Will Trump “de-escalate” Minneapolis tensions after Alex Pretti killing?

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0:38President Trump is saying he wants to de-escalate tensions in Minnesota after the killing of the US citizen Alex Pretty by federal immigration agents at the weekend. And Donald Trump has sent the very controversial Border Patrol chief out of the state. But there are still thousands of ICE, immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minnesota and the protests are carrying on. So how much of a de-escalation can we really expect? And if we do, what does that mean for Donald Trump's deportation policy? Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir.

1:18Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world. Oh, dear. Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry? Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

1:39Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Washington Bureau. And it is Marianna in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London. And it's Anthony, still up to my neck in snow here in my home in Arlington, Virginia. Right. So a lot has happened since we last talked about Minneapolis on Monday's podcast when we were answering your various questions about it. We've had this preliminary report, haven't we, into what happened. And the president has been talking about Alex Pretty's killing. Sarah, if you were going to sort of get us up to speed with where we're at now, what would be your sort of summary of it?

2:11Well, so to briefly run through what happened for anybody who's not caught up. Alex Pretty, who was a US citizen, a nurse in the local veterans hospital, was shot dead by federal immigration agents on Saturday. And there was video evidence, quite a lot of videos appeared on social media directly contradicting what the Trump administration had said immediately afterwards. They claimed that he was a domestic terrorist, that he was intent on causing a massacre of law enforcement agents. And there was no evidence for any of those claims in videos that everybody could look at. And we talked about this on Monday's episode.

2:44Since then, we've had this initial report from Homeland Security, and it confirms that two officers did fire guns in the shooting of Alex Pretti. And crucially, it makes absolutely no mention of him having brandished a gun, which is what the Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, told the media, or making any kind of threats towards these officers. Now, Donald Trump has been to Iowa on Tuesday to make a speech about the economy. But, of course, on the way, he took lots of questions from the media with different reporters and an interview that he gave to Fox News as well. We're going to de-escalate a little bit.

3:16The message is out that Tom Homan is in. Yeah. Commander Bovino is supposedly leaving Minneapolis along with some CBP agents. Is this a pullback? I don't think it's a pullback. It's a little bit of a change. Everybody in this room that has a business, you know, you make little changes. Because, you know, Bovino is very good, but he's a pretty out there kind of a guy. And in some cases, that's good. Maybe it wasn't good here. Do you agree with the assessment from some of your own officials that Alex Freddie is a domestic terrorist or an assassin? Well, I haven't heard that, but certainly he shouldn't have been carrying a gun.

3:48But all of, hey, look, bottom line, everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident. Everyone, unless you're a stupid person, a very, very unfortunate incident. I don't like that he had a gun. I don't like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That's a lot of bad stuff. And despite that, I say that's a very unfortunate. So there Donald Trump is once again pointing out the fact that Alex Preddy had a loaded handgun, had several clips on him and suggesting that that was part of the reason why this situation escalated and implying that he was somehow responsible. I think that is going to annoy a lot of gun rights groups, conservative gun rights groups in the U.S.

4:31You've already heard some pushback from the National Rifle Association and from a Minnesota gun rights group to previous comments by Trump administration officials on this. It is not the kind of line you would expect to hear from Donald Trump, who is touted about being the biggest defender of the Second Amendment, which protects the constitutional right to have firearms in this country. Yes. So, Anthony, what Donald Trump said there was that he didn't like that he had a gun or that and two fully loaded magazines. We've heard other administration officials talking about this. So notably Kash Patel, head of the FBI, normally a big supporter of the Second Amendment as well.

5:07And he said, you can't bring a gun to a protest. Now, that's not right, is it? I mean, one, this wasn't really a protest as such, but setting that aside, you can bring a gun to a protest, can't you? In fact, as many guns as you like, as long as you're licensed to carry them. There's no carve out in the Second Amendment that says you have a right to bear arms except when you're going to a protest. Now, does that risk escalating the situation if you have a firearm and you're around law enforcement who are worried about their safety? Yes. But also, as many on the left have pointed out, Donald Trump supporters have shown up at rallies and protests carrying not just handguns, but loaded semi-automatic rifles as well, armed to the teeth.

