It’s been more than two months since Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Cellphone footage viewed around the country shows the 38-year-old ICU nurse being shoved to the ground and surrounded by agents before gunshots ring out.
It was the second fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by immigration agents this year.
Those deaths, and the Department of Homeland Security’s response, sparked nationwide protests, including here in Arizona. They also contributed to the partial government shutdown in February, after Congress failed to agree on DHS reforms and greenlight funding for the agency.
Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly introduced legislation to create a use-of-force standard for ICE and require body cameras. Multiple lawmakers have also probed ICE and Border Patrol officials about existing body camera use.
“I just want to know how many cameras, right now, do you have, on your agents?” Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) asked Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott during a Feb. 10 hearing.
Scott said about half of the roughly 20,000 Border Patrol agents active nationwide are equipped with the cameras. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Thompson about 3,000 of roughly 13,000 ICE agents also have cameras.
While the use of body cameras for federal immigration officers is a central question in Washington now, that effort actually dates back years.
‘Not seen as a political program’
Dan Herman, senior director of national security, accountability, and reform at the Center for American Progress, says plans to equip Border Patrol agents with cameras began during the first Trump administration.
“They officially launched the program in 2021, but CBP had already been moving toward adopting body worn cameras,” said Herman, who also served as a senior accountability adviser for CBP under President Joe Biden. “It was not seen as a political program.”
Herman says CBP prioritized giving Border Patrol agents cameras first, since they were more likely to be working in remote areas without other surveillance than their CBP customs officers working at border ports of entry.
Efforts to release footage from serious use-of-force incidents began after a Biden 2022 executive order, which required cameras for all federal law enforcement and a new database of officer misconduct managed by the Department of Justice.
DHS established its first agency-wide camera program a year later, and said it would build off of the 2021 pilot — which had already issued 7,000 cameras to Border Patrol agents. Edited footage of use-of-force incidents by agents began appearing on CBP’s website that spring.
The first entry, from March of that year, was of a smuggling incident south of Tucson, where an agent fatally shot a man through his car window as he attempted to flee the scene.
The webpage is still active today, but nothing’s been added since last May. That means high profile incidents — like the Alex Pretti shooting, or another in Chicago in October, where an agent shot and wounded U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez — are missing.
Herman says it’s not clear what happened.
“Is this neglect, is this lack of staffing, right? You need people on the back end to do this,” he said. “Is this deliberate effort to sort of torpedo it? We don't know … and I think that kind of requires Congress … to kind of do its job and demand answers.”
CBP and DHS did not respond to questions about whether the footage release program is still in effect. But during a Feb. 12 hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, CBP Commissioner Scott said that multiple agencies were still reviewing evidence from the Pretti shooting — including body camera footage.
“I can’t jump to a conclusion ... either direction. I would ask America to do the same thing. But, I am committed to transparency, to making sure all the information we have is made public when it’s appropriate,” Scott said.
To date, the government has not released any of the footage from that shooting. DHS and CBP didn’t respond to questions about whether it would.
Rollback on reforms
Katherine Hawkins, senior legal analyst with the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, says the footage program wasn’t perfect. Families with loved ones killed by immigration agents struggled to obtain unedited body camera footage, for example, and agents’ cameras weren’t always turned on during shootings.
Still, she says, seeing reform efforts get rolled back — as the Border Patrol’s reach expands — is a bad sign.
“There’s also a worry that, beyond the body camera footage release being rolled back, that it might be a bit of a canary in the coal mine,” she said.
Hawkins says getting footage now usually requires court proceedings — like in October, when a federal judge in Chicago ordered former Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino to wear a body camera.
“He didn't actually get one until ordered to by a judge,” she said. “Then there's also the question of, even if evidence exists on a body camera … is that really an adequate safeguard if you've just got wholesale violations of constitutional rights and a lack of independent investigation?”
Hawkins says other Biden-era initiatives, like a requirement for use-of-force incidents to be investigated by an oversight body, are also now at risk.
“It’s not enough to say oh they have to wear body cameras. You have to actually see the footage, or it doesn’t amount to much,” she said.
That question came up back in January, just days after the Minneapolis shootings, when an alleged smuggler was shot and wounded by Border Patrol agents along a remote desert highway outside Tucson.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told reporters his department was handling the investigation into Border Patrol’s use-of-force.
Back then, Nanos said he wasn’t sure whether agents were wearing cameras.
“We’re looking at all of that right now. I don’t know that. I know there’s video, where it came from, I don’t know,” he said at a Jan. 27 press conference.
This month, a spokesperson with the sheriff’s department said the case had been referred to the Pima County Attorney’s Office.
The spokesman didn’t release details about their review of the incident, but said investigators had viewed the body camera video available. That footage, he said, was back in custody of the Border Patrol.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series looking at the state of reform efforts for the Department of Homeland Security.
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A federal judge is once again weighing whether to intervene on behalf of a former Phoenix police sergeant fired for his behavior at an anti-ICE student protest in January. -
Audiences on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border watched the same movie just feet from each other during the Film on the Fence event. -
Jerod MacDonald-Evoy, a reporter for the Arizona Mirror, found use-of-force incidents at Arizona ICE facilities — including a pepper spray incident at Phoenix Mesa Gateway Airport — are up 333%. -
Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller overstepped his authority by entering a partnership with federal immigration authorities, a Maricopa County Superior Court Judge ruled Friday. -
The Maricopa County Medical Examiner determined that a Haitian man’s death while in ICE custody was caused by a severe infection related to dental issues. That comes after the man’s family accused immigration agents of failing to provide proper treatment for a toothache.
