By Renee Hickman, Ted Hesson, Brad Heath and Kristina Cooke
WASHINGTON, Jan 27 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s top immigration officials have repeatedly made statements after violent encounters involving federal agents – including two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis this month – that were later contradicted by evidence, a Reuters review found.
Trump officials quickly painted the two recently shot dead – Renee Good and Alex Pretti – as aggressors and said the shootings were justified. But video and other evidence soon emerged that contrasted sharply with these accounts, fueling questions about the credibility of federal officials and doubts about their willingness to fully investigate these and other incidents.
The Reuters review included these two incidents and four others in recent months that, collectively, show a pattern in which officials rushed to defend immigration officers without waiting for key facts to emerge – in what former immigration officials called a clear break with past practice for federal agencies in such situations.
These initial representations have been challenged by video footage or other evidence, sometimes in court. In one non-lethal shooting in Minnesota, court documents emerged showing the incident began with a case of mistaken identity. A death in a detention center that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security described as an attempted suicide was later ruled a homicide by a county medical examiner.
“They are trying to control a narrative from the very start, and they don’t seem to care when they’re proven wrong,” said David Lapan, who was the DHS press secretary in 2017, during Trump’s first administration.
In response to a Reuters request for comment, DHS pointed to previous statements about the incidents involving their officers, stressing the need for officer safety as they carry out Trump’s crackdown.
“We have seen a highly coordinated campaign of violence against our law enforcement,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, adding that the department aims to “give swift, accurate information to the American people.”
Here is a look at six incidents in Minneapolis, Chicago and Texas:
DHS SAID PRETTI BRANDISHED A GUN BUT VIDEO SHOWED A CELL PHONE
After Pretti, 37, was shot and killed during an encounter with U.S. Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement noting that Pretti was carrying a firearm but did not say that it remained holstered. The statement said the encounter “looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
DHS said Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun” in a post on the social network X, sharing a photo of the alleged weapon.
“The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted,” DHS said.
White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, said on X that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin.”
Video of the encounter verified by Reuters showed Pretti holding a cell phone and not a gun as he was wrestled to the ground by the agents. Video evidence also showed that an officer removed Pretti’s gun from his body shortly before the first shots were fired. He had a legal permit to carry the weapon.
In response to a Reuters request for comment on Monday, DHS said in a statement that Pretti “committed a federal crime while armed as he obstructed an active law enforcement operation” and that the situation was “evolving.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing on Monday that Trump “wants to let the investigation continue and let the facts lead.”
DHS CLAIMS GOOD ‘WEAPONIZED HER VEHICLE’
Homeland Security described Good, the 37-year-old woman shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on January 7, as a “violent rioter” who had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them – an act of domestic terrorism.” It said the officer who killed her “saved his own life and that of his fellow officers.”
Trump said Good “ran over the ICE officer,” who he said shot her in self-defense.
Videos of the shooting taken from several vantage points – including cell phone video recorded by the officer who shot Good – conflicted with those claims.
The videos show Good in her car as agents rushed up toward her as her vehicle partly blocked the street. One of the agents, Jonathan Ross, positioned himself near the front of her car; another was standing by the driver-side window. The videos show the car moving forward, its wheels turned away from Ross, who drew his weapon and fired three shots at Good as her car went past, killing her.
Video reviewed by Reuters appeared to show Ross and the vehicle making contact, but Reuters could not determine whether Ross touched the vehicle or if it struck him.
ICE PURSUED CAR THINKING DRIVER WAS SOMEONE ELSE
On January 15, DHS said officers “were conducting a targeted traffic stop” in Minneapolis for Venezuelan immigrant Julio Sosa-Celis when he sped away, crashed his car and fled on foot to an apartment building.
DHS said at the time that Sosa-Celis and two other men hit an ICE officer who pursued him with a snow shovel and broom handle, prompting the shooting.
Court documents unsealed last week told a different story.
An FBI affidavit said the ICE officers had scanned a license plate registered with a different person suspected of an immigration violation, leading them to chase the wrong person before the alleged assault and shooting.