5:52And they are, they say, exercising their constitutional rights. And of course, you haven't seen this kind of a violent incident when these right-wing gun rights activists have been showing up to protest. So yeah, I think there's clear contradictions here. And Donald Trump is kind of treading on dangerous ground with his own base if he keeps pushing ahead on this. So why do you think they're just looking for any excuse to blame Alex Peretti for something here? I think that's certainly part of it. Maybe they make it a pitch to what they would consider more centrist people who aren't gun rights activists or gun rights proponents who would look at this and say, well, geez, why does he have a gun in this sort of a circumstance?

6:34But when you get right down to it, he had that right. And it shouldn't have been grounds for the kind of response that the law enforcement had there. Although you can understand, again, They see a gun. They're on edge already. All of the immigration enforcement officials in this incident were armed as well. They very quickly pulled out their handguns when they heard that. And then someone shouted, gun, gun, gun. And things escalated from there. One thing that just on that point you're making, Anthony, around the risk of losing some of his base here. I mean, if you look at the some of the very pro MAGA, pro Donald Trump accounts on social media, but particularly those that frequently post about gun rights and the right to carry arms and everything else, quite a few of them have turned on Donald Trump over this.

7:21And they have been posting saying that, you know, all administration should be should be held accountable for this kind of thing. And it's not a reason to shoot someone and all that all that kind of stuff. Remember all the defenses that people asserted on the right for Kyle Rittenhouse, who was the individual during the Black Lives Matter protests in Wisconsin, who had a semi-automatic rifle carrying it during those protests, shot someone and was not charged by any of the law enforcement there. I mean, he was celebrated as a hero by many conservatives, including Donald Trump himself. So it's a very different sort of one treatment of him in that sort of circumstance and reaction by law enforcement during those protests, which were much more tinged with the potential for violence than what we've seen from this video of Alex Priddy prior to his shooting.

8:17Now, the other thing Donald Trump mentioned there, well, the other person Donald Trump mentioned there was Gregory Bovino, the Border Force chief. Very high profile in recent months in various different cities as ICE have gone in on these immigration raids. And he's been asked to leave Minnesota now. He's being sent back to California where he's from. Is that going to make a major difference, I guess, to what happens on the ground and to the perception of what's happening on the ground? because, I mean, he has been seen as the kind of the face of the particularly aggressive, sometimes violent push into these cities, hasn't he?

8:53Because although there's been these two fatal incidents, there's been lots and lots of occasions where protesters have been wrestled to the ground, pepper sprayed and treated quite violently in many, many ways and the violent way in which they go into people's homes when they're looking for what they think are illegal immigrants. So, Anthony, do you think, I mean, a major change in tactics, do you think? Or is Bovino the fall guy here? And once he's left Minnesota, then people can look elsewhere? I don't think we've seen a change in tactics necessarily yet. On Sunday and Monday, we saw video evidence of continued immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, continued clashes between immigration, federal immigration officers and protesters.

9:33So that hasn't changed, although there has been talk of at least some of the immigration officers being removed from Minneapolis, so maybe not quite as many. But the drawdown, the de-escalation, as Donald Trump mentioned, hasn't really been felt on the ground yet by many. But I do think that, as you mentioned, Bovina was the face of this aggressive immigration effort, and not just in Minneapolis, but in Chicago and in Charlotte, North Carolina and in Portland and in Los Angeles, all of these. He was kind of the man who was out front in his full military style Border Patrol uniform, giving press briefings where he's been denouncing not just the protesters, but also talking about the type of criminals they've been taking off the streets.

