Trump’s deportation forces finally went too far

A federal agent shoves a woman to the ground. A young man walks over to help her up. Then the agent pepper-sprays them both. 

Despite the burning in his eyes, the young man keeps trying to get the woman upright — until a pack of masked, camouflaged officers wrestle him to the street. 

They beat him. He writhes in pain. An agent realizes that he has a firearm holstered on his waist and confiscates it. Someone shouts, “Gun.” An officer fires a shot into the young man’s back — then keeps firing as he collapses. Now, a second agent is firing too. Bullet after bullet into a motionless body. Screams from bystanders as the whole world shakes.

This is what nearly everyone with eyes and an internet connection saw Saturday, when Border Patrol agents gunned down 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. 

The ICU nurse’s final moments were caught on multiple cellphone videos, each depicting one of the most horrifying “officer-involved” shootings of an era that’s seen plenty, including ICE’s killing of Renee Good in the same city, less than three weeks earlier.

Nevertheless, administration officials chose to defend the government’s killing of a US citizen with incendiary lies. 

The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Pretti had “approached officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun,” forcing them to fire “defensive shots.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem suggested that Pretti had been trying to perpetrate an act of “domestic terrorism” that aimed “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” 

Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said Pretti planned to “massacre” federal agents. 

And White House adviser Stephen Miller declared the VA nurse a “would-be assassin” who had “tried to murder federal law enforcement.”

All these remarks had the same chilling subtext: Reality was no constraint on the administration’s support for violence committed in its agenda’s name. DHS was prepared to say things that contradicted all available evidence, in order to protect its agents from legal accountability. 

This proved a bit too Orwellian, even for Trump’s allies.

Many Republican senators, governors, and influencers called for a thorough investigation into Pretti’s killing, as did the NRA. Meanwhile, in interviews with CBS News, anonymous DHS officials complained that the administration was squandering its credibility by trying to “gaslight and contradict what the public can plainly see with their own eyes.”

By Monday, the White House was beating a retreat. Most significantly, the president demoted Bovino, sending him back to his old job as chief of Border Patrol’s sector in El Centro, California. Trump also deployed his (reputedly more moderate) border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, in a bid to mend fences with its leadership. Trump subsequently said he had a “very good call” with Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, saying they both wanted to make conditions in Minneapolis better. 

At the same time, administration officials stopped asserting that Pretti’s killing was justified, saying instead that an investigation was necessary to determine that. 

These are heartening developments. It was far from certain whether any substantial number of Republican officials would publicly critique the White House’s posture. 

After all, the administration’s nearly identical response to Renee Good’s killing failed to inspire comparable intraparty criticism. When an ICE agent killed the 37-year-old mother, the administration had smeared her as a “domestic terrorist,” claiming that she had intentionally run over the agent, who’d sustained life-threatening injuries in the encounter — a narrative blatantly contradicted by video evidence. 

Voters chose to believe their own eyes. By a 54 to 28 percent margin, they told a CBS News/YouGov poll that Good’s killing was unjustified. Nonetheless, even as the administration chose to launch a punitive investigation into Good’s widow, conservative pushback remained muted. 

It’s comforting to know that there is a degree of depravity that Republicans won’t tolerate. And it is similarly reassuring that the White House is not wholly indifferent to popular backlash. 

Nonetheless, it’s important to resist this administration’s latest attempts to induce collective amnesia. 

When the White House says that it can’t yet determine whether Pretti was lawfully killed, it is admitting that our nation’s highest-ranking immigration officials shamelessly misled the American people, so as to defame a slain US citizen. 

An administration that had any sincere regrets about DHS’s perfidy would relieve Miller and Noem of their positions within the Cabinet, while denying Bovino any role within Border Patrol.

But we are not governed by such an administration. And while Trump appears to be ramping down CBP’s activities in Minneapolis, there is no sign that his deportation forces intend to cease unconstitutionally breaking into Americans’ homes, torturing detained immigrants, or brutalizing demonstrators.

Over the past 48 hours, America has taken baby steps back from the brink. But our republic won’t be on sound footing until Trump beats a far deeper retreat.