By Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman
Tuesday, January 27, 2026
The statements from congressional Republicans after
Saturday’s shooting of Alex Pretti were relatively mild. Lawmakers said that
they were “deeply
troubled” or “disturbed”
by the second killing of an American citizen by federal immigration officers
this month; most called for an investigation into Pretti’s death. But the
statements kept coming, one after another, all through the weekend and into
yesterday.
The reactions from across the GOP sent an unmistakable
message in their volume, if not in their rhetoric, to Donald Trump: Enough.
The defining characteristics of the Republican-controlled Congress during the
president’s second term have been silence and acquiescence. That so many in his
party felt compelled to speak up after Pretti’s killing was a sign that
Republicans had finally lost patience with federal agents occupying a major
American city—a deportation operation that has soured the public on one of
Trump’s signature policies and sunk the GOP’s standing at the outset of a
crucial midterm-election year.
Republican committee chairs in both the House and the
Senate summoned top administration officials to public hearings—a rarity in the
past year. From the right, the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights
advocates criticized comments from senior law-enforcement officials, including
FBI Director Kash Patel, that blamed Pretti for carrying a firearm and said
that people should not bring guns to public demonstrations. (Videos showed that
officers disarmed
Pretti before they fatally shot him.) Few Republican leaders rushed to defend
the unnamed agent who’d killed Pretti, nor did they echo the rhetoric of
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, the White House
deputy chief of staff, who referred to
Pretti, an ICU nurse, as a “would-be assassin.” In at least one case, the lack
of comment from a top Republican was significant: House Speaker Mike
Johnson—ordinarily quick to pick up talking points from the president and his
top aides—has said nothing about the shooting.
The harshest Republican condemnation came from one of the
party’s candidates for governor of Minnesota, Chris Madel, who yesterday
declared that he was quitting the race in part because of the federal
deployment. “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on
the citizens of our state,” Madel said in his video announcement,
“nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”
Watching all of this unfold was Trump, who already did
not like what he saw. For the president, it was a rare winter weekend when he
wasn’t in Palm Beach or at the golf course. He never left the White House. And
he was glued to news coverage that showed little besides another horrific
shooting in Minnesota. Videos of Pretti’s killing were inescapable on TV and
social media, and the story broke through to nonpolitical media—drawing
reactions from the likes of Charles Barkley and Bill Simmons—in ways that the
fatal shooting of Renee Good on January 7 did not.
Read:
Lethal force on a frozen street
Trump’s first move was to defend the federal officers
carrying out the immigration operations in the moments before the deadly clash.
He reposted a Department of Homeland Security–supplied photo of the gun Pretti
had been carrying, before again making claims about fraud in Minnesota’s
immigrant communities. But he otherwise remained publicly silent as more videos
of the shooting cast doubt on the administration’s statements about what had
happened.
Trump began asking aides and outside advisers if it had
been an “okay” shooting, trying to figure out whether the agents had made the
right decision to fire, a White House official and two allies close to the West
Wing told us. His top aides, among them Miller—including in a post that was
amplified by Vice President Vance—immediately blamed Pretti for instigating
violence (as the administration blamed Good after her death) and suggested,
without evidence, that Pretti had been a “domestic terrorist.”
But this time, fewer Republicans joined the chorus. And
as the weekend wore on, more GOP lawmakers and conservative media voices began
to call for an investigation into the shooting and to question the
administration’s assertion that an armed Pretti had violently resisted agents.
Senator John Curtis of Utah called out
Noem by name, saying that he disagreed with her “premature” response to the
shooting.
Trump grew concerned at the response, the White House
official and one outside ally told us. He again on Sunday demanded more
cooperation from local officials and blamed Democratic lawmakers for violence
in Minnesota—but he noticeably did not defend the officers who’d shot Pretti,
in either his posts or in a brief interview
with The Wall Street Journal. The president, who has long enjoyed
near-total fealty from Republicans, took note of the lawmakers calling for a
probe or quietly suggesting that federal officials roll back operations in the
Twin Cities. (He was glad that the lawmakers did not blame him personally for
the administration’s response, one of the allies told us.)
Trump was particularly bothered by the NRA's strong reply to an
assistant U.S. attorney in California appointed by the administration who said
that if a person approaches law enforcement with a gun, there is a “high
likelihood” that officers will be “legally justified in shooting you.” Trump
has long prided himself on the support he receives from those he calls “my
Second Amendment people,” and he has often been deferential to the gun lobby
despite its waning influence.
When something becomes too controversial for Trump’s
liking—or when the blowback becomes too fierce—he has in many cases a way to
declare some sort of victory, even a far-fetched one, and then move on (as he
did with Greenland last week). Aides wondered whether he was trying to do the
same with Minneapolis. Yesterday, Trump appointed his designated “border czar,”
Tom Homan, to head the federal operation in Minnesota. Although most Democrats
are deeply skeptical of Homan, he has not been involved in the Twin Cities
operations and has been more consistently careful with his language than Miller
or Noem. (After Good’s killing, Homan said that he would reserve judgment on
the matter until an investigation had concluded.) Trump later claimed, after a
phone call, that he and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are largely aligned in
their goals for the federal operation—and even offered some faint praise for
the governor, who is under investigation by the Department of Justice for allegedly
impeding the operation of immigration agents.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said
yesterday that if local officials increased their cooperation with the federal
government, Border Patrol agents would “no longer be needed to support ICE on
the ground in Minnesota.” The administration decided to pull some federal
agents out of Minnesota, aides said, but did not suggest a sweeping overhaul to
the mission in the state or to Trump’s broader immigration agenda.
Trump’s unease, along with pushback from Republicans,
grew by the hour and forced a major change: As The Atlantic’s Nick
Miroff first reported,
the administration yesterday ousted Gregory Bovino from his role as the Border
Patrol’s “commander at large” and removed him from Minnesota, where he had
become the public face of the federal operation. Many in Trump’s orbit saw
Bovino as an easy scapegoat; he’d claimed, without evidence, that Pretti had
planned to attack federal agents. (His choice
of coat and interactions with Minnesotans in social-media posts had also
generated an uproar.) Despite this, a senior administration official insisted
that Bovino’s transfer had been in the works before the announcement of Homan’s
new role. Not all of Trump’s allies were happy with the change in Minneapolis.
“You can’t sugarcoat this,” the Trump ally Steve Bannon said on his podcast.
“It wasn’t just a blink. It was a crater.”
Last night, the president met for two hours in the Oval
Office with Noem and one of her top advisers, the former Trump-campaign chief
Corey Lewandowski, but the senior official made clear to us that no additional
leadership changes are imminent. Leavitt, in her briefing, also said that Trump
continues to have confidence in Noem. For the moment, she remains at her job.
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