You’re a government official and you have just learned that some of your employees have shot and killed a civilian. You don’t have all the facts, and there are discrepancies in the initial accounts. What do you do?
For most of us, I presume, the answer is to call the victim’s family to express condolences and then to promise the public a full investigation followed by whatever consequences the results warrant.
That’s how previous administrations, regardless of party, would have responded. But the Trump administration views such niceties as weakness. Looking weak, giving an inch to the critics, must be avoided at all costs.
So Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem chose differently when ICE agents shot and killed a protester in Minneapolis over the weekend. At a news briefing hours after the killing, she described the victim, Alex Pretti, as someone who “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” He had, she said, been “brandishing” a gun. “This individual, who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism. That’s the facts.”
Those aren’t facts. There was no evidence at the time, and none has emerged since, that Pretti intended to kill anyone, sought to use his gun to stop law enforcement or brandished it. All available videos suggest otherwise. Noem was either lying or speaking with an indifference to truth that is morally indistinguishable from lying — all to trash the reputation of someone her department had just killed. Her department didn’t even notify Pretti’s family of the killing. They learned about it from a reporter.
Noem’s colleagues joined in the fun. Greg Bovino, whom the department has been calling the “commander at large” of the Border Patrol, accused Pretti of seeking to “massacre law enforcement.” (In November, a federal judge concluded that Bovino had “lied multiple times” about his use of tear gas against anti-ICE protesters in Chicago.) Trump administration officials Tricia McLaughlin and Stephen Miller made the same false attacks on Pretti.
FBI Director Kash Patel contributed false statements about the law, saying that you can’t bring loaded firearms to protests. Under Minnesota law, you can, and anyway, Pretti was not at a protest.
Based on past performance, we can be confident that none of these officials will ever apologize for the smears. At most, aides to President Donald Trump will drop them and perhaps pretend they never made them. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, two days after the shooting, explained that none of his colleagues were talking about “the legal definition of domestic terrorism.” (Compare with Noem at her news briefing: “That is the definition of domestic terrorism.”)
Some in the administration are reportedly frustrated, calling the statements from Noem “a case study on how not to do crisis PR.” Sure, and Bovino has already been put out to pasture as a result. But the statements are also signs of moral rot and civic irresponsibility. People speak the way Noem and company have when they have decided that fighting their enemies, even the dead ones, is more important than being decent.
And, let’s not forget, putting the administration’s enemies in their place is what the surge of immigration enforcement to Minnesota was always about. The Trump administration wanted to capitalize on the publicity surrounding welfare fraud in the state, a scandal concentrated among Somali immigrants. The fact that the state’s governor, Tim Walz, was on the Democratic ticket that ran against Trump last year added to the attraction.
On the day of this latest shooting, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Walz a letter listing the administration’s demands, the first being that the state share its data on Medicaid and food stamps. In isolation, that’s a reasonable request. It is not remotely plausible as a rationale for a militarized federal law enforcement operation in the state. Besides, the administration’s Minnesota operation has set back the anti-fraud campaign by inducing the prosecutor who had been leading it to resign.
If the administration were consciously pursuing a strategy optimized for producing confrontation rather than for bringing down the number of illegal immigrants, it would be proceeding just as it has been. Trump has continued, for example, to show no interest in taking obvious steps to crack down on employers’ hiring of workers who entered the country illegally. Pretti’s death, like that of Renée Good, is a consequence of that strategy.
Asked for comment after it altered an image of someone who had protested against its immigration policies, the White House responded, “The memes will continue.” Of course they will: They are much of the point of the immigration policies Trump has adopted.
They’re why Trump has been willing to put up with all the costs of those policies, which now include two dead people in Minnesota. If the president is backing down now, it is because he has found a red line: too much bad publicity.
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