This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s partnership with NOTUS, a nonpartisan news organization that covers government and politics with the fresh eyes of early career journalists and the expertise of veteran reporters.
Alex Pretti was filming immigration agents in Minneapolis not long before one of them killed him. In the hours since, bystander footage contradicting the official narrative from the Trump administration led to a swell of outrage, even from the president’s allies.
The killing showed the dangers of filming law enforcement in America. It also showed how vital it is for accountability.
Activists, free speech advocates, and fed-up citizens nationwide are grappling with what experts say is a flashpoint for the First Amendment. They say filming law enforcement operations is a clearly established right and is essential for documenting and investigating potential abuses. While the administration has sought to stop observers, arguing that people filming and following immigration agents puts their safety and missions at risk, free speech advocates say documenting what’s happening is as important as ever.
“There’s an element of necessity here for accountability,” Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said Sunday. “If we didn’t have video footage of what happened to Mr. Pretti yesterday, what would the government tell us? What would we know about it?”
Creeley added that “they are taking steps seemingly designed to evade accountability, going after folks filming in public exercising their First Amendment rights, wearing masks, expanding the definition of ‘doxing,’ which is not a legal term of art, to include any discussion of where ICE is and what they’re doing.”
Pretti appeared to film on his phone before officers threw him to the ground, took away a gun he was legally authorized to carry, and shot him 10 times. Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot and killed by immigration agents earlier this month after she and her wife stopped to observe and verbally confront them. After officers yelled conflicting orders at her, she turned her wheel and attempted to drive away as a federal agent shot her three times.
In both cases, the Trump administration quickly said the deceased were threatening the lives of officers, who acted in defense. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at a press conference Saturday that Pretti, who officials said carried a handgun, appeared to want “to inflict maximum damage” and “kill law enforcement” when he arrived.
Officials have not presented any evidence of that claim beyond the fact that he legally had a firearm. Still, Noem on Fox News accused Pretti of assault and said that “these officers used their training, followed their protocols and were in fear of their lives.”
“We do know that he came to that scene and impeded a law enforcement operation, which is against federal law. It’s a felony,” Noem said. “When he did that, interacting with those agents, when they tried to get him to disengage, he became aggressive and resisted them.”
DHS did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday about these concerns from First Amendment advocates and experts. The White House referred NOTUS to a prior comment from Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino.
“I believe that all citizens of the United States have those First and Fourth Amendment rights as long as they do so peacefully, and don‘t delay, obstruct or assault anyone in doing that — and that’s the issue here because he was not peacefully doing anything,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash Sunday when asked if people have a right to film law enforcement.
Bystander footage of the lead-up to the shooting directly contradicted much of what administration officials have said about Pretti’s actions, leading to public outrage and calls for investigation from even within the president’s own party.
Critics of the response said that might be why the administration is eager to clamp down on filming.
“You see those independent-minded voters looking at the same video and coming to the direct conclusion that what they’re seeing is state-sponsored terrorism, state-sponsored murder,” said Patrick Eddington, a security and civil rights expert at the Cato Institute.
“The more that these criminal acts are captured on video, and they become part of the public consciousness and the public historical record, the easier it’s going to be to build the kind of political opposition to this regime that will be required to get rid of it one way or the other,” Eddington continued.
On the ground, agents appear empowered by the administration’s rhetoric about observers, threatening and detaining people for filming them. In Minnesota, advocates said that more than a dozen observers had been arrested. More have alleged that frustrated agents have threatened them with arrest for following and filming them on public streets, claiming that doing so is “obstruction” or impeding law enforcement.
Videos of federal law enforcement threatening people for filming them have circulated widely on social media. In one video posted to X, agents reach into a car to grab the cell phone after the two people inside refuse their orders to turn off their phones. Another video shows an agent approaching a person recording and attempting to yank the phone out of their hands.
In the wake of Good’s killing, DHS personnel have been repeatedly documented threatening people following them to record their activities with her fate, too: “You did not learn from what just happened?” one ICE agent asked a filming observer in another video. “Go home to your kids.”
“It’s very clear that there’s an established right to record law enforcement officers conducting their duties in public, but basically, you have an administration that has completely flouted those protections and has a very different perspective on what folks are doing when they’re recording,” said Scarlet Kim, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
“It’s not limited to just L.A., Chicago and Minneapolis,” Kim continued. “We’re seeing, basically, the administration engaging in a really widespread practice of retaliating against people who are observing and recording their activities.”
While constitutional experts said there are protections afforded to people who film law enforcement activities in public places, there are not many legal remedies that people can take when federal personnel violate those rights. Federal law enforcement officers are offered more forms of legal immunity than state and municipal officers.
Both Kim and Creeley suggested that Congress should pass legislation to provide more pathways for people to seek relief when federal agents violate First Amendment rights, especially given that this administration has shown no signs of reversing its position on the matter.
DHS officials in 2025 repeatedly said they consider people filming their operations as acts of violence.
Some First Amendment advocates said the administration is moving the line between peaceful observation and criminal interference to discourage people from filming them — in other words, to chill others’ speech.
“They’ve conflated, actually, the photography and the videography, as conduct, and said that those images have been used to ‘dox’ their agents,” said Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel to the National Press Photographers Association. “The public and the press have a right to photograph and record these things, as long as they are not obstructing, and the fact that they’re out there photographing, recording cannot be construed itself as an obstruction, as an interference.”
Beyond claiming that observers filming DHS personnel obstruct their operations or put agents in danger, the administration has routinely labeled those protesting its immigration enforcement policies as domestic terrorists. In September, Trump signed an executive order that effectively mandated federal law enforcement to conduct surveillance of citizens and organizations based on their speech and policy positions.
In Portland, Maine, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer was filmed taking photos of an observer’s car. The ICE agent told the observer that “now you’re considered a domestic terrorist” and suggested there was a “database” of observers, the existence of which DHS has denied.
The president of the Institute for Free Speech, David Keating, said federal officers appear to lack proper training for de-escalating high-pressure situations, and individual protesters must use “common sense” when interacting with agents.
“If things look like they’re dangerous, don’t get close to it,” Keating said. “You are not empowered to get in the middle of it and try to stop actions done by the police.”
Nicholas Williams, the policy and campaigns officer at the UK-based organization Index on Censorship, said the dissonance between the Trump administration’s rhetoric justifying DHS operations and what people see in video recordings can lead people to believe the burden of documenting abuses falls on them.
“When you have absolute or runaway impunity, when you’ve got state bodies being able to work without oversight, when you’ve got law enforcement agencies working without accountability, the public have to almost step in to fill that gap,” Williams said.