Pressure mounted on Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday to fully investigate the previous day’s killing by federal immigration officers of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Calls for an investigation have come from all sides of the political divide after video analysis showed officers had removed from Pretti a handgun he was reportedly permitted to carry – and which he was not handling – before fatally shooting him.
Republican US senator Bill Cassidy said the “credibility” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were “at stake”.
“There must be a full joint federal and state investigation,” Cassidy wrote in a post on X, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot Renee Nicole Good to death on 7 January and border patrol officers fatally shot Pretti on Saturday. “We can trust the American people with the truth.”
Other Democrat lawmakers, including US House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, both of New York, also issued calls for federal immigration authorities to leave Minnesota. They urged Senate Democrats to vote against funding the US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and border patrol, during budget negotiations in the coming days.
“We have a responsibility to protect Americans from tyranny,” Ocasio-Cortez posted on X.
On Sunday morning, US senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Adam Schiff of California, both Democrats, said they would vote against the impending department of homeland security funding.
“When they’re killing two constituents in my state, and they’re taking two-year-olds out of the arms of their mom, and they are taking an elder Hmong man out of his house and putting him out there in his underwear, and then figuring out they have the wrong man … no, I am not voting for this funding,” Klobuchar told NBC’s Meet the Press, alluding to incidents involving federal immigration agents that have drawn heavy media scrutiny.
Schiff said he was “not giving ICE or border patrol another dime, given how this agency, these agencies are operating”.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, first announced on Saturday that he and his fellow Democrats would not provide the necessary votes if DHS funding remains in the measure. A spokesperson for Senate majority leader John Thune said DHS and other government funds will be voted on as a single package. Without a compromise, the government faces a partial shutdown at the end of January.
Schiff warned that a government shutdown would result if Republicans “insist” on combining immigration enforcement funding with other government appropriations. “It will be a Republican decision,” he said. “They understand we’re not going to go along with this.”
Connecticut US senator Chris Murphy, also a Democrat, told CNN’s State of the Union that Democrats “can’t vote to fund this lawless Department of Homeland Security … that is murdering American citizens, that is traumatizing little boys and girls all across the country, in violation of the law.”
Meanwhile, Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan, called for “the truth” to be told about their son.
“We are heartbroken but also very angry,” they said. “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.”
The family’s statement came after US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem made the claim that Pretti brandished a gun before agents fired “defensive shots” at him. None of the ubiquitous video evidence shows Pretti brandishing a gun.
Klobuchar also said that the Trump administration had described the shooting, which is shown in several eyewitness videos circulating widely on social media, “in ways that simply aren’t true”.
“I just keep thinking, your eyes don’t lie,” Klobuchar said. “Law enforcement is based on trust, and we have had a total breakdown of trust.”
She called for a “transparent” investigation into the shooting and called for the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agents to leave Minnesota.
The deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, told Meet the Press that “there’s obviously an investigation that’s ongoing”.
“Secretary Noem talked about that yesterday, which is what we would expect anytime a tragedy like this occurs,” Blanche said.
But he disagreed with the premise that the videos of the encounter told the whole story. “We don’t know what happened in the minutes leading up to what we just watched. We don’t know what ICE saw, what ICE heard,” Blanche said of Pretti’s killing by federal agents. “That’s part of the investigation that’s going to be happening.
“You see a violent interaction with the man who was shot. And so we don’t know. No matter how many times you look at it, no matter how many different angles that we see, there’s a lot that we don’t see.”
Blanche re-iterated the government’s position that the anti-immigration enforcement protesters were not peaceful. “They are trying to impede and obstruct ICE, and it makes the job that our men and women have to do virtually impossible to do without interactions like that,” he said.
But, alluding to Minnesota governor Tim Walz and his fellow Democrat Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, Blanche added: “Make no mistake about it. This was entirely avoidable if we had a governor, if we had a mayor, if we had leadership in Washington and over in Minnesota that actually cared about their citizens.”
Border patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino was asked why federal agents shot and killed Pretti.
“You don’t know he was unarmed,” Bovino told CNN’s Dana Bash. “I don’t know he was unarmed. That’s freeze-frame adjudication of a crime scene via a photo. That’s why we have investigators.
“The facts are going to come to light as to what exactly happened with an investigation.”
When asked by Bash whether he was blaming the victim, he said, “The victims are the border [atrol agents.”
Republican US senator Lindsey Graham took the line that “an armed man trying to impede a lawful arrest is a recipe for disaster”. The South Carolina Republican said he expects law enforcement officers to use good judgement “but not to foolishly risk their lives or the lives of others”.
“If you go to such events with a loaded gun, bad things can happen,” Graham added, though it is legal in Minnesota to possess guns in public places with a permit.
Late Saturday, a federal judge issued an order blocking the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence” related to Pretti’s killing, after Minnesota officials sued DHS.
The Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, said the suit demanded “a full, impartial, and transparent investigation into [Pretti’s] fatal shooting at the hands of DHS agents [that] is non-negotiable”.
Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara, meanwhile, said information about what led up to the shooting was limited. As protests erupted in Minneapolis on Saturday, federal officers impeded state investigators from accessing the scene of Pretti’s killing.
Trump responded to Pretti’s shooting with his typical combativeness. The Republican president accused Walz and Frey of “inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous and arrogant rhetoric”.
Vice-President JD Vance for his part claimed events in Minneapolis were “engineered chaos” resulting from “far-left agitators, working with local authorities”.
ICE and border patrols officials were scheduled to hold a news briefing early Sunday afternoon in Minneapolis.
