In an eyewitness video analyzed frame by frame by The New York Times, Alex Pretti raises one hand and holds a phone in the other. Federal agents tackle him, and one appears to find and remove a gun holstered on his hip. Then, an agent shoots — and a second follows. They appear to fire nine more shots as Pretti lies on the ground.
The Trump administration has claimed Pretti was shot because of his legally carried gun — that the agents, later identified in records viewed by ProPublica as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer Raymundo Gutierrez, acted in self-defense. But the tool he was visibly holding in the seconds before he was killed is the one the Trump administration seems truly afraid of — and the one it’s fought harder to control.
The phone Pretti held — like the ones that onlookers used to record his killing and share it with the world — had a kind of power that the Trump administration has repeatedly recognized as both a threat and an instrument, depending on who’s using it.
The visual of Pretti clutching his phone moments before his death is emblematic of millions across the country clutching to digital evidence and online forums to make sense of the events taking place across the country. For those who oppose the federal government’s immigration enforcement tactics, technology — particularly in the form of phones and social media — has become one of the strongest defenses, whether used to alert others to ICE’s presence, organize actions and aid, or help those far away see what’s happening on the ground. For the Trump administration, it’s a visible thorn in its side.
The administration recognizes, and uses, the force of information technology. Official government accounts regularly share right-wing memes with authoritarian and white supremacist talking points, while cabinet secretaries and President Donald Trump quickly jump on X and Truth Social to relay their version of events. Shortly before Pretti’s killing, the administration used social media to counter video evidence of another killing on the streets of Minneapolis at the hands of a federal agent: that of 37-year-old Renee Good. In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed Good “viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” and pointed to one grainy and distant angle of the incident that he said made it “hard to believe” the agent was alive. A Times analysis of several angles of the shooting — including those that were much closer to the incident — found that the “agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired three shots at close range.”
The phone Pretti held had a kind of power that the Trump administration has repeatedly recognized as both a threat and an instrument
Officials across every administration have pushed back on negative press reports or downplayed their significance. Conservatives often point out that the Biden administration recognized the vast power of amplifying information across social media platforms — administration officials urged platforms to remove or limit the spread of medical misinformation during the covid-19 pandemic.
Still, the Trump administration has proved particularly willing to disregard obvious truth and particularly savvy at utilizing technology to shape its account of history. It’s curried favor with influencers it recognizes can be as effective, if not more so, as traditional media at spreading messages far and wide. Its rapid response memeification of policy issues fluently speaks the language of the internet. And it’s allied with or created platforms that facilitate the flow of information.
Trump learned an important lesson after his first term about how valuable it can be to control the very platforms where narratives spread. In 2020, a bystander’s video of Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, kneeling on the neck of a Black man named George Floyd for nine minutes spurred protests in cities around the country, and led to tangible — if often short-lived — change. Trump said Americans were “rightly sickened and revolted” by Floyd’s “brutal death,” but also blamed antifa and “professional anarchists” for provoking his pledge to deploy additional law enforcement to contain the demonstrations.
He also bears a more personal grudge. In 2021, Trump was kicked off of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube over concern he’d incite further violence following the insurrection at the US Capitol. A year later, he launched his own social platform, Truth Social. By the time he was elected to a second term, Elon Musk, a Trump backer who briefly joined the administration, owned X, the recently renamed Twitter. And rather than ban TikTok when required by law last year, Trump claimed to extend the deadline for a forced sale until ByteDance finally reached an agreement with some of his closest allies.
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