Trump Tries to Quell Growing Backlash to Minneapolis Shooting

President Donald Trump attempted to quell growing bipartisan backlash to his immigration crackdown on Monday following a second fatal shooting by a federal agent in Minneapolis in just over two weeks. The President announced on Truth Social that he was dispatching his border czar, Tom Homan, to Minneapolis, where he will manage Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in the city. He added that Homan, who is considered a proponent of targeted immigration enforcement over the kind of sweeping street grabs that have been a flashpoint for violence in Minneapolis, “has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there.” Read more: Support for Abolishing ICE Is Surging Among Republicans Separately, Trump said he had a “very good” call with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and they were now on a “similar wavelength” regarding immigration enforcement in the city. Walz’s office said in its readout of the same call that Trump had expressed an openness to reducing the number of federal agents deployed. The apparent shift in tone from Trump comes as he faces mounting pressure over a spate of violence linked to his Administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was killed by a Border Patrol agent as he took part in a protest in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. His death came just over two weeks after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a poet and mother of three, also by a federal immigration agent.  A city on fire Minneapolis was already convulsed by protests over Good’s killing in the days before Pretti’s death. Minutes later, the scene of his shooting became a battleground between protesters and federal agents as the city exploded in anger again. By Saturday evening, the shooting had developed into a political crisis for Trump. In Washington, D.C., Senate Democrats who had previously been reluctant to block funding for ICE now threatened a partial government shutdown rather than pass another spending bill that would give the agency $10 billion more in funding. Several Republicans were calling for an investigation into the shooting. The anger was fueled not just by the shooting itself, but by the Trump Administration’s handling of its aftermath. Trump and his top officials quickly tried to pin the blame on Pretti, labelling him an instigator and suggesting he had attacked the agents who killed him, despite multiple videos clearly showing otherwise.   “This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go — What is that all about?” Trump posted soon after the shooting.  The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in its initial statement on the killing that Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun,” and “violently resisted,” suggesting that he wanted to “massacre law enforcement.”   At a press conference in the hours after the shooting, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem suggested Pretti wanted “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”  Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino claimed that Pretti had approached agents with a handgun, had “violently resisted, and intended to “massacre law enforcement.”  In several social media posts, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller described Pretti as an “assassin” and a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to murder federal agents.” Vice President J.D. Vance reposted Miller’s characterization of Pretti as an “assassin” on X. But multiple videos of the incident, released by witnesses to the shooting in the hours after, clearly contradicted those accounts. They show Pretti holding a phone, not a gun, when an agent approaches him and other protesters and squirts pepper spray in their faces. When Pretti moves to help another protester who has been sprayed, he is tackled and pulled to the ground, where he is struck repeatedly.  Soon after, one shot rings out, then several more in quick succession.  In total, at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds—including several after Pretti is lying motionless on the floor.  The backlash  The reaction to Pretti’s killing was more forceful than the one that followed Renee Good’s— compounded by it. On Saturday, responding to a wave of anger from his party, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats would oppose a government spending bill that includes $64.4 billion in funding for DHS, of which $10 billionis earmarked for ICE. “What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling—and unacceptable in any American city,” Schumer, who represents New York, said on Saturday evening. He added that “because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.” Before the weekend, Schumer and other Senate Democrats had signaled that they had wanted to avoid a shutdown and the bill looked likely to pass in the Senate. But Pretti’s killing at the hands of a Border Patrol agent, after being pepper-sprayed and shot several times on the ground, prompted a wave of anger in the party.   The shooting prompted rare statements of condemnation from former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Obama, whom Trump succeeded in 2017, called Pretti’s killing a “heartbreaking tragedy.” In a statement with his wife Michelle posted on X on Sunday, he said Trump and officials in his Administration “seem eager to escalate the situation” instead of “trying to impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they’ve deployed.” Several Republicans, too, broke ranks with their party to call for an investigation into the shooting, among them Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas and Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.  Cassidy, who serves on the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, described the events in Minneapolis as “incredibly disturbing” and said the “credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake” following the shooting.  Ricketts, who is a staunch supporter of Trump, called for a “prioritized, transparent investigation into this incident,” describing the shooting as “horrifying”. Sen. Rand Paul, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent letters to the heads of ICE, Border Patrol, and Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Monday, inviting them to a hearing on Feb. 12. The Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, New York Rep. Andrew Garbarino, requested a similar hearing over the weekend. Walking back  By Sunday, Trump appeared to have realized that Minneapolis represented a political crisis. Successive polls have shown his approval rating on immigration plummeting. A YouGov poll taken after the killing of Pretti showed support for abolishing ICE at record highs—with more supporting abolition than opposing it—and nearly 20% of Republicans in favor of shuttering the agency. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he declined to give his backing to the officer who killed Pretti, and said his Administration was “reviewing everything” to do with the incident.  He also suggested for the first time that he might be looking for a way out of Minneapolis.  “At some point we will leave. We’ve done, they’ve done a phenomenal job,” he said, without offering a timeline. On Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt distanced Trump from Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem’s description of Pretti, saying she had “not heard the president characterize” Pretti as a domestic terrorist. Trump and Walz had been heavily critical of each other in recent weeks. “What’s the plan, Donald Trump? What is the plan?” Walz said during a news conference on Sunday. “What do we need to do to get these federal agents out of our state? If fear, violence and chaos is what you wanted from us, then you clearly underestimated the people of this state and nation.” But on Monday, his office said in a statement that the two had a “productive call” in which Trump agreed to “look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and working with the state in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement regarding violent criminals.” Trump said: “I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future.”