The Trump administration is removing Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino from Minnesota, after federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old VA ICU nurse, Saturday morning. Bovino has been the face of Trump's roving paramilitary-style immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and other Democratic-led cities. Shortly after Pretti was killed, Bovino had claimed Pretti intended to "massacre law enforcement," a statement unsubstantiated by video and witness testimony from the scene. According to The Atlantic magazine, Bovino will return to his previous post in El Centro, California,
Miller, the architect of Donald Trump's hardline immigration policy, finds himself in the rare position of being contradicted and excluded from crucial decisions by the US president. About three and a half hours after the tragedy on Saturday, Miller used social media to describe Pretti, 37, as a would-be assassin who tried to murder federal agents. On Tuesday, when asked if he believes Pretti was an assassin, Trump said: No.
The acting commander of U.S. Border Patrol and an unspecified number of agents are expected to leave Minnesota "imminently," according to multiple reports, amid escalating outrage over a series of deadly encounters tied to a massive federal immigration crackdown in the state. Gregory Bovino, who has overseen Border Patrol operations during the Trump administration's Operation Metro Surge, is among those expected to depart, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Again, when you take into account all of the factors that none of us know because we weren't there we don't know what precipitated that, we don't know what happened before. And unfortunately they interfered with an ongoing law enforcement investigation and that is something you just don't do. Normal law-abiding citizens don't do that. There's nothing wrong with exercising their Amendment rights to record, but when you start interfering, that's tough.
Early Saturday morning, it appeared as if enough Senate Democrats were willing to fund the Department of Homeland Security and its deportation machine, if that's what it took to keep the rest of the government open. How quickly things change. The House had passed funding for the DHS late last week, with seven centrist Democrats joining nearly all Republicans to get it over the line. The Senate was to take it up this week alongside a handful of other funding bills.
President Donald Trump has announced he will send Tom Homan to Minneapolis, an apparent benching of DHS honcho Kristi Noem, who has reportedly been at odds with the border czar. Trump announced the move via his Truth Social platform on Monday morning, two days after the shooting of Minneapolis VA nurse Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents. I am sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight.
I'm shocked and deeply saddened that one of my colleagues was murdered in cold blood by modern-day Gestapo this morning," said Steven Koster, an ICU Nurse in San Francisco.
The suspect also had two loaded magazines and no accessible ID. This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.
The incident, the third shooting involving Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis this year, occurred shortly after 9 a.m. Central Time on the city's South Side when federal law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation against a man the Department of Homeland Security said was undocumented and armed, and wanted for "violent assault." Another individual approached the federal agents with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun, DHS said.
All we have is the Department of Homeland Security's version of events. That, at around 2:20 P.M., Border Patrol agents approached a man and a woman in the parking lot of a hospital. That the man, who was driving the truck, attempted to run the agents over, causing one of the agents on the scene to discharge his weapon in self-defense.