Believe Your Eyes
Chances are, you’ve seen Richard Tsong-Taatarii’s photo. Taken Wednesday in Minneapolis, it shows an unidentifiable protester face down on the ground; two Border Patrol agents are on top of him, holding him there, while a third unloads pepper spray into his face from just inches away.
Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026
— Minnesota Star Tribune (@startribune.com) January 22, 2026 at 6:19 PM
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The photo ran on the front page of The Minnesota Star Tribune on Friday and already feels like a defining image of the long ICE incursion in Minneapolis—a powerful illustration of how the agency has acted, in broad daylight, with excessive force and impunity.
This is just one example of federal agents terrorizing people in the city. There’s also the photo of a 5-year-old boy being detained outside his home. There’s the video of an agent chasing a teenager through the snow on a residential street as the boy yells “I’m legal” in Spanish. And yesterday, the world saw footage of Alex Pretti, a nurse who worked in the ICU of a Veterans Affairs hospital, as agents pepper-sprayed him, knocked him down, appeared to remove a legally permitted gun from his person, and fired at least 10 bullets into his prone body. (Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino has claimed that the agents were the “real victims” and suggested that they were acting in self-defense.)
[Jonathan Rauch: Yes, it’s fascism]
There are still unknowns in this case, as there are in many of the chaotic moments that have come out of ICE’s recent surge in Minneapolis. But there are basic facts: Pretti was helping a woman when agents swarmed him. He did not have a gun in his hand. In the past 18 days, agents have used excessive force against numerous people in Minneapolis and killed two of them—first Renee Good, now Pretti. We know about this violence—we can see it ourselves from numerous angles—largely because of video and photographic evidence taken by everyday citizens, many of whom have purposefully set out to make sure that they are recording what is happening for the world to see.
Tsong-Taatarii credits these volunteers, many of whom are trying to protect their neighbors, for his now-famous shot. On Wednesday, Tsong-Taatarii had been following Bovino but realized that was “a wild goose chase,” and was alerted by a group to an escalating situation in South Minneapolis. He drove over and got the photo. When I spoke with him on Friday, he told me that protest observers have set up Signal group chats, which help track agents’ movements across the city. He uses the chats to make sure he can be in the right place at the right time to document what is happening.
If it still is not clear why this matters, compare the documented reality with the Trump administration’s blatant propaganda. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement yesterday that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Similarly, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called Pretti a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement.” Video footage directly contradicts these claims. It shows Pretti holding a phone in his hand, pointing it at an agent after another shoved a woman. He was shot again and again while on the ground.
The full evidence around Pretti’s death has not yet been released. If he was indeed filming agents before he was shot, there is likely first-person footage on his phone. But Pretti’s last seconds were captured from multiple angles, in sickening footage widely distributed on social media and by news organizations. It is able to be seen and dissected online precisely because of the observers who were there to document it, who watched as federal agents piled atop Pretti and who did not drop their phones when the gunshots rang out.
[Read: Minneapolis is a Second Amendment wake-up call]
The work of observers and photographers in Minneapolis right now is as dangerous as it is crucial, because ICE’s presence in Minneapolis is provoking not only physical conflict but an informational conflict. Agents themselves are pulling out their phones during altercations with protesters. According to The Washington Post, the White House has urged ICE to “produce videos for social media of immigrant arrests and confrontations to portray its push for mass deportation as critical to protecting the American way of life.” Last week, President Trump posted on Truth Social that ICE must “start talking about” the people they’re arresting in Minnesota, writing: “Show the Numbers, Names, and Faces of the violent criminals, and show them NOW.” When the footage doesn’t suit the administration, it seems to have no issue doctoring images to suit its alternate reality, as it did on Thursday. Agents had arrested an attorney who was protesting at a local church, and the White House posted a photo of this woman that was altered, presumably by AI, to make it look like she was crying.
A dark irony of our current age is that there is more video and photographic evidence than ever before, and yet propagandists can coerce or convince others to not believe what they can see with their own eyes. (See also: January 6, 2021.)
If the truth is ever to win out over propaganda, it can only do so in the face of overwhelming evidence, the collection of which has become ever more treacherous in the second year of Trump’s second presidency. But the news and footage of Pretti’s death seems to have broken through the usual informational chaos—at least to some extent. On Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook pages, the videos of Pretti’s last moments appear to have galvanized people who don’t normally engage or post about politics. And it is thanks to the bystander videos of Pretti’s killing that people are trying to hold the administration accountable. This morning, the CNN host Dana Bash referenced the footage in an interview with Bovino, asking him why Pretti was shot after being disarmed. “We’re not going to adjudicate that here on TV in one freeze frame,” Bovino replied. “It’s not a freeze frame,” Bash said. “We’re showing a video of one of your agents taking the gun away. And that happened before Pretti was shot.”
Minneapolis residents are risking their lives to document what is happening to their city. In Pretti’s case, doing so cost him everything. We should believe what we can see with our own eyes. One can only imagine what Miller and the administration might have said about the shooting and Pretti if there weren’t an abundance of footage. Thankfully, because of the observers, the world can see for itself.