What stands out in the internal CBP review of Alex Pretti’s killing cited in the attached NPR reporting isn’t just what it says, but how it says it. The language is doing active work to minimize and normalize conduct that, on video, is plainly aggressive and coercive. Phrases like “attempted to move the woman and Pretti out of the roadway” read as neutral, even procedural. But the videos show that this ‘attempt’ consisted of violent shoving followed immediately by point-blank pepper spray: two actions that make it physically impossible to comply. If you’re pushed to the ground, you can’t walk. If you’re sprayed in the face, you’re incapacitated. That gap between description and reality is not accidental. It’s how violence is administratively laundered. The same pattern shows up in the reflexive ‘resisting arrest’ narrative. In the review, resistance is asserted as a fact. But the article itself highlights eyewitness testimony that directly contradicts that claim: one witness stated that Pretti wasn’t even facing the agents when they grabbed him and “didn't look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help [a] woman up”. This is a familiar script. Agents initiate force; people react in entirely natural human ways: stumbling, flinching, using their arms to shield their faces, pulling away, trying to regain balance or help someone up. Those reactions are then retroactively reframed as resistance or assault, providing legal and moral cover for escalation. We’ve seen this move countless times: an agent shoves or crowds an observer, the observer reflexively makes unintentional contact with the agent while trying not to fall, and that accidental contact is reclassified as an intentional assault: justifying a brutal beating or worse. This isn’t about one incident. It’s about a system that allows state violence to be justified through careful wording, where constitutional rights and basic human reactions are treated as provocation, and compliance is defined as instant, unwavering, total and silent submission: even in the middle of being assaulted by an armed federal agent acting outside of constitutional authority. When internal reviews adopt this language, they aren’t clarifying events. They’re pre-emptively defending force. That should alarm anyone who still believes rights are something you exercise: not something you’re punished for invoking. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/g-s1-107608/alex-pretti-death-internal-review-immigration