The affidavit said another man was driving the car and was the sole occupant – not Sosa-Celis. The car’s actual driver – another Venezuelan immigrant – crashed and fled to an apartment building where Sosa-Celis was present, it said.
At the apartment building, an ICE officer trying to detain the car’s driver was struck by him and Sosa-Celis with a broom – and a third man with a shovel – before the officer fired his weapon, the FBI affidavit said.
While DHS said initially that the officer “fired a defensive shot to defend his life” during the ambush, the FBI affidavit said the alleged attackers dropped the broom and shovel when they saw the officer draw his gun and were fleeing toward the apartment as he fired.
Robin Wolpert, an attorney representing Sosa-Celis, said he would plead not guilty if indicted.
Wolpert said the affidavit established that the ICE officer shot Sosa-Celis from 10 feet away as he was fleeing, which showed the officer “was not in immediate danger.”
DHS did not address the FBI affidavit with the different account of the incident when asked for comment.
SHIFTING STATEMENTS AFTER DETENTION DEATH
When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced the death of Cuban immigrant Geraldo Lunas Campos in a Texas detention center on January 3, it said he experienced “medical distress” and that the incident was being investigated.
A January 15 report in the Washington Post said the El Paso County medical examiner’s office was likely to rule it a homicide, with the preliminary cause of death “asphyxia due to neck and chest compression.” The Post cited a witness who said guards were choking Lunas, who said he could not breathe, details that were absent from ICE’s statement.
DHS issued a new statement after the article was published that said Lunas tried to commit suicide and then resisted security officers and died.
The medical examiner released a report last week that found the death was a homicide due to asphyxia from neck and torso compression, according to the Post.
The death was one of six deaths in ICE detention in January, an unusually high number.
JUDGE CALLS OUT GOVERNMENT’S ‘WIDESPREAD MISREPRESENTATIONS’
A federal judge wrote in a November opinion restricting immigration agents’ use of force in Chicago that the government’s “widespread misrepresentations call into question everything that defendants say they are doing in their characterization” of the crackdown.
In one instance, Homeland Security posted on X that “rioters surrounded law enforcement” and “attacked” a van carrying detainees, an encounter that escalated until someone threw a rock at Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, hitting him in the head. Five days later, Bovino said in court that the rock had not hit him when he first deployed tear gas.
“It did almost hit me,” he said.
U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis said Bovino “lied multiple times” about why he needed to throw a tear gas canister at protesters.
Neither DHS nor Bovino responded to requests for comment about the incident and the comments by Ellis.
In the same case, Ellis also questioned authorities’ claims that they needed to use tear gas so that they could leave the scene of another operation in October, saying the agents themselves had prolonged the encounter through their actions.
“Every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything” the government said, Ellis wrote.
Homeland Security said in a statement after the ruling that officers were facing “rioters, gangbangers and terrorists” and that they had shown “incredible restraint in exhausting all options before force is escalated.”
GOVERNMENT DROPS CASE AGAINST U.S. CITIZEN SHOT BY BORDER AGENT
On October 4, Homeland Security said that several drivers “rammed” law enforcement officers in Broadview, a Chicago suburb where an immigration detention center has been the site of clashes between protesters and immigration agents.
DHS said one of the drivers, a woman, was “armed with a semi-automatic weapon” and that law enforcement was “forced to deploy their weapons and fired defensive shots at an armed U.S. citizen.”
The woman, U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez, was shot by an agent five times. She survived and was indicted on charges of impeding a federal officer with a deadly weapon.
The officer later boasted of his marksmanship in text messages shared in court.
Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Parente, told the court that footage from one of the agents’ bodycams contradicted the DHS account. Martinez, 30, said that one of the agents actually rammed her vehicle with his.
Parente told Reuters Martinez left her gun in her purse on the passenger seat and never brandished it. DHS was wrong about the location of the incident – it occurred in the Chicago neighborhood of Brighton Park, not Broadview.
On November 20, government prosecutors asked the court to dismiss the case against Martinez, saying it was “reviewing new facts and information” from the months-long operation.
DHS referred any questions about federal charges to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Renee Hickman in Chicago; Ted Hesson and Brad Heath in Washington; and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Craig Timberg and Deepa Babington)