10:25I remember a video of him holding what looked like some sort of a gas canister, tear gas or smoke, and tossing it at protesters surrounded by his Border Patrol, fellow Border Patrol officers. So he had become a bit of a lightning rod here. So taking him out of the equation at least gives the administration a chance to say, OK, you know, we're putting someone else in here. Tom Homan, a little more skilled politically, a little less bombastic, a little more of a Washington player because he worked in the Obama administration as well as the Trump administrations. So it's a change of tone, perhaps a change of attitude.

11:04We'll see if it's an actual change of policy as well. And Gregory Bovino that we were just talking about, who was in charge of the operations there in Minneapolis, it's not just that post that he's lost. He lost access to his social media accounts. He couldn't be posting on X anymore. And that's, I thought, absolutely fascinating that the White House clearly thought it was as important to stop him communicating on social media as it was to stop him from actually taking charge of the operation on the ground. Yeah, and it's really interesting because lots of the posts he's shared have highlighted individual examples of where he feels you know the crackdown on immigration is is working for example his his latest post before he then kind of went quiet went dormant was saying convicted sexual predator arrested you know he's that bigging up what would would be perceived as the kind of achievements if that's the right word of the administration meeting their targets and goals i think that the decision to essentially not allow him to use his X profile highlights two really important things.

12:02The first is that the individual examples that are being accentuated or picked up upon by politicians are not necessarily proving that helpful for Donald Trump in terms of the public perception of these immigration crackdowns. Number two, that they recognise the power that even X, which we often talk about how it's small but mighty in terms of its ability to shape political narratives, they recognise that actually it's a really crucial and important tool. And it's a big thing that the White House hammer all the time. The number of violent criminals, they say, have been detained and in many cases deported.

12:35And in fact, the last time we saw Donald Trump in the briefing room just over a week ago, he was there with all of these A4 sized photographs, sort of mugshots of people who he said had already been deported outside of America with the list of the crimes that they'd committed. Now, dangerous they were and what a safer place America was for not having them in the country anymore. But actually, Anthony, I just saw some stats from the Cato Institute who say of all of the people who've been detained in this crackdown since Trump came back to the White House, only 27 % of them have any convictions at all.

13:05And only 5 % of them have convictions for violent crime. If you listen to Donald Trump or Caroline Levitt or any bit of the administration, you'd think that they were nearly all violent criminals. And I wonder to what extent it's making it through into the public's mind that actually a lot of these are, you know, perfectly law-abiding citizens who might not be entirely innocent in that they're living in the country illegally or in an undocumented fashion, but haven't been committing the kind of crimes the administration would want you to believe they had. Right. The White House has been characterizing the people being detained and removed as the worst of the worst.

13:41But then the pictures that we see out of Minneapolis and elsewhere, you see the five-year-old child who we talked about on this podcast before, who has been detained with his father and sent to Texas pending removal. You see families, you see people who are working in schools or people who are working in restaurants. These are not hardened criminals. These are just people, as you mentioned, who are living in the United States without documentation. And that, I think, kind of drives home the fundamental reality of this is that for the past year, plus that Trump and his White House staff have been talking about the need for mass deportations.

14:22Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's White House deputy chief of staff, set a goal of 3 ,000 detainees a day. There just aren't the kind of numbers there to focus solely on criminals or people who have broken the law. And so that is why I think you see some people looking at these things and seeing a disconnect between what the White House is saying and what they're seeing with their own eyes. And they're seeing in videos and they're seeing portrayed in the media and online. Kind of on that point, actually, we've had this from AmeriCaster James. It's not his real name, but he's worried about the repercussions from ICE.

14:57Hello, AmeriCaster. This is James in Minneapolis. I'm a teacher and my colleagues and I are giving lifts or rides, as we say here, to many of our Hispanic and East African students because their parents are legitimately scared to leave their houses. I'm not a US citizen. The family I drive with are US citizens, but they know that their children will be safer being driven by a white person. Now, people here talk about MAGA being a dog whistle for Make America White Again. So I was wondering, do you think this is an accurate assessment of the administration's aims? I think that certainly is a criticism of the Trump's MAGA movement, that it is focused on kind of an ethno-nationalism, that the crackdown on undocumented migrants focuses predominantly on undocumented migrants from places like Latin America and Africa and not on places that are European.

