Minnesota governor Tim Walz appealed to Donald Trump to withdraw federal agents from Minnesota on Sunday, a day after US border patrol officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who was monitoring the immigration crackdown.
“What’s the plan, Donald Trump?” Walz asked at a news conference. “What do we need to do to get these federal agents out of our state?”
“President Trump, you can end this today. Pull these folks back; do humane, focused, effective immigration control – you’ve got the support of all of us to do that,” Walz said. “Please show some decency. Pull these folks out”.
Walz, who is not seeking re-election this year, offered an impassioned plea to the US public, many of whom have been caught between supporting immigration control and opposing actions of its enforcement under the Trump administration in the interior.
With both sides of the debate attempting to claim the moral high ground in the aftermath of the killings of Pretti and Renee Good, 17 days earlier, Walz appealed to the public , saying that even if it they once sided with ICE operations, the time had come to oppose them.
“Which side do you want to be on?” Walz asked. “The side of an all-powerful federal government that could kill, injure, menace and kidnap its citizens off the streets, or on the side of a nurse at the VA hospital who died bearing witness to such government,” referring to Pretti.
Earlier, border patrol commander Gregory Bovino offered a sermon about individual choice, implicitly referring to Pretti. “When someone makes the choice to come into an active law enforcement scene, interfere, obstruct, delay or assault law enforcement officer and – and they bring a weapon to do that; that is a choice that that individual made”.
The competing moral appeals came amid mounting skepticism over the narrative advanced by the Trump administration, that Pretti was a direct threat to federal agents and they had acted defensively, after multi-perspective video evidence showed that Pretti never brandished a weapon, and appeared to have been disarmed of a gun he had a license to carry moments before agents opened fire on him at point-blank range.
Bovino said on Sunday he would not speculate about the shooting and that he planned to wait for a federal investigation report. The previous day, the border patrol commander made the sweeping, unsubstantiated claim that Pretti had threatened a “massacre” before being disarmed. Officials with Minnesota’s bureau of criminal apprehension said state investigators had been blocked from the scene of the shooting.
Walz accused federal agents of “sweeping away the evidence”.
In his appeal, Walz also referred to the video evidence that contradicted the claims of federal officials, saying: “You know what you saw, and then you heard the most powerful people in the world ... narrate to you what you were looking at, that this was a domestic terrorist … sullying his name within minutes of this event happening”.
The governor’s comments came hours after US attorney general Pam Bondi accused Minnesota officials of refusing to enforce the rule of law.
“You and your office must restore the rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” Bondi wrote in a letter to Walz. “Fortunately, there are common sense solutions to these problems that I hope we can accomplish together.”
Bondi pressed Walz to produce information about the state’s welfare programs and voter rolls. Both have been swept up in claims by federal officials that Democratic lawmakers in the state allowed them to be manipulated or subject to welfare fraud costing billions.
“I am confident that these simple steps will help bring back law and order to Minnesota and improve the lives of Americans,” Bondi wrote.
The Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, noted that Pretti appeared to have been exercising his first and second amendment rights when he was fatally shot. The chief told the Washington Post: “It’s very obvious from a lot of these videos that this is not what professional policing looks like in this country today.”
While Minnesota remains the focus of attention, increased tensions between local and federal law enforcement have also emerged in Maine. Last week, Kevin Joyce, sheriff of Maine’s Cumberland county, accused ICE agents of “bush-league policing” after they detained a work-authorized corrections officer during a traffic stop.
In Maine last week, the agency launched “Operation Catch of the Day”, which it said would target “the worst of worst criminal illegal aliens”.
But the visibly angry sheriff said at a press conference after one of his corrections recruits was bundled into a car by ICE agents, leaving his car open and unoccupied, that it was “a show of force, a show of whatever they were trying to do”.
Joyce added that if he had once been supportive of ICE removing undocumented immigrants with a criminal record, he was no longer of that mind. “We’re been told one story, which is totally different to what’s occurring,” he said.
