At least two federal agents who were involved in Saturday’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis have been placed on administrative leave, two US media outlets reported on Wednesday.
The US Department of Homeland Security said the two immigration agents who discharged their weapons during the deadly encounter with Mr Pretti were put on leave as part of standard procedures, Fox News reported.
Immigration agents on Saturday fired multiple shots at Mr Pretti, an ICU nurse at a hospital for veterans.
His death was the second fatal encounter between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents and US citizens in Minnesota this month, and sparked a national uproar.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, said he would “de-escalate a little bit” his immigration enforcement crackdown in Minnesota as he tried to quell the backlash to two fatal shootings by federal agents, even as the raids continued without pause.
The US president did not say whether he would direct a change in tactics, and federal immigration raids continued in the state, including an incident on Tuesday during which agents tried to enter the consulate of Ecuador in Minneapolis without a warrant.
The fallout from the killing of Mr Pretti on Saturday has continued to dog the White House even as Mr Trump travelled to a rally in Iowa to deliver remarks about the economy in the hopes of bolstering Republicans in advance of the midterm elections in November.
Mr Trump hedged his views on the killing of Mr Pretti, telling reporters before the Iowa event that he did not think Mr Pretti was an “assassin”, a term used by his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, but he continued to blame Mr Pretti for carrying a gun he was licensed to possess.
The backlash has nonetheless remained ferocious towards the aggressive tactics of agents, and the National Rifle Association criticised the administration for dismissing Mr Pretti’s constitutional and legal right to carry a gun.
[ White House backtracks initial claims about Alex Pretti after intense backlashOpens in new window ]
A third round of No Kings protests is being planned for March 28th – galvanised by the killing of two US citizens in back-to-back incidents in the immigration operation in Minnesota. Organised by groups around the country, the demonstration is expected by some to draw as many as nine million people, which would make it the largest protest in US history.
“This is in large part a response to a combination of heinous attacks on our democracy and communities coming from the regime, and a sense that nobody’s coming to save us,” said Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of the non-profit Indivisible.
Mr Trump insisted on Tuesday that he was waiting for the results of a “very honourable and honest investigation” into Mr Pretti’s shooting, which is being conducted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of the US border patrol.
There has been no civil rights investigation by the US justice department, as was until recently typical practice in federal officer-related shootings.
The fast-changing nature of the situation also appears to have caught Mr Trump off-guard at times. Following his suggestion that he was on the “same wavelength” with Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, and Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, after the weekend, Mr Trump on Wednesday expressed frustration in a Truth Social post that Mr Frey would not help federal immigration officers.
“Surprisingly, Mayor Jacob Frey just stated that, ‘Minneapolis does not, and will not, enforce Federal Immigration Laws.’” Mr Trump wrote. “Could somebody in his inner sanctum please explain that this statement is a very serious violation of the Law, and that he is PLAYING WITH FIRE!”
[ Minneapolis shooting: How the Trump administration rushed to judgmentOpens in new window ]
Mr Frey responded hours later, saying in his own post on X that he did not want local police getting pulled in to help with immigration enforcement.
“The job of our police is to keep people safe, not enforce fed immigration laws. I want them preventing homicides, not hunting down a working dad who contributes to Mpls & is from Ecuador,” Mr Frey wrote.
At the White House, Mr Trump initially appeared to penalise Ms Noem for falsely portraying Mr Pretti as a “domestic terrorist”, replacing her lieutenant, the US border patrol commander Gregory Bovino, with Mr Trump’s “border tsar”, Tom Homan.
Ms Noem’s job nevertheless appeared to be safe after she met Mr Trump in the Oval Office to complain that she had been unfairly blamed, alleging that her remarks had been scripted by Mr Miller.
Mr Miller, meanwhile, after immediately attacking Mr Pretti following his death, has now turned to blaming Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) for supposedly presenting the White House with inaccurate information, and laid the blame with Mr Bovino.
“The White House provided clear guidance to DHS that the extra personnel that had been sent to Minnesota for force protection should be used for conducting fugitive operations to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disrupters,” Mr Miller said.
A preliminary report by CBP’s internal watchdog, transmitted to lawmakers on Tuesday, said Mr Pretti was shot by two US border patrol agents while resisting arrest.
The report also made no mention of Ms Noem’s initial claims that Mr Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement”, nor that he had been “brandishing” a gun when he was tackled by agents and shot roughly 10 times in the back.
– Guardian. Additional reporting by Reuters