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When agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed Veterans Administration intensive care unit nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, ICE spokespeople and other mouthpieces for President Donald Trump’s misbegotten policies didn’t tarry when it came to smearing the name and the reputation of the dead man.

They said that Alex Pretti, 37, was a “domestic terrorist.” One particularly idiotic flack called the fallen healer an “assassin.” The Trump propagandists swore up and down that the shooting was justified.

They were certain of that, they said.

The haste with which ICE swept the site of the killing clear of evidence suggests the opposite is true.

Fortunately, there were eyewitnesses—eyewitnesses with phones capable of capturing video of the tragedy—who could establish a more accurate record than those who work for a president with a well-documented and longstanding contempt for the truth.

Those videos, unedited and shot from multiple angles, revealed that Pretti simply tried to record a group of ICE agents manhandling a lone woman—and that he attempted, peacefully, to defend her when they began pepper spraying her.

He never brandished the gun that he had in a holster and for which he had a permit. The first shot by an ICE agent occurred after another ICE agent had taken the gun from Pretti.

That shot and all that followed were fired as he lay helpless on the ground.

Confronted by such evidence, most people—at least those with consciences—would have the good grace to shut up, if they couldn’t find the strength of character to apologize to Pretti and his family.

But Trump’s thugs did no such thing.

They continued to lie even when it was clear to everyone who hasn’t fallen prey to MAGA brainwashing that they were lying and lying outrageously.

These latest lies are part of a pattern.

Trump and his minions like to say ICE’s activities are part of a campaign to crack down on undocumented immigration.

If so, they’re going about it in a very strange way.

Minnesota has—depending upon which survey instrument is used—between 81,000 and 130,000 undocumented immigrants.

That may sound like a lot, but not when compared to Texas and Florida. Texas has between 1.7 million and 2.1 million undocumented immigrants. Florida has between 600,000 and 1.2 million.

Common sense would seem to dictate that ICE should focus its efforts on those two states rather than on establishing itself as an occupying force in Minneapolis, a city nearly 1,500 miles from the Mexican border.

If the focus was on eliminating undocumented immigration, that is.

But it isn’t.

Uprooting undocumented immigrants in Texas and Florida would devastate the construction, hospitality and agricultural industries in those states. Texas and Florida are reliably red states, but neither is so Republican that having a GOP-led economic meltdown couldn’t tip the scales in an election year.

And 2026, of course, is an election year.

Minnesota, on the other hand, is a blue state, one that demonstrates progressive policies can work. (The average annual salary in Minnesota is roughly 10% higher than that in either Texas or Florida.)

That makes the home of the Twin Cities an attractive target for an administration that hates the notion that anyone anywhere might think, act, speak or live differently than the MAGA crowd does.

The fact that the two people ICE agents have killed in Minnesota—Pretti and Renee Good—both were U.S. citizens without criminal records suggests that the agency is at least as focused on intimidating dissenters into silence as it is on rounding up immigrants.

So does the Trump administration’s insistence that we ignore the evidence before our eyes and instead swallow still more lies, even when those lies defame our fellow citizens who led good lives.

Students of the late historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt know what’s going on here.

The point of flooding the zone with lies the way the Trump administration and its apologists have isn’t to convince us that what they’re saying is true.

No, the point is to get us to believe that there is no such thing as truth—that everything is subjective and that reality is as malleable as soft clay.

But truth does exist.

And reality?

Well, it’s as hard and genuine as the bullets that killed Alex Pretti.