Was Evan Kilgore the federal agent who shot and killed U.S. citizen and registered nurse Alex Pretti during an immigration enforcement raid in Minneapolis? No, that's not true: Kilgore denied he worked for immigration enforcement agencies and threatened to sue those who spread the claim on social media. Lead Stories found nothing suggesting that the conservative commentator had built a career at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. As of this writing, government officials haven't released the name of the officer who shot Pretti, but said he was an 8-year-veteran agent, a timeline that does not sync with the public history of Kilgore's career.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Bluesky on Jan. 25, 2026. It opened:
#resisters you know what to do #anonymous #OSINT #NAFO
The post included a slide that read:
This is the POS that unalived ALEX PRETTI in Minnesota ! His name is EVAN KILGORE
The entry shared a photo of a man. This is what it looked like on Bluesky at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at bsky.app/profile/drharmony.net)
Alex Pretti, an Illinois-born U.S. citizen and a registered nurse, was shot and killed during an immigration enforcement operation (archived here) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the morning of January 24, 2026.
In the aftermath, social media users started to share this image of a masked person (archived here):
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at facebook.com/groups/2650312661859103)
Those posts suggested that the image above showed the agent who killed Pretti. At some point, other social media users began to speculate that the man in the photo was Kilgore. Kilgore's account profile picture (archived here) was used in the post claiming he is the agent who shot Pretti.
On January 25, 2026, Kilgore, however, wrote (archived here):
I am not the individual who shot Alex Pretti yesterday in Minneapolis.
In a separate entry (archived here), published on the same day, he addressed another example of the claim, describing that post as "demonstrably false and defamatory". He continued:
I am not the shooter. I am not an ICE or Border Patrol agent.
One more of Kilgore's posts (archived here) from January 25, 2026, stated:
I was not in Minnesota yesterday.
As of January 26, 2026, federal authorities have not released the name of the agent who pulled the trigger. On the day of the shooting, however, U.S. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino said (archived here) at the press conference that the agent "had been serving as a border patrol agent for eight years".
That means that for a person to have that number of years of experience by January 2026, they must have joined U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) roughly between the second half of 2017 and the second half of 2018.
A native of Ohio (archived here), Kilgore was 32 years old in January 2026 (archived here). He attended conservative Grace College & Seminary in Indiana and later worked for its marketing department as a special projects coordinator. In June 2017, Kilgore was fired for being part of a controversial cover image for a fake rap album (archived here).
It's unlikely that Kilgore could have joined the CBP immediately after that. In the summer of 2018, the U.S. Office of Government Accountability wrote (archived here) that "in FY 2017 it took more than 300 days, on average, for CBP officer applicants to complete the process" that leads to their first day at work. Furthermore, even in 2018, that figure remained the same, according to the CBP itself (archived here).
In February 2018, Kilgore started his current account on X. Lead Stories manually reviewed what he posted during the first month (archived here), but found no mention of joining the CBP.
A now-deleted page on the website of Turning Point USA, (first archived on December 8, 2021) described Kilgore as a TPUSA ambassador who "began sharing his views on Twitter in 2017 after getting 'canceled' from his marketing job by the woke outrage mob." The page said nothing about Kilgore's purported career at the CBP. His later posts -- for example, here -- suggested that he had parted ways with the conservative organization led by Charlie Kirk before Kirk was assassinated.
Lead Stories ran Kilgore's profile photo from his X account through the Amazon Rekognition face comparison tool with the photo of the masked agent used in posts that claimed the agent was Kilgore. Rekognition concluded that images circulating on social media show two different people:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of page at us-east-2.console.aws.amazon.com/rekognition)
