On Saturday Jan. 24, a federal immigration officer fatally shot a 37-year-old Minneapolis man during an immigration enforcement operation, triggering a new wave of protests and ramping up tensions in a city already shaken by another fatal shooting weeks earlier.
According to the Associated Press, family members say the man, Alex Pretti, was an intensive care nurse at a VA hospital who was upset by President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in his city.
By Sunday, outside ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C., hundreds of demonstrators rallied to demand limits on aggressive enforcement and greater oversight of the agency. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats vowed to oppose a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security that would provide $64.4 billion to the agency — including $10 billion for ICE. The stance increases the likelihood of a partial government shutdown by the end of this week.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that federal officers were conducting an operation and fired “defensive shots” after a man with a handgun approached them and “violently resisted” when officers tried to disarm him.
After the shooting, an angry crowd gathered and protesters clashed with federal immigration officers, who wielded batons and deployed flash bangs.
The Trump administration swiftly defended federal agents on social media and in public statements, urging support for ICE and blaming local leaders for causing unrest.
“The Mayor and the Governor are inciting insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric… LET OUR ICE PATRIOTS DO THEIR JOB!” said President Donald Trump in a statement released by the White House on Instagram. “12,000 Illegal Alien Criminals, many of them violent, have been arrested and taken out of Minnesota. If they were still there, you would see something far worse than you are witnessing today!”
But critics on Capitol Hill, including both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, condemned the rhetoric as inflammatory and called for accountability and independent investigations into the use of force.
“ICE should be abolished,” Texas Republican Rep. Craig Goldman said in an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju. “Something should be reconstituted so that we have immigration enforcement.”
