It’s time to de-escalate in Minneapolis, Mr. President.
Not because you’re wrong to enforce immigration law, nor to go after fraudsters who’ve stolen billions in federal funds — but because these enforcement tactics won’t turn the tide, instead they are backfiring.
Swing voters — Hispanics and independents who turned to you at the last election — see US citizens dying at federal agents’ hands, and recoil in horror.
We get it: Alex Pretti, like Renee Good before him, was clumsily interfering with federal agents doing their job — egged on by leftist propagandists falsely claiming that Americans’ right to protest extends to messing with the feds, even physically intervening to prevent enforcement of the law.
Meanwhile, local authorities — Mayor Jacob Frey, Gov. Tim Walz — have been failing to do their jobs, or worse: ordering local law enforcement to stay away from the confrontation the hard left demands.
Walz finally called in the National Guard on Saturday, long after he should have called for troops to protect Minnesotans and to let Homeland Security do its work. But that hardly means Kristi Noem can go back to Plan A, because she (or whoever set this strategy) plainly didn’t think things through.
Whatever the Border Patrol might have or have not done wrong Saturday, those agents should never have been in that position.
The anti-ICE crew is getting exactly what it wants right now. People looking at a video on TikTok don’t get any of the context: All they’re seeing is a crowd of agents beating a guy onto the ground, with shots then ringing out and him ending up dead. Having Homeland Security double down now is all too likely to produce more such scenes.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the shooting of a 37-year-old anti-ICE protester in Minneapolis
- Alex Pretti’s Sig handgun has history of accidentally firing — offering possible clue to why Border agent shot him
- Who is Alex Jeffrey Pretti, the anti-ICE protester fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis?
- Chaotic moment federal officer reached for gun revealed in close-up analysis of Minneapolis armed anti-ICE protester shooting
- Family of slain anti-ICE protester says they are ‘heartbroken and angry’ in first statement
- Man waving gun at feds attempting to arrest illegal criminal migrant in Minneapolis fatally shot by agent: DHS
Nor is invoking the Insurrection Act going to fix things. Quite the contrary, it’ll backfire even worse.
It’s the left that wants a civil war here; the forces of law and order need to be smart about how they respond. Simply being in the right just isn’t enough. Team Trump needs to cool things down, and let the American public see calm leadership.
An impartial investigation is warranted here — not the one-sided inquisition Tim Walz wants, but one the broad center of the nation can trust.
The alacritous and misleading rhetoric coming out of the administration needs to stop: Any reasonable person who has watched the videos clearly knows by now he was not “waving his gun around.” And while Pretti was horribly misguided, there is no evidence he was a “terrorist” intent on a “massacre” of law enforcement. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem should also take a break from her self-promoting and combative TV hits.
However noble the mission is to rid the country of the “worst of the worst,” the broad support for it is now ebbing fast.
Mr. President, the American people didn’t vote for these scenes and you can’t continue to order them to not believe their lying eyes.
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