Trump administration officials have justified the influx of federal immigration agents in Minnesota by offering a number of defenses after the killings of two Americans there.
In a single month, agents have fatally shot Renee Good, 37, a mother of three who was behind the wheel of her car, and Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who appeared to be filming border agents.
President Trump and top officials, in trying to shift blame, have mounted an array of arguments. They have accused Mr. Pretti of assaulting and brandishing a weapon at officers, despite video evidence to the contrary. They have characterized Minnesota as a state that refuses to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. And they have overstated the fraud scandal that precipitated the surge of immigration officers.
Here’s a fact-check.
What Was Said
“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition, rather than a sign. This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers.” — Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, in a news conference last Saturday
This lacks evidence. Mr. Pretti, the nurse killed on Saturday, was carrying a firearm, but no evidence has emerged that he used it to “assault” law enforcement officers. It is not against state law to bring a firearm to a protest. Ms. Noem, like many others in the Trump administration, has written positively about armed assembly in the past, and has supported efforts to loosen restrictions on carrying firearms in public.
Videos of the scene show Mr. Pretti holding a phone, not a gun, before agents tackled him to the ground. The agents then yelled that Mr. Pretti had a gun, and disarmed him before shooting him.
Officials have not offered proof that Mr. Pretti was using his weapon to “assault” the agents. And an initial report from U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s internal watchdog does not repeat the claim that Mr. Pretti brandished his weapon.
And contrary to Ms. Noem’s suggestion, Minnesota does not prohibit firearms at demonstrations, according to both the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety and the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus.
“Peaceful protests while armed isn’t radical — it’s American,” Gun Owners of America, a gun rights lobbying group, said on social media. “The First and Second Amendments protect those rights, and they always have.”
As the Republican governor of South Dakota, Ms. Noem supported efforts to expand gun rights. The first measure she signed into law made it legal to carry concealed pistols in the state without a permit. She also approved a measure repealing all concealed permit fees, including for federal background checks.
And Ms. Noem has written approvingly of one instance of armed assembly in the past. In her 2024 book, “No Going Back,” Ms. Noem described armed counterprotesters at a Black Lives Matter rally in Sioux Falls, S.D., in May 2020.
“Sparks of violence erupted but never got out of control,” she wrote. “There also happened to be hundreds of Second Amendment–loving bikers in close proximity. They parked along the protest route downtown and at the mall, standing with police with their Second Amendment rights on full display. They didn’t have to say anything; the message was clear: No riots or looting tonight.”
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Ms. Noem “supports every American’s Second Amendment right. Americans have the right to show up to a protest with a gun, but you must follow the law.”
What Was Said
“Remember, there’s a much easier way to do this. When these violent criminals who are here illegally are ready to get out of prison, the mayor could just let us know. We could go get them from prison and deport them. They refuse to do that.” — Todd Blanche, deputy attorney general, in an interview on NBC last Sunday
This is exaggerated. While some county jails in Minnesota do not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the state’s prison system does. In fact, Minnesota state law requires its Department of Corrections to notify ICE when it takes into custody any prisoner who is not a U.S. citizen. The Department of Corrections, which runs the state prison system, also coordinates with federal immigration officials to transfer custody of migrants subject to deportation. The agency released 84 people to ICE last year.
Records compiled by the Deportation Data Project, an academic group, and analyzed by the Prison Policy Initiative, a think tank that supports criminal justice reform, showed that ICE arrested more than 560 people out of jails and other detention facilities in Minnesota from Jan. 20, 2025, to Oct. 15, 2025. That was about a third of all recorded ICE arrests in Minnesota during that time.
“Minnesota has taken some steps to protect people from criminalization of immigration, but it has not gone nearly as far as states like Illinois,” said Jacob Kang-Brown, a senior researcher at the Prison Policy Initiative.
While states like Illinois, New York and Oregon have laws that limit local cooperation with immigration enforcement, recent efforts to do so in Minnesota have failed to gain traction in the state legislature. But unlike states such as Texas and Florida, Minnesota does not require local law enforcement to cooperate either.
As a result, it is often up to counties and jurisdictions to set immigration enforcement policies.
The Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports lower levels of immigration, lists 12 counties in Minnesota as “sanctuary jurisdictions,” indicating that they do not generally cooperate with ICE or federal immigration enforcement. But it does not list the state itself as a sanctuary state. (There are 87 counties in Minnesota.)
The list does include Hennepin County, which houses the state’s largest county jail, in Minneapolis. But the jail’s immigration policy is set by the county sheriff, not the mayor of Minneapolis, as Mr. Blanche suggested.
Conversely, seven counties and one city in Minnesota have agreements with ICE, under its 287(g) program, which deputizes local officials to carry out immigration enforcement operations.
What Was Said
“We’re in there looking for where this money is coming from, how much it is — it could be more than $19 billion. Can you believe that? That’s just one state. If we were able to cut out 50 percent of the fraud, 50 percent, and we should be able to do better than that, we would have a balanced budget without having to talk about even growth.” — President Trump, at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21
“In Minnesota, they think it’s $19 billion. If they think it’s $19 billion, triple it or quadruple it.” — Mr. Trump, in a Fox News interview on Tuesday
This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump’s figure for the amount of potential fraud in Minnesota is double what federal prosecutors have estimated. And it is implausible that reducing fraud in Minnesota or fraud across the country would balance the federal budget.
After the shootings of Mr. Pretti and Ms. Good, Mr. Trump said that one of the reasons for the surge of immigration agents to the city was a fraud scandal involving members of the Somali diaspora.
Over the past few years, fraudsters have perpetrated several schemes targeting social safety net programs in Minnesota. So far, federal prosecutors say they have uncovered more than $1 billion in funding stolen from taxpayers.
In December, prosecutors announced that they were broadening the investigation, and said that fraudulent payments since 2018 could total more than $9 billion. (The top prosecutor leading that investigation resigned after the shooting of Ms. Good, as the Justice Department sought to focus on her ties to activist groups.)
State officials have questioned the $9 billion estimate as inflated, noting that their own estimates are in the tens of millions. They said that any amount of fraud should provoke outrage.
But $9 billion over seven years would not be nearly enough to balance the federal budget. The federal deficit was $1.8 trillion in 2025. A 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office estimated that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud a year, including from schemes that go undetected. Eliminating all fraud in government programs across the country would reduce the federal deficit by a third.
“The Trump administration will get to the bottom of the fraud and ensure American taxpayers aren’t being ripped off,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Linda Qiu is a Times reporter who specializes in fact-checking statements made by politicians and public figures. She has been reporting and fact-checking public figures for nearly a decade.
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