15:56I mean, and if you look at stated immigration policy, the refugee policy, as has been revised by the Trump administration, they have been putting a focus on accepting refugees, asylum seekers from South Africa, white asylum seekers from South Africa, not the type of asylum seekers we've seen, say, under the Biden administration that were from places like Central America and Haiti and Africa. So it is certainly possible to draw the conclusion from that evidence that this administration is focused on prioritizing white migrants versus migrants of color. And if you listen to people like Stephen Miller, who I've just talked about, he has given speeches talking about the United States or positioning the United States as a defender of Western civilization, of Western culture, which you can certainly listen to and think, okay, here again is kind of the dog whistle, the touchstone for a policy that is focused on white European values versus the values of other countries and other ethnic identities.

17:04And Donald Trump gets asked about this every so often, whether it is his desire to make the country whiter. And he says, absolutely not. It just so happens that all the people who are here illegally are very often people of colour and that those who are here, perfectly legally, American citizens, people who were born in the United States, is very happy for them to stay and appreciates the melting pot nature of American society. Now, not everybody necessarily believes him about that. And Anthony, you're absolutely right. You can look at some of the policies, which seem to be straining in a different direction.

17:36But from his own lips, Donald Trump always vehemently denies that as an idea. All right, Sarah, let's get back to the politics of this. Bovino is out, but some of the other people behind this policy, the faces of the administration on this crackdown. Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary in particular, they're still in their jobs. And Donald Trump, at least for the moment, has said he has no intention of removing her, even though she was one of the people out there from the very beginning suggesting that Preti somehow had instigated his own death. So do we think that Noem is on shaky ground?

18:12Have you been getting any signs that maybe there is increased criticism of her that That may end up costing her her job. I don't think it'll cost her a job, but I think you might find she's sidelined a bit for a while. So she and her number two, Corey Lewandowski, another very controversial member of the Trump administration, were in the Oval Office for two hours on Monday night talking to the president. And one has to assume that they weren't being congratulated on how things were going in Minneapolis. That was probably a very uncomfortable meeting. Now, you know, Donald Trump doesn't like firing people.

18:45He doesn't want to be seen to be being pushed around by the media or public opinion. And he thinks it would look like he was admitting he'd made a mistake if he actually fires somebody. So I think she's extremely unlikely to lose her job, certainly in the short term. What's been really interesting over the past week, quite a lot of people have been pointing out that they've been seeing content from Donald Trump's administration on social media or from politicians who support Donald Trump. But they feel as though some of the content relating to, for example, the shootings in Minneapolis, they've actually not been seeing on their feeds.

19:18And it's led to accusations of censorship, particularly when it comes to TikTok. And it's worth saying that TikTok has just kind of switched over from being owned by kind of exclusively by ByteDance, which is the Chinese company that owns TikTok more generally, to this US consortium, which includes Oracle and which Larry Ellison is in charge of and various other big companies, several of which are run by people who've been supportive of Donald Trump. And all of that has kind of cooked up this speculation, which at points has tipped into conspiracy of people saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, they're deliberately now suppressing on TikTok videos about, for example, ICE agents because they don't want us to see it because they don't want us to be critical of the administration.

19:58Now, TikTok has come out very clearly to say, look, most of the stuff that people have been highlighting or the stuff people have been highlighting is connected to glitches where we've moved over sort of where US users data is being stored, which is why this consortium had to buy in the first place because of these various accusations about China. But anyway, all of that is a kind of way of saying that increasingly, I think the administration or Donald Trump, at least, and we know this kind of from the fact that various politicians seem to be being warned against posting this stuff online, that they're realizing how powerful these individual cases are.

