The US government’s account of the killing on Saturday of Alex Pretti, a US citizen with no criminal record, has been unravelling since it happened last weekend.
Stephen Miller, the mastermind of US president Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy, had called Pretti a “terrorist” and told other administration officials, including Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, to call him an “assassin”.
But videos clearly contradicted that story. Pretti was pinned down at the time when immigration agents opened fire and killed him. Protests and a palpable sense of outrage subsequently grew across the country. Even the president’s allies became alarmed. Many of them wanted to see changes on the ground, and several made a recommendation directly in calls to the president: Send Tom Homan, the White House border tsar, to Minneapolis.
Early on Monday, Brian Kilmeade, the co-host of Fox & Friends, of which Trump is a loyal viewer, repeated the message three times in two hours.
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Twenty minutes later, the president announced on social media that he was sending Homan to Minneapolis, a tacit acknowledgment that he was losing control of a situation that posed one of the most serious political threats of his second administration.
Gregory Bovino, a border patrol official who had been directing on-the-ground operations in Minneapolis and who was known for aggressive tactics, was out. “Bovino is pretty good, but he’s a pretty out-there kind of guy,” Trump told Fox News. “Maybe it wasn’t good here.”
And while there is no sign that Trump is repudiating the tactics used by the federal agents in Minnesota or the core tenets of his immigration policies, the moment was a rare example of the president moving to mitigate the harsh optics associated with a crackdown his administration has otherwise celebrated.
Trump has honed a survival tactic over many years facing criticism in the public eye: he creates diversions to barrel from one news cycle into the next. But in other moments, when he has faced particularly intense – and politically damaging – public outcry, he has taken stock of news coverage and decided to take a different tack, often temporarily.
Pretti’s killing and its aftermath created one of those moments. Trump seemed to realise in this case that his message, at least, had to change. Shortly after he made the announcement about Homan, Trump and his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, softened their tone about the shooting and distanced themselves from the incendiary comments made by Miller, Bovino and Noem. Trump also said he spoke with governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, whom he had castigated days before.
As the White House walks back some of its harshest statements, a blame game of sorts has erupted, with Miller suggesting immigration authorities in Minneapolis may not have been following protocol.
In a statement, Miller said the White House had advised Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials to create a “physical barrier” between “arrest teams” and “disrupters”.
“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” said Miller, who just days earlier had called Pretti a “would-be assassin”.
On Wednesday, a department of homeland security official said the two federal officers who shot Pretti had been put on leave.
It remains to be seen whether the rhetorical shift will tamp down the outcry or whether there is any will inside the Trump administration to change tactics on the ground.
Homan, a long-time US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) official, is seen among Trump’s allies as someone who could bring a measure of calm to the chaos in Minnesota, particularly because he has called for targeted arrests instead of sweeping raids. But he is fully on board with Trump’s mass-deportation campaign – in 2018, he, along with two senior officials, recommended a policy that eventually led to families being separated at the southern border.
By Monday afternoon, Trump was sitting with Homan in the Oval Office. The meeting on immigration issues had already been on the president’s schedule, but now it served as a send-off for Homan, whose new assignment was to start immediately.
“President Trump asked Tom Homan to fly to Minnesota, because Tom Homan is the perfect man for the job,” Leavitt said in a statement. “Following the president’s directive, Tom was on a plane within hours.”
This account of Trump’s shifting strategy in Minnesota, and the dawning realisation that his usual tactics were not working, is based on interviews with a dozen people, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
In the days after the shooting of Pretti, Trump did not like what he was seeing on television.
Holed up in the White House over the weekend, with temperatures dropping and a major snowstorm on its way, Trump expressed concern about the killing to aides and allies. His frustrations were, however, more in relation to the coverage of the events than the incident itself, according to people familiar with the dynamic.
‘Nobody Understands TV Better’
The president told certain people that the killing of Pretti and the protests were overshadowing his accomplishments on immigration and the border – two issues that he sees as his signature achievements, and which he returns to over and over when he feels under siege politically.
“Nobody understands TV better than him,” said Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who spoke with Trump over the weekend. “I was among many that were telling him his instincts were right.”
Graham said he and others told Trump they needed to find a solution.
“We’re still going to pursue the hardest of the hard, but the visuals were undercutting the idea that the chaos is caused by sanctuary-city policy,” he said.
It was not just political figures who were reaching out. In the past week, Apple chief executive Tim Cook told Trump it was “time for de-escalation” in Minneapolis, according to a spokesperson for the company.
By Sunday night, Trump signalled he was open to a change when he told the Wall Street Journal he willing to have an investigation into the shooting, even though he and his aides had already rushed to judgment about who they believed was at fault.
The next morning, when Trump announced Homan would be taking over day-to-day operations in Minnesota, critics said the president was simply papering over the problem.
Democratic representative Bennie Thompson said Homan’s appointment was nothing but “musical chairs”.
“You don’t make change by just moving someone out and bringing the same-type mouthpiece in – in another suit,” he told CNN. “So what we want is substantive change.”
‘A Very Unfortunate Incident’
Noem, the homeland security secretary, knew that a reshuffle in Minneapolis was bad news for her. She was, after all, the woman in charge of immigration. She was the public face of the entire operation.
Democrats were calling for her impeachment, and even Republican allies were criticising the administration’s response to the death of Pretti.
So Noem called the White House and requested a meeting with the president.
Trump was running late and in the middle of a radio interview when Noem arrived. But he invited her and Corey Lewandowski, her top aide and Trump’s first campaign manager in 2015, to join him in the Oval Office as he finished up.
Once Trump was free, the group discussed the administration’s response in Minnesota and ways to better communicate the president’s accomplishments on the border.
But it was hardly a crisis meeting. The situation in Minneapolis was only one of the topics they covered during the nearly two-hour Oval Office confab. Trump also chatted about the construction of the White House ballroom, one of his favourite topics, and the midterms.
Noem, despite overseeing a deadly and chaotic crackdown, seemed safe – for now, at least. On Tuesday, Trump told reporters he was happy with her.
“I think she’s done a very good job,” he said.
As Trump travelled to Iowa for a speech on the economy, Miller was on Air Force One – a sign that his standing had not diminished, either.
Despite the shift in tone from Trump, his intense federal crackdown was still active. In Minneapolis on Monday, federal agents arrested about 100 immigrants in the country illegally – far surpassing the daily average before the operation began in the city, according to two US officials.
Even as he tried to turn the page on the crisis in Minneapolis, saying he wanted to “de-escalate” the situation, he continued to blame Pretti, the intensive care unit nurse shot by Border Patrol agents, for his own death.
“You can’t walk in with guns,” Trump said of Pretti, who was legally carrying a gun with a permit and was under a pile-up of agents when one suddenly shot him in the back. He then called Pretti’s death “a very unfortunate incident”. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
