Trump's response to Pretti killing upends Second Amendment politics

0:00Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at MathWorks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. It doesn't matter if you're carrying multiple magazines or even multiple firearms. All of that is legal under Minnesota law. Gun owners react to the killing of Alex Preddy and the Trump administration's equivocation on the Second Amendment.

0:45It's Wednesday, January 28th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:55Today on the show, as Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino leaves Minneapolis, we look at how he ramped up his tactics in the months leading up to the killing of Alex Preddy. Bovino seemed to be auditioning for a bigger role, and he got that later in Los Angeles. He did the exact same thing on a much bigger scale in Los Angeles and later again in Chicago and Minneapolis. Bovino may be out of Minneapolis, but his legacy at Border Patrol lives on. Before we get to that, though, a preliminary government review out last night of the shooting death of Alex Preddy in Minneapolis last Saturday makes no mention of claims from the Trump administration that he attacked immigration agents or threatened them with his gun, which he legally carried, and which did not appear to be visible in any of the videos we've all seen of their encounter.

1:44After federal agents shot Preddy dead in the street, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House advisor Stephen Miller were quick to say that Preddy brandished his gun at officers, that he intended to massacre agents, that he was a domestic terrorist, and that agents killed him in self-defense, despite video evidence to the contrary. FBI Director Kash Patel later walked that back to he shouldn't have brought a gun, even licensed, to a protest. Last night, President Trump doubled down on that, speaking about Alex Peretti on Fox News. I don't like the fact that he was carrying a gun that was fully loaded and he had two magazines with him, and it's pretty unusual.

2:28But nobody knows when they saw the gun, how they saw the gun, everything else. That's a very different take on the Second Amendment than Republicans have staked out previously. So we wanted the view of a gun rights advocate. Brian Strauser is chair of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus. He spoke to Robin Young. Well, your thoughts first on Kash Patel's comments that a legally owned gun is illegal at a protest. And then from Trump, that somehow a fully loaded gun with two extra magazines made it suspect. So as to the FBI director's comment, he's clearly not familiar with Minnesota law where a permit to carry a holder has every right to bring a firearm to a protest or a march.

3:10We had a large march on Friday where more than 50 ,000 people were in attendance and there were no violent incidents. And I'm sure folks were carrying there. The president's comments are pretty disappointing. It's not uncommon for permitted folks to carry extra magazines for self-defense purposes. And again, it's not illegal to bring a firearm to a protest here in Minnesota. Yeah. Well, and by the way, we should point out, it's not really been clear that this was a protest. It just seemed to be kind of a hazy thing where there were border agents and there were people like Alice Preddy who were coming to observe it.

3:45But the preliminary report from the Custonson Border Patrol Oversight Office concluded two officers shot Preddy. We saw in the video that he was being held down in a scrum when an officer yelled, the investigation said, he's got a gun. We see on the video an officer appears to unholster it. But other agents may not have seen that. You know, only after the shootings, the investigation found, did an agent say he had Preddy's gun in his possession. So does it worry you, you know, given that an officer yells out he's got a gun, in this chaos, people might not have known that the gun was removed, thought he still had the gun.

4:22I mean, it's just something people might point to as maybe leading to the conclusion that you shouldn't bring a gun to where there's going to be a lot of armed agents trying to do their job. You know, I think two reactions. One, I think it's fair to say this wasn't really a protest. There were, on the videos, it looks like maybe four or five folks that were there at that particular block blowing whistles and filming ICE officers as they engaged in enforcement activity. but also I think everyone has to make, every person who's carrying a firearm has to make their own risk assessment about what they think they're going to encounter during the course of a day and make sure that they're comfortable that carrying a firearm in that situation is wise or a smart thing to do in that moment.

5:12Yeah. Where do you draw the line? Carl Rittenhouse, you know, we remember, got up from his home after watching a Black Lives Matter protest on TV, He drove to the scene, walked down a street with this long gun over his shoulder, frightening people. You know, they didn't know who was he. Is he a shooter? One young man tried to tackle him. Kyle shot him then, then shot another young man and a medic. Both died. A jury acquitted him on defense grounds. He said it was self-defense. The president at the time defended him. He was lionized. What did you think at the time about somebody slinging a gun over their shoulder and marching down a street in that way?

5:54Well, you know, it's a good example of where it's, you know, certainly legal in his right to do so. That was a pretty volatile situation that he walked into carrying a long gun that I think raises a lot of risk. I agreed with the acquittal in that he was acting in self-defense in the moment, but maybe not the smartest thing to do. In this situation... Oh, sorry, go ahead. I just want to ask you, wouldn't you get a lot more support? Because you're right now in a moment where there are a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle and the debate over guns who are saying the same thing together.

6:29Wouldn't you get a lot more support from people who hadn't previously supported things like the right to have a gun holstered, licensed, as Alex Preddy did? If there was more loud condemnation of somebody slinging a long gun over their shoulder and marching down the street with it? I think that having consistency from a principle standpoint is important and making sure that organizations like ours remain focused on the single issue and not getting into other challenges that come up or other public policy issues that detract from that mission. I would agree that principle-based responses are appropriate.

