Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on Sunday accused President Donald Trump and top officials of his administration of putting out a “flat-out insane” narrative regarding the shooting death of a Minneapolis man during an encounter with federal immigration agents.
In an interview Sunday with The Washington Post, Ellison (D) was particularly critical of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino for immediately laying blame for the incident not on the behavior of federal agents but on inflammatory rhetoric by local officials and on the victim himself, 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse.
“Unlike other folks who are not in the chain of prosecution or defense, they are. This is their employee who they trained — apparently, allegedly,” Ellison said. “So for them to jump out there and say, ‘He’s done nothing wrong, the victim is a bad person,’ is flat-out insane and is a complete break with what we consider to be reasonable law enforcement behavior. It fails every test of professionalism.”
The Department of Homeland Security has claimed its agents were on Nicollet Avenue early Saturday conducting a “targeted operation” against another person when a man, later identified as Pretti, “approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun” with an intent to “massacre law enforcement.” Subsequently, according to its account, “the officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted.”
However, a Post analysis of video of the event, shot from several angles of the event, suggests that an agent retrieved a holstered handgunPretti was carrying before he was shot multiple times. The first of what appear to have been as many as 10 shots was fired less than a second later, the video shows.
Ellison — who says he may be called upon at some point to prosecute a case arising from the incident — declined to discuss what state and local investigators have learned. But he added: “I think that reasonable people watching the video could conclude that [Pretti] had a gun and a holster, that it was taken off of him in plain view on the video, and that after that, he was shot. I think that a person who saw those things would not be hallucinating.”
Pretti’s death came barely two weeks after the killing of Renée Good, who was shotin her vehicle by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, prompting massive protests and escalating clashes between demonstrators and federal officers.
As Minnesota’s attorney general mounts a legal challenge to the administration and its deployment of thousands of federal agents to Minneapolis and St. Paul, Ellison finds himself in a situation that is both uncharted and familiar in some respects.
At this point, his office has sued the Trump administration more than 50 times, on actions that range from the president’s executive order to end birthright citizenship to an Agriculture Department requirement for further verification of recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.
But now, he said in a news conference Sunday with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), “there has never been a deployment of immigration agents this size in the history of the United States.”
“Therefore,” he added, “there’s no playbook.”
Ellison said in the Post interview that his office is relying on help from “23 other state attorneys general, who are helping every day. I have a private bar who’s volunteering.”
On Monday, he will be in court to argue for an end to the surge of immigration officers in Minnesota.
“We’re going to tell the court that this has been a dramatic and historic escalation. There’s never been a deployment of ICE agents quite like this. And yet, Minnesota doesn’t have the most immigrants. What would justify this?” Ellison said.
“They want to say, oh, this has to do with fraud,” Ellison said, referring to an ongoing scandal involving members of the Somali American community. “Well, you don’t stop fraud with a gun and a mask and a violent man who wants to hurt someone.”
“It was never about what they claim it’s about. It was about them trying to essentially destroy federalism, which is that balance between state and federal power,” Ellison added. “All I can tell you is that I’m going to be ever faithful. That’s the only thing I know is that I never back down. I’m not scared of [Trump’s] jail or his subpoena. I am absolutely fearless of this guy, and I’ll stand up to him every single time and never blink.”
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