President Donald Trump said his administration was “going to de-escalate a little bit” in Minnesota, after the second fatal shooting of a US citizen by federal immigration officers there.
“Bottom line, it was terrible. Both of them were terrible,” he said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday.
In early January Renee Good was fatally shot by an immigration officer, followed by Alex Pretti, who was killed after being stopped by border agents this past weekend.
Pretti’s death reignited local protests and public outcry across the country, and led to criticism from lawmakers in both parties. Trump’s remarks are the latest sign his administration is taking a step back on its operations in Minnesota.
Speaking to other reporters ahead of a rally in Iowa Tuesday night, Trump said he viewed the killing of Pretti, an intensive care nurse at a veterans’ hospital, as “a very unfortunate incident”.
Asked by reporters about whether he agreed with characterisations of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist,” Trump said: “I haven’t heard that.”
Trump then added: “He shouldn’t have been carrying a gun.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said shortly after the shooting that Pretti “wasn’t there to peacefully protest, he was there to perpetuate violence,” and accused him of “domestic terrorism”.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has also said the agents fired in self-defence, after Pretti resisted attempts to disarm him.
Noem said Pretti was shot because he was “brandishing” a gun during a confrontation, but local authorities said the gun was legally registered and that Pretti was shot after the firearm was removed.
Eyewitnesses and local officials, however, have challenged that account, saying he had a phone in his hand, not a weapon.
A preliminary report drafted by Customs and Border Protection also appears to contradict the initial DHS account of events. It says two of its agents fired their weapons at Pretti.
It does not mention that Pretti was reaching for his firearm, according to a copy of the report seen by the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
On Monday, the DHS pulled the Minnesota mission’s leader and figurehead, Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino, from the state. The department said it was deploying the White House’s border tsar, Tom Homan, to take over there.
Homan posted on social media on Tuesday that he had met with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and local law enforcement officials.
Pretti’s death, coming two weeks after the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good, enraged local residents and sparked fresh calls from state and city officials for the Trump administration to withdraw its 3,000 immigration agents and officers from the region.
In the interview with Fox News, Trump appeared to defend the Minnesota operation, saying “we took thousands of hardened criminals” out of the state, “so they have good crime numbers.”
“That’s all working out, we have Tom Homan there now,” he said, before adding the administration would “de-escalate”.
Stephen Miller, a top White House aide working on the administration’s deportation initiative, told CNN that 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”.
“We are evaluating why the [US Customs and Border Patrol] team may not have been following that protocol,” Miller said in his statement to CNN.
Some Republican leaders and lawmakers have called for an investigation into Pretti’s death, including Vermont Governor Phil Scott and US Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska.
“The nation witnessed a horrifying situation this weekend,” Ricketts wrote on X. While he reaffirmed his “support for funding ICE remains the same,” Ricketts said he expected “a prioritized, transparent investigation into this incident”.
A federal judge has blocked DHS from destroying or altering evidence.
In his speech at the Iowa rally on Tuesday night, which was dedicated to his economic policies, Trump did not discuss the current situation in Minnesota in-depth, but talked about his immigration crackdown more broadly, citing a Harvard Harris poll from December that suggested 80% of Americans support his administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.