20:29But that doesn't make the conspiracy true. But it's something that people are noticing. They're saying, oh, hold on a second. I want to see the stuff that's showing me what's really going on here. And this feeling that actually the genuine approach which Donald Trump's administration have taken, quite a few people are saying this doesn't feel very genuine anymore. I think to get back to the point about Kristi Noem, because I think there is some risk to her at this point. There have been a couple of Republican senators, Tom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have come out and said that she should resign.

21:01Now, they have been Trump critics in the past, so it's not a major break, but it is an indication that there are some, even within the Republican Party, who are nervous about her. And then the Democrats feel like they have an advantage here. The House Democrats came out, the leadership came out with a letter saying that they were going to make a motion to impeach Kristi Noem, that she should resign. Otherwise, they're going to keep pushing ahead and they can do this the hard way or the easy way. Now, it's unlikely that she could actually be impeached because Republicans control the House and Republicans control the Senate.

21:35But it is a chance to put a lot of Republicans down on record defending Noam at a time when I think Democrats feel she is not very popular. Yeah, it's quite smart, I think, because instead of arguing about their own immigration policy, which Democrats often find quite uncomfortable, they can try and pin it all on Christy Noam. As you say, they don't have a chance of impeaching her, but they can make every Republican congressperson who is standing for re-election in November actually vote in favour of her and then use that in campaigns against them. If she is still a kind of poster girl for the tactics that were being used in Minneapolis and that people still are extremely uncomfortable about that, then what?

22:14And she's so prominent. You see so much of her. What a great way of trying to tie other Republicans to this unpopular immigration crackdown, if that is still an issue in November. Yeah, and there are Republicans who are starting to express concern and not just kind of the usual suspects in the Senate, but rock ribbed Republicans in red states like Texas, where you saw the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott. Greg Abbott says the White House needs to recalibrate on what needs to be done to make sure that respect for federal law enforcement officers is going to be reinstilled. And that's not an easy task.

22:51And then we heard from Kevin Stitt, who's the Republican governor of Oklahoma, questioning a little more the wider endgame in this immigration enforcement policy. Here he is talking to CNN. But now Americans are asking themselves, what is the endgame? What is the solution? And, you know, we believe in federalism and state rights and nobody likes feds coming into their state. And so what's the goal right now? Is it to deport every single non-U.S. citizen? I don't think that's what Americans want. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? So not only have we got some normally loyal Republicans expressing some deep concern there about two very interesting topics, I think.

23:33So you've got Greg Abbott in Texas talking about the way in which this is undermining respect for law enforcement and for the Department of Homeland Security. I've read a lot of comments from serving agents as well, saying they're really, really worried about the reputation of their agencies being destroyed by what people are seeing happening in Minneapolis. And then you've got Kevin Stitt there talking about states' rights. I mean, something else conservatives are usually very, very strong on, saying the federal government can't come into my state and start pushing people around and doing what they want and criticising the policy from that point of view.

24:08It's as though the Trump administration just got itself on the wrong side of a lot of very traditional conservative arguments, isn't it, Anthony? Yeah, Tucker Carlson, another outspoken conservative, sometimes a critic of Trump's, but also a leading voice in the MAGA movement, says it's clear that what's occurring in Minneapolis is completely out of control. Leaders in Washington must do everything possible to lower the temperature. Carlson is the guy who has raised the temperature at points. So if he's saying things are getting out of control, I think maybe that is one of the reasons why you've seen Trump start to back down a bit in the face of this criticism.

24:45Yeah. And then even the Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota itself, Chris Medell, suspended his campaign. And he said he was worried that people were being targeted for their skin color. I have read about and I have spoken to countless United States citizens who have been detained in Minnesota due to the color of their skin. I personally have spoken to several law enforcement officers, some Hispanic and some Asian, who have been pulled over by ICE on pretextual stops. Driving while Hispanic is not a crime. Either is driving while Asian. At the end of the day, I have to look my daughters in the eye and tell them I believe I did what was right.