Donald Trump claimed without offering further details that he would “de-escalate a little bit” his immigration enforcement crackdown in Minnesota as he tried to quell the backlash to two fatal shootings by federal agents, even as the raids continued without pause.
The president did not say whether he would direct a change in tactics and federal immigration raids continued in the state, including an incident on Tuesday during which agents tried to enter the consulate of Ecuador in Minneapolis without a warrant.
The fallout from the killing of Alex Pretti on Saturday has continued to dog the White House even as Trump travelled to a rally in Iowa to deliver remarks about the economy in the hopes of bolstering Republicans ahead of the midterm elections in November.
Trump hedged his views on the killing of Pretti, telling reporters before the Iowa event that he did not think Pretti was an “assassin”, a term used by his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, but he continued to blame Pretti for carrying a gun he was licensed to possess.
The backlash has nonetheless remained ferocious towards the aggressive tactics of agents, and the National Rifle Association criticized the administration for dismissing Pretti’s constitutional and legal right to carry a gun.
A third round of No Kings protests is being planned for 28 March – galvanized by the killing of two US citizens in back-to-back incidents in the immigration operation in Minnesota. Organized by a groups around the country, the demonstration is expected by some to draw as many as 9 million people, which would make it the largest protest in US history.
“This is in large part a response to a combination of heinous attacks on our democracy and communities coming from the regime, and a sense that nobody’s coming to save us,” said Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of the non-profit Indivisible.
Trump insisted on Tuesday that he was waiting for the results of a “very honorable and honest investigation” into Pretti’s shooting, which is being conducted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of the US border patrol. There has been no civil rights investigation by the US justice department, as was until recently typical practice in federal officer-related shootings.
The fast-changing nature of the situation also appears to have caught Trump off-guard at times. Following his suggestion that he was on the “same wavelength” with Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, and Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, after the weekend, Trump on Wednesday expressed frustration in a Truth Social post that Frey would not help federal immigration officers.
“Surprisingly, Mayor Jacob Frey just stated that, ‘Minneapolis does not, and will not, enforce Federal Immigration Laws.’” Trump wrote. “Could somebody in his inner sanctum please explain that this statement is a very serious violation of the Law, and that he is PLAYING WITH FIRE!”
Frey responded hours later, saying in his own post on X that he did not want local police getting pulled in to help with immigration enforcement.
“The job of our police is to keep people safe, not enforce fed immigration laws. I want them preventing homicides, not hunting down a working dad who contributes to MPLS & is from Ecuador,” Frey wrote.
At the White House, Trump initially appeared to penalize Noem for falsely portraying Pretti as a “domestic terrorist”, replacing her lieutenant, the US border patrol commander Gregory Bovino, with Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan.
Noem’s job nevertheless appeared to be safe after she met with Trump in the Oval Office to complain that she had been unfairly blamed, alleging that her remarks had been scripted by Miller.
Miller, meanwhile, after immediately attacking Pretti following his death, has now turned to blaming Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) for supposedly presenting the White House with inaccurate information, and laid the blame with Bovino.
“The White House provided clear guidance to DHS that the extra personnel that had been sent to Minnesota for force protection should be used for conducting fugitive operations to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors,” Miller said.
“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol.”
A preliminary report by CBP’s internal watchdog, transmitted to lawmakers on Tuesday, said he was shot by two US border patrol agents while resisting arrest. The report also made no mention of Noem’s initial claims that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement”, nor that he had been “brandishing” a gun when he was tackled by agents and shot roughly 10 times in the back.