7:09Well, you said that there's been a change in the conversation about gun ownership with gun owners like yourself that owners are feeling, well, what did this mean for me? We certainly heard from our members a level of concern about federal law enforcement activity here in Minnesota and the agents that may not be familiar with our laws around carrying a firearm. And what does that mean if a firearm is discovered at some protest or march situation with law enforcement agents that may not be familiar with our local laws? It certainly raises concerns. And do you think this will be a fair, ultimately, investigation by the Trump administration?

7:50We'd like to see an impartial independent investigation that involves both state, local, and federal authorities. Right now, the state's been boxed out of that investigation. So I think there's a lot of skepticism about if we're going to see an accurate and fair investigation. Brian Strausser, chair of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

8:18Well, in addition to triangulating its stance on gun rights, the administration has also shuffled some personnel in Minneapolis. Greg Bovino's time as the face of Trump's immigration agenda might be over, but his tenure still tells us a lot about where this might all be going. That's after the break.

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9:28This week, the Trump administration ousted Gregory Bovino from his job overseeing Border Patrol operations in Minneapolis. Border czar Tom Homan will take Bovino's place. And to add insult to injury, Bovino reportedly lost access to his government X account, which was very active, following people who tweeted messages of support and frequently fighting with people who criticized him. He also is known for posting slickly produced hype videos like this one to Facebook. Hello, Greg Bovino, chief patrol agent and commander of Operation At Large Los Angeles. Folks, there is no such thing as a sanctuary city.

10:14There's no such thing as a sanctuary city. Now, Bovino is reportedly on the verge of retirement. And this morning, President Trump tried to distance himself from some of the aggressive tactics that Bovino embodied, telling reporters immigration enforcement would be, quote, a little bit more relaxed, and we'd like to finish the job and finish it well, and I think we can do it in a de-escalated form. But Bovino's rise to prominence says a lot about the immigration crackdown that he came to lead. And he leaves a lasting impression on the agents still deployed in American cities. So says Sergio Olmos.

10:50He's an investigative reporter with CalMatters. In January of last year, he reported on Bovino's El Centro Border Patrol unit, which traveled more than 300 miles north from their headquarters on the Mexican border to carry out sweeping raids in California's agricultural heartland. Here's Sergio Omos' conversation with Scott Tong. Yeah, so the social media stuff, you know, he said he had five agents who were hired specifically to do video. These are Border Patrol agents, and they didn't rotate out to different, like, tasks. They just were hired because they know how to edit video. And the videos you see on social media are really well done, like production value, and they have all this music.

11:27The team that puts this stuff together seems to be very online and seems to kind of get what like TikTok or what looks good on Instagram. Well, Greg Bovino has been a very visible presence in many American cities, of course, in Minneapolis. He doesn't wear a mask, though he walks right next to, you know, many agents who do wear masks. But tell us how this all got started. I guess earlier he had worked on the border and then started moving his operations into other cities. Yeah, we first became aware of him when he did this operation in Bakersfield called Operation Return to Sender, where he went up 300 miles away from his sector to the agricultural heartland of California, and what he called a highly targeted operation against criminals.

12:10They went to farmland, they went to gas stations, Home Depots, a lot of the stuff that we see play out nationwide, where they're stopping people on the highways. But that started in Bakersfield on January 7th, eighth and ninth, when Biden was still in office. And that was a test case. Bavino seemed to be auditioning for a bigger role. And he got that later in Los Angeles. He did the exact same thing on a much bigger scale in Los Angeles, and later again, Chicago and Minneapolis. And if you go back into his history a little bit, he's actually been talking about using the border as an interior force for a long time.

12:40He told congressional investigators a couple years ago that Border Patrol really should be used in the interior and that every town was a border town. That was his real model for how to do immigration enforcement. So just to be clear, are you saying they just approached people, pulled them over, and in many cases arrested them without any specific suspicion of an individual person? Yeah, they said they had a list of targeted people, targeted enforcement against criminals. They arrested 78 people. We later got documents from Customs and Border Protection that showed that 77 out of the 78 people, Border Patrol had no knowledge of criminal or immigration history prior to encountering them.

13:16So they didn't know who these people were. One person had an order of removal, so they should have been deported. But they didn't know who these people were. They were just doing what later we can know as Kavanaugh stops. And that, of course, is a reference to Justice Kavanaugh, who penned an opinion at the Supreme Court that has been interpreted to allow agents to focus on people based on their appearance. Yeah, and that decision comes because the ACLU sued in Los Angeles, in which Judge Freen Pong said there's four things you can't use to detain people. One of them was race and ethnicity and speaking Spanish or broken English.

13:49And later that went up to the Supreme Court and they basically stayed the order. So that meant that Border Patrol could go out and stop people based on race and ethnicity. But in the interview was Greg Bovina's argument, counter argument perhaps, that when you cross the border without legal papers, that is criminal action, that these are all persons who, in his view, have committed a crime? Yeah, he was saying that anyone who crosses the border and is unhearly unauthorized is a criminal. But the thing is that when someone gets picked up and they don't have an authorization to be here, they're not actually a criminal, right?

14:23Because if you go to a criminal court, if you go to federal court, you have the right to an attorney. When you get picked up by ICE, you get put in a detention facility. You do not have the right to an attorney because it's not deemed a criminal offense, right? It can be criminal. of. So if someone's been already been deported and they come back, you can charge them with illegal reentry, which is a crime. And they do go to federal court and they get a public defender. But in most cases, it's a civil matter. And that's why they can go to a facility without, you know