The White House’s tone might be softening after outrage about the Minnesota ICE shootings, but there’s no reason to expect a policy shift
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Has the US entered the darkest period of Donald Trump’s second term? It certainly feels like it. The Trump administration’s cruel obsession with immigration had already yielded imprisonments, deaths and deportations, but the recent trend of immigration agents gunning down US citizens in the streets surely represents a painful new step.
The government’s immediate reaction to the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed less than three weeks apart in Minneapolis, have only intensified the air of menace.
Despite video evidence that showed Pretti was holding a phone, not a gun, when he was fatally shot, Stephen Miller called the registered nurse a “would-be assassin”: “a domestic terrorist who tried to assassinate law enforcement”. Gregory Bovino, the senior US border patrol official who has become the face of the government’s immigration crackdowns, said over the weekend that border patrol agents were “the victims”, not Pretti. Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, claimed Pretti was involved in “domestic terrorism” when he was killed.
