In Minneapolis and other U.S. cities, Bellingcat supplements local news by “zooming in with a forensic lens”

DailyTrend

Jan 29, 2026 - 10:00

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In Minneapolis and other U.S. cities, Bellingcat supplements local news by “zooming in with a forensic lens”

When Bellingcat, the open-source investigative journalism collective, launched in 2014, it occasionally covered the United States, publishing investigations on topics like the far-right and COVID-19 misinformation.

Scan the outlet’s U.S. coverage over the past couple of years, though, and a pattern emerges: The stories become increasingly local. On January 5, 2021, Bellingcat ran a story with the headline “How the insurgent and MAGA right are being welded together on the streets of Washington D.C..” The next day came the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Five years later, more of Bellingcat’s stories are taking place on American streets. Last year, the outlet partnered with visual investigative nonprofit Evident Media to report on federal agents using tear gas and pepper spray against protestors in Illinois, and with CalMatters to track immigration raids in Los Angeles.

On January 7, when a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed U.S. citizen Renee Good in Minneapolis, Bellingcat used footage from five different smartphone videos to figure out what happened. Just over two weeks later, when ICE agents shot and killed U.S. citizen Alex Pretti, Bellingcat reported from Minneapolis again.

“The United States Department of Homeland Security claimed Pretti was killed after an ‘armed struggle’ with DHS officers and that it seemed he had wanted to ‘do maximum damage,'” Bellingcat’s investigation team wrote. “Yet video footage shared online, showing shortly before and during the incident, appears to contradict that claim.”

Bellingcat released pieces of the Pretti investigation as they emerged, then the full investigation on January 25.

I emailed back and forth with Bellingcat lead editor Eoghan Macguire about the outlet’s recent work in the U.S. Bellingcat is increasingly partnering with American news sites, Macguire said, to bring its work to “the audiences who need to see them most — including those local to the events we are reporting on.”

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Laura Hazard Owen: What was Bellingcat’s reporting process after Alex Pretti was killed? How did your team members begin coordinating?

Eoghan Macguire: We’ve been following stories around ICE and Border Patrol since last year. We did our first piece with Evident Media and CalMatters in April [2025], looking at the January 2025 raids in Bakersfield. That was a harbinger of much of what was to come. We’ve since covered events in L.A., Washington, D.C., Chicago, and elsewhere.

We’re working from a big database of incidents that’s helping to inform what we do. These incidents are ICE/U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) raids where people are being arrested or taken away and video has been posted to social media.

Within the dataset we have incidents where force has been used, but that’s not the only type of incident we’ve gathered. Collecting this data has allowed us to pick out trends and tactics that Border Patrol and ICE appear to be using — like swarming Home Depot parking lots and car washes in L.A., targeting delivery drivers in Washington, D.C., or breaking the [temporary restraining order] designed to prevent riot control weapons from being used on journalists in Chicago.

We hope to publish the dataset at some point, but we are as yet unsure as to when that will be.

We have several volunteers working to gather and verify videos, operating alongside our investigators, using a tool called Atlos that helps bring order to our verification process and map out what we are seeing. We’ve recorded incidents in dozens of U.S. cities and have been gathering incidents in Minneapolis, too.

U.S. local media does a great job of covering what is happening on the ground and there’s no point in us replicating that work, so we’ve tried to add something different, either by analyzing events at scale to pick out the broad tactics being used by ICE and Border Patrol, or by zooming in with a forensic lens, like in the Renee Good or Alex Pretti incidents.

For the Alex Pretti story over the weekend, we had four investigators, our social media team [of two], and two editors across events. This helped get things out quickly.

Owen: How did your team communicate on this story? And how did you decide when it was ready to run?

Macguire: For the Alex Pretti story, it was just Bellingcat staff communicating over Slack, breaking down videos of the incident and the claims that were coming out from the [U.S. Department of Homeland Security]. There’s a lot of back and forth, breaking video down by frame and such, until eventually we get something we feel is important to publish on or that furthers understanding of what happened.

In this case, we felt we had a few findings that were adding to the conversation, which was moving incredibly fast. So we put out some of what we were finding on social media first, before we published the story on our site.

We were able to see pretty quickly that the gun Alex Pretti was carrying appeared to have been removed by an agent before the first shots were fired. We posted about that first on Bluesky, Instagram, and YouTube. We also posted first on Bluesky that it appeared two agents had fired their weapons during the incident and that five shots appeared to be fired at Pretti while he was already incapacitated on the ground.

That’s counter to how a lot of journalism has used social media — you traditionally use social to promote your story — but it worked for us in the circumstances. We won’t do that all the time, but we felt it was the right thing to do with this story.

Owen: Do you notice parallels between what is happening in the U.S. and what you’ve seen in Bellingcat investigations in countries with authoritarian governments?

Macguire: I have noticed a few people saying things like that online. What is happening in the U.S. just now is certainly in the wheelhouse of the type of thing we have long reported on — although I would also add that we do have a history of reporting on things like police violence, human rights abuses, and migration in the U.S. prior to the last couple of years.

Owen: How do you decide how much of your content will go out in pieces on social media, and how much you’ll save for the full published investigations?

Macguire: Like everyone else, we’re trying to figure it out. I don’t foresee a situation where the backbone of our output is not the investigations that go on our website. But if we really are in the “post-traffic” era, then we need to think about building more direct lines of communication with our audience to ensure they see our stories, as well as create derivative products from those investigations.

That could be how we break investigations down for social channels like Instagram or YouTube, or building up our presence on the likes of Reddit. But I think everything that has happened with X/Twitter should also be a lesson in why journalistic outlets should be cautious about becoming too dependent on social media platforms.

We are still looking to grow our audience on those social channels, as it is where people are, but we are also hopefully going to be launching a couple more newsletters this year to bolster those direct connections with readers, as well.

Owen: I noticed Bellingcat isn’t tweeting anymore. How’d you make that decision?

Macguire: We decided to stop posting. Constructive engagement was dropping hugely and we felt there were other platforms it was better to focus our time on.

We also felt it probably wasn’t the most responsible thing to keep directing our audience onto a platform where hate content seems to be in the ascendance and non-consensual images were being made by its AI component. We’ve dedicated a lot of work to investigating non-consensual AI imagery, and felt [staying on X] was incompatible with that type of work.

Owen: What else should our readers know about Bellingcat’s plans going into 2026?

Macguire: Away from social and newsletters, there’s strength in numbers, and partnerships with other media orgs have always been a big thing for Bellingcat. We want to share our methods with as many journalists as possible so that more are exposed to them, learn about them, and therefore do their own open source investigations. But partnership also ensures we bring our stories to the audiences who need to see them most — including those local to the events we are reporting on.

Evident Media, a D.C.-based nonprofit outlet, has been an amazing partner in all our work covering ICE and Border Patrol raids. They have now produced several excellent video stories in partnership with us, focusing on incidents in Bakersfield, L.A., Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Minneapolis.

We also worked with CalMatters when covering the raids in Bakersfield and L.A., while The 51st covered our work looking at incidents in Washington, D.C.

We hope to work with more U.S. local outlets on this issue, should the right opportunities arise. The same goes for other outlets in different parts of the world. In the past year, we published in partnership with 27 different outlets, including AFP, The Washington Post, Frontline, and The Sunday Times. More partnerships are already in the pipeline for the coming year.

Screenshot from Bellingcat’s homepage on January 26, 2025