Social media has been flooded with graphic footage from the moment federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, in Minneapolis. But one viral image circulating as a supposed freeze frame from the shooting was not real.
Experts say the image was manipulated using artificial intelligence and appears to be a synthetic enhancement of authentic video from the scene. One telltale sign is that a figure in the image is missing his head.
“It’s on video and here is a freeze frame,” reads the caption of a Jan. 25, 2026, Facebook post that helped spread the image.
The picture shows agents surrounding a kneeling man believed to be Pretti, with a gun pointed at his head. Its unusually sharp quality stood out against the grainy videos already circulating from the incident, helping it spread rapidly across Instagram, Facebook, X, and Threads.
Some users pushed the image as proof of excessive force by federal agents, while others claimed it showed Pretti reaching for a weapon. One post on X even suggested the image belonged on the cover of Time magazine.
Despite being fake, the image fooled some high-profile figures. Tony Thomas, a former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, reposted it multiple times in replies to Trump administration officials discussing the shooting.
Tensions in Minneapolis had already been running high over President Donald Trump’s surge of immigration enforcement agents into the city. Those tensions flared again Jan. 24, when federal officers shot Pretti, a U.S. citizen, after tackling him to the ground.
The Department of Homeland Security said Pretti intended to harm agents.
The shooting followed a Jan. 7 incident in which another Minneapolis resident and U.S. citizen, Renee Good, was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. In that case as well, the Trump administration said officers were in danger, a claim that clashed with video evidence. AFP later debunked several misleading visuals tied to that incident.
The high-resolution image tied to Pretti’s death appears to follow the same pattern.
A reverse image search shows it closely resembles verified footage from one angle of the shooting. But the original video is far more pixelated and lower quality than the viral still.
Experts pointed to several red flags consistent with AI-generated imagery. In the image, the agent kneeling near the man believed to be Pretti appears to be missing a head. Another officer’s leg bends at an unnatural angle beside an unrecognizable object.
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, said the GetReal Security lab he co-founded also determined the image was an AI enhancement of a real video frame. He said the practice has become increasingly common as users try to sharpen low-quality footage.
“The issue with these images is that the AI enhancement tends to hallucinate details,” Farid said in a Jan. 26 email.
