid-November, about 1,600 recruits had completed six weeks of basic training and were among those sent into U.S. cities, including Minneapolis, to carry out the Trump administration’s deportations.
Overall, roughly 3,000 ICE, Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have been operating in the Twin Cities. The ICE agent who shot Good was not a recent recruit, but rather a 10-year law enforcement veteran with ICE and was seriously injured in June in a separate incident in the Minneapolis area when he was dragged by a car during an attempted arrest, court records show.
Caleb Vitello, who was acting ICE director and is now the agency’s assistant director for the Office of Training and Development, spoke with CBS News late last year, prior to “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis. Vitello discussed how recruits are trained to handle encounters with protesters and how they should approach de-escalating tensions, including how and under what conditions they should apply use-of-force and less-than-lethal weapons.
“Our use of force continuum is officer presence, verbal commands, soft techniques, hard techniques and deadly force,” he told CBS News.
“We always want to de-escalate,” he said, adding, “we just don’t want to fight.”
“Say ‘Police’ upon engagement”
Vitello said, “All of our officers are trained to say ‘Police’ upon engagement. It definitely helps when they see a badge, but No. 1 word is ‘Police. Police. Police. Police.'”
He stressed that agents should be identifying themselves if their firearms are visible.
“That’s rule No. 1: If I can see the gun, I should also be able to see the badge,” he said.
Brown also told CBS News that CBP training instructs officers to alert others when a weapon is seen, not immediately open fire.
According to the report submitted to Congress, during the struggle that preceded Pretti’s fatal shooting, one Border Patrol agent yelled, ‘He’s got a gun!’ multiple times.
“Approximately five seconds later, a [Border Patrol agent] discharged his CBP-issued Glock 19 and a [CBP officer] also discharged his CBP-issued Glock 47 at Pretti. After the shooting, a BPA advised he had possession of Pretti’s firearm,” the CBP report added.
“Training is to call out ‘gun’ — not to start shooting just because you see one,” Brown told CBS News. “Seeing a firearm doesn’t automatically justify pulling the trigger.”
ICE leaders have also noted their agents may conduct deportation operations without wearing name-identifying badges, and they often wear masks. DHS officials allow them to conceal their identities out of concern the agents will be doxxed, despite the risks that their masking could be exacerbating tensions with civilians.
“With the amount of cameras out there, social media, so on and so forth, they are going to get doxxed,” Vitello said. “And I can tell you having to call your wife and tell her to lock the door ’cause you just received a threat is a terrible feeling.”
Using “OC” or pepper spray
Oleoresin Capsicum, also called “OC” spray or pepper spray, is what’s considered a “soft technique,” says Vitello, meaning “it hurts, but it doesn’t injure.”
A soft technique “is appropriate when a subject is passively non-compliant,” he said. In that situation, agents have given “very clear verbal commands” to people to put their hands up. When they fail to do so, Vitello says, “you’ve demonstrated yourself to be passively non-compliant.”
Trainees are instructed to create a distance from a subject “greater than six feet” and to aim for the eyes because “that’s what is going to incapacitate you.”
Deploying pepper balls
Pepper balls, which are filled with OC, are intended to be fired from launchers, and they burst on impact. They’re most often used during protests.
Vitello said, “You want to aim for the chest. You want to aim for the stomach. You want to aim for those areas. We teach our folks not to aim at the face, right?” Because that “will do a significant amount of damage.” The face and groin areas are to be avoided, he said.
In October, pressed on whether firing from elevated positions violates DHS policy, CBP Commander at Large Gregory Bovino insisted, “It doesn’t matter where you fire from… that is a less lethal device for area saturation.” As for shots striking protesters above the waist, he said, “If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them. Don’t protest and don’t trespass.”
Asked to weigh in on Bovino’s statement, at the time, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said, “ICE and CBP are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves.”
The baton: “a fantastic de-escalation tool”
Officers are trained to use the baton for less-lethal force applications around large muscle groups and the peroneal pressure points around the legs.
But “the head, neck, sternum and spine are what we call deadly force areas,” Vitello said. “So that is a less lethal tool that can become lethal as necessary,” if, for instance, a subject draws a knife.
He calls the baton “a fantastic de-escalation tool,” and told CBS News, “I have drawn my Baton countless times in the field. I have never had to hit anybody with it,” because coupled with “a strong command…, they listen.”
Many high-profile incidents under scrutiny have involved CBP agents, who are traditionally trained for border enforcement and interdiction rather than targeted immigration operations in major U.S. cities or civil unrest situations.
“A completely different environment”
John Sandweg, who was acting general counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and acting director of ICE, said CBP also trains its agents in New Mexico along the border and operates in a very different environment from other agencies, often in dangerous situations in the desert apprehending groups of smugglers and members of drug cartels.
“Of all the agencies, the most concerning to me and others has been the border patrol presence. You’re just trained that it’s okay to be so aggressive because you’re just operating in a completely different environment,” Sandweg said.
“CBP and ICE personnel are being asked to do a different kind of enforcement mission, which is really large scale sweeps of densely populated civilian areas with less training and perhaps not the right training versus the more targeted set of enforcement actions that they have historically engaged in,” CBS News national security contributor Sam Vinograd told CBS News. “And if they are going to move into these large scale sweeps and at large arrests in civilian areas, they need a different kind of training to minimize risk to the public and minimize risk to themselves.”
According to current and former DHS officials, including Vinograd, operations in Minneapolis also reflect a broader shift in how the federal government is operating during protests, relying on immigration agents and officers to perform widening sweeps in public spaces such as gas stations and restaurants. The sweeps, in addition to crowd-management responsibilities, are typically dealt with by local police, who often have more experience and training in de-escalating large demonstrations and tamping down civil unrest.
Sandweg also said the Border Patrol has no business operating in a city like Minneapolis because their training is geared more toward encountering drug cartels and migrants along the border.
“They are trained to operate with a high degree of aggression because that’s what you need to train them, to let them do their job safely to maximize their protection,” he said. “But you take those experiences and that training and you say, ‘okay, now your job is to decide where is that line? What constitutes unlawful impeding a federal agent in the performance of his duties versus what constitutes first amendment protected speech?’ That’s an incredibly difficult thing I think for any law enforcement officer, especially for one who just never encounters that in his career and is not really trained to deal with that.”
Sandweg thinks the Trump administration has encouraged a more aggressive approach to these operations.
“They were very much supportive of this,” he said. “They were quick to, you know, say everything the officers did was completely justified. I feel like [it] created an ‘us versus them’ mentality. We lost sight of the fact that DHS and ICE and CBP are agencies that serve the United States of America — they’re to promote public safety.”
Accountability
In December, Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee formally asked the Government Accountability Office to examine DHS’s rapid hiring and training surge, signaling growing congressional oversight interest as expands enforcement staffing at an unprecedented pace.
Several House Democrats are pushing to include language in this year’s DHS funding bill that would increase training requirements for ICE officers, and Senate Democrats are threatening to block a package to fund major parts of the government this week, following the deadly shootings of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday.
But a partial government shutdown would likely have little impact on the administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement operations, since the relevant DHS agencies received a massive funding infusion in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.
Leaders of the three major immigration enforcement agencies are set to testify before a pair of House and Senate committees in February.
Todd Lyons, the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Rodney Scott, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection; and Joseph Edlow, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, are scheduled to appear before the House Homeland Security Committee on Feb. 10, and then testify before the Senate Homeland Security Committee two days later on Feb. 12.
