President Trump moved swiftly on Saturday to try to shift the blame for another shooting death in Minneapolis away from the federal agents involved in the incident, claiming instead that it was the result of inflammatory rhetoric by local officials and the victim himself.
Members of Mr. Trump’s administration also quickly labeled the man, who Minneapolis police said was 37 and an American citizen, as a “domestic terrorist” and would-be assassin hours after the morning shooting, before all the facts were known or an investigation could take place. Videos taken by bystanders appeared to contradict the account of federal officials.
In a pair of social media posts, Mr. Trump accused local politicians, including Gov. Tim Walz and Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, of “inciting Insurrection” in an attempt to divert attention from an unrelated fraud scandal. He called Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “patriots” who were left unassisted by the local police as they seek to detain what Mr. Trump described as violent immigrants.
“If they were still there, you would see something far worse than you are witnessing today!” the president wrote.
Mr. Trump also shared a photo of a firearm that federal officials claim belonged to the man who was killed. The police in Minneapolis said the man, whom law enforcement officials identified as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, had a firearms permit. It is legal to openly carry a weapon in Minnesota.
The Department of Homeland Security said the episode began when a man approached Border Patrol agents “with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun” and they tried to disarm him. But footage from the scene verified by The New York Times shows that the man was holding a phone in his hand when federal agents took him to the ground and shot him. A Times analysis found that at least 10 shots were fired.
A U.S. official said the Department of Homeland Security would investigate the shooting, with the help of the F.B.I. Despite that, top Department of Homeland Security leaders weighed in on the shooting Saturday with assertions of what had occurred.
Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official in charge of agents in Minnesota, claimed that the man was attempting to murder agents.
“This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” Mr. Bovino said at a news conference on Saturday.
The defiant and angry response by the president and members of his administration further inflamed tensions in a city that has for weeks been racked by conflicts between protesters and government agents sent there to enforce the president’s crackdown on immigrants. Increasingly, U.S. citizens have taken to the streets to protest what many have described as a military-style occupation of an American city in which federal agents are using aggressive and violent tactics.
The shooting further deepened a calcifying rift between federal officials and their counterparts in Minnesota, where local and state officials said they have been given sparse information about the actions of federal agents.
Shortly after the shooting, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, posted messages on social media claiming the man was seeking to murder federal agents.
“A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists,” Mr. Miller said. Earlier, he responded to a social media post from Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, that criticized the administration’s crackdown in her state.
“A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement and this is your response?” he wrote. “You and the state’s entire Democrat leadership team have been flaming the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportation of illegals who invaded the country.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem echoed the idea that Mr. Pretti was a domestic terrorist in a news conference on Saturday.
“This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement,” she said, despite no known evidence of his intent. She called her assertion of “domestic terrorism” just “the facts.”
The fatal shooting Saturday came a little over two weeks after Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman, was shot three times while she was driving in her S.U.V.
In the hours after she was shot and killed, Ms. Good was also labeled a “domestic terrorist” by members of the Trump administration, as officials moved quickly to exonerate the ICE official who shot her before an investigation could determine what had occurred.
A supervisor in the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis field office resigned after bureau leadership in Washington pressured her to discontinue a civil rights inquiry into Jonathan Ross, the immigration officer who shot Ms. Good, The Times reported.
Mr. Trump and top officials were following a similar playbook in their response to the shooting of Mr. Pretti on Saturday, even as videos emerged that challenged their accounts.
On Saturday, angry Minnesota officials demanded that Department of Homeland Security officials leave the state.
“How many more residents, how many more Americans, need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?” Mr. Frey said.
On social media and in a later news conference, Mr. Walz said he had spoken with Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, after the shooting. He had argued for state officials to lead the investigation. He accused “the most powerful people in the federal government” of “spinning stories and putting up pictures.”
Of immigration agents, Mr. Walz added: “They killed a man, created chaos, pushed down protesters, threw gas indiscriminately and then left the scene and then we’re left to clean up.”
Mitch Smith contributed reporting from Chicago.
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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