Kristi Noem’s announcement that all federal immigration agents in Minneapolis will now wear body cameras has backfired spectacularly as critics use her pledge to question why footage of two fatal shootings has been withheld.
The Homeland Security secretary, 54, announced the move in a post on X on Monday, writing: “Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis.”
She said DHS would “rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country,” promising to expand the program nationwide “as funding is available.” This, she claimed, was proof that the Trump administration is “the most transparent…in American history.”
But Noem’s words didn’t land quite the way she had probably hoped. Instead, they prompted outrage from members of the public who pointed out that the move meant nothing if DHS refused to release bodycam footage, as it has done in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
The unarmed mom and Veterans Affairs ICU nurse, both 37 and U.S. citizens, were shot dead by federal immigration agents during protests in Minneapolis last month, triggering nationwide protests and a funding revolt on Capitol Hill that forced Noem’s hand to mandate bodycams.
President Donald Trump, 79, backed Noem’s plan while trying to keep some distance from it. At a White House event Monday, he said body cameras “generally tend to be good for law enforcement,” adding that if Noem “wants to do that, I’m okay with it.”
Critics say the announcement does nothing to answer the central question hanging over the administration, which is why no body-camera footage has been made public from the Good and Pretti shootings.
In Good’s case, the ICE agent who killed her, Jonathan Ross, 43, was filming on his phone as he fired three shots into her SUV.
Civil-rights advocates and local officials have demanded the full video and any other recordings, but the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division declined to open a federal investigation into the Jan. 7 incident. An FBI supervisor who pushed internally to probe Ross’ actions resigned.
In the case of Pretti, multiple investigations have confirmed that Border Patrol agents were wearing body cameras during the chaotic confrontation when he was shot on a Minneapolis street on Jan. 24.
DHS has told lawmakers that internal findings rely on footage from numerous cameras, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which oversees Border Patrol, has sent Congress a report based on a preliminary review of the body-camera footage and other documentation.
Yet none of that video has been released to the public, even as bystander footage has repeatedly contradicted the government’s account of the killing.
On social media, Noem’s bodycam vow landed as expected.
One X user wrote: “You haven’t shared body camera footage ever before when you had it. What good is footage we will never see?” Another said, “Great to see you will become transparent after exhausting every effort to be opaque.”
There was also backlash over Noem’s claim the policy would be pushed nationwide “as funding is available,” given the massive budget DHS was handed as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
“You have the largest by far of any federal agency in the 250 year history of the nation,” one person wrote.
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS and the White House for comment.
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