The shooting dead of Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis on Saturday has raised the stakes even further in the conflict sparked by the Donald Trump administration’s aggressive and deliberately provocative tactics in Minnesota.
The death of Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, bears a grim resemblance to the killing of Renee Good 17 days earlier. In both cases, administration officials immediately characterised the victims as “domestic terrorists” and offered false accounts of what happened. Video footage contradicts official claims in both incidents. The shamelessness of these falsehoods has become familiar; lying for this administration is less a strategy of concealment than an assertion of impunity.
The disturbing scenes from Minneapolis have prompted protests across the US despite severe weather conditions. It seems certain that one of the objectives of flooding Democrat-leaning cities with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and US Border Patrol is to provoke a counter-reaction. Facing headwinds before November’s midterm elections, the White House may calculate that doubling down on immigration will motivate its base, which is disenchanted with Trump’s performance on economic issues.
There are signs since Saturday’s killing that some Republicans are becoming nervous about the impact on the electorate of the disturbing images emerging from Minneapolis. Whether that is reflected in any meaningful way in Congress remains to be seen. What does appear certain is that Senate Democrats will block budgetary legislation which must be passed by Friday to avert another government shutdown.
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Republicans need seven Democrat votes to avoid a filibuster on the measures, and given the level of anger at recent events, they will not receive them unless funding of $10 billion for Ice is withdrawn. That seems unlikely.
Having ratcheted up the hostility to near-breaking point, Trump and his advisers may now find de-escalation difficult. On Monday, Trump despatched his “border tsar”, Tom Homan, to Minneapolis. Homan is a long-time immigration hawk who served as Ice’s acting director during Trump’s first term. That his statements about the Minneapolis killings have been more measured than anyone else in the White House speaks volumes about the contempt in which legal norms are held by figures such as deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, whose assertions are more reminiscent of a dictatorship than a democracy.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, masked agents continue to roam the streets, racially profiling individuals and deploying violent tactics against peaceful protesters. It seems all too possible that more innocent people will die and America’s democratic crisis will worsen still further.
