Not long after federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident on Saturday, senior members of the Trump administration were ready with their conclusions about what had happened and who was to blame.
Stephen Miller, president Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, called the victim, Alex Pretti, who was filming Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, a “domestic terrorist”. Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of Border Patrol operations, said Pretti was out to “massacre law enforcement”. The department of homeland security (DHS) said an agent had fired “defensive shots” because he was “fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers”.
Even as videos emerged that contradicted the government’s account, the Trump administration was in a race to control the narrative around the killing of Pretti, a registered nurse with no criminal record who was pinned down when immigration agents opened fire and killed him.
The rush to blame Pretti and exonerate the immigration agents – even while officials were still gathering the facts – deviates entirely from the way law-enforcement investigations are normally carried out.
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But it also underscores what has become a pattern by Trump and top administration officials to justify an increasingly violent crackdown: immediately going on the offensive and demonising the victim, often distorting the facts in the process.
On Sunday, Trump said Democrats were to blame for the killings, not federal agents.
His reasoning, which he laid out on social media, was that Democrats were not co-operating with the Ice operation in Minneapolis, which has created “dangerous circumstances for EVERYONE involved”.
Daniel Altman, a former customs and border protection official who served in the Trump and Biden administrations, said presidents often tried to find political advantage in moments of crisis. But he said it undermined public confidence in the investigation process to make snap judgments about motive and blame.
Altman, who oversaw internal investigations into use of force, said there were well-established procedures for such cases, including timelines for notifying Congress and the public. “Those measures are designed to promote transparency and accountability,” he said.
Shortly after Pretti was shot, officials at DHS and the White House were in contact about how to respond to the incident, according to a person familiar with the communications who asked for anonymity to describe internal procedures.
The officials sought information from the ground in Minneapolis and worked with lawyers to prepare the statement issued by DHS. Some details were removed before the statement was published because they were still working to get a more complete picture of what happened, the person familiar with the process said.
Still, the statement claimed that Pretti “approached” officers with a handgun and the “armed suspect violently resisted” when officials tried to disarm him.
Videos of the encounter show Pretti, who had a permit to carry a firearm, stepping between a woman and an agent who was pepper spraying her. Pretti is then hit with pepper spray before a group of agents pile on to him, restraining and disarming him before the barrage of gunfire. Videos show that he never drew his weapon.
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem labelled Pretti a “domestic terrorist”, saying that was just “the facts” of the case and claiming to know his motive: “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement”.
The same day DHS issued its statement, Miller and Bovino, the key architects of Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, showed little restraint. Their social media posts are not subject to review, and their public comments are rarely carefully worded. In November, a federal judge found that Bovino had lied multiple times about federal agents’ use of force during immigration enforcement operations in Chicago.
The killing of Pretti – and the administration’s handling of the case – has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. Democrats assailed the Trump administration and quickly signalled that they would oppose legislation to fund large parts of the government because it included $10 billion for Ice.
Major gun rights activists and groups, typically allies of Trump’s, also denounced his administration for suggesting that Pretti’s killing might have been justified because he was carrying a pistol.
Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, wrote on social media: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.” Gun Owners of America, one of the country’s largest gun advocacy groups, said in a post on social media that it condemned Essayli’s “untoward comments”.
Some Republicans in Congress also raised concerns about the shooting, a reflection of fears within the party of how backlash to the administration’s aggressive tactics could damage their political prospects in the midterm elections.
“The credibility of Ice and DHS are at stake,” said Republican senator Bill Cassidy, who also called for a “full joint federal and state investigation” into Pretti’s death. “We can trust the American people with the truth.”
A poll from the New York Times and Siena University, conducted after the killing of Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman who was shot in Minneapolis by an Ice officer this month, found that roughly half of voters supported Trump’s deportations and his handling of the border with Mexico, but a sizeable majority believed that Ice had gone too far.
Just 36 per cent of voters said they approved of the way Ice was handling its job, according to the poll, while 63 per cent disapproved – including 70 per cent of independent voters. And 61 per cent of voters said Ice had “gone too far” in their tactics, including nearly one in five Republicans.
By Sunday morning, even some senior Trump administration officials appeared to try to tone down some of the language. Deputy attorney general Todd Blanche dodged questions on NBC’s Meet the Press about whether Pretti was “brandishing a gun”, as Noem had said Saturday.
“I do not know, and nobody else knows, either,” Blanche said. “That’s why we’re doing an investigation.”
But Bovino gave little ground in an interview on CNN, arguing that the Border Patrol agents were the “victims” and that Pretti had “injected himself into that law enforcement situation with a weapon”. Still, when pressed for evidence, Bovino had little to offer.
“The facts are going to come to light as to what exactly happened with an investigation,” he said.
- This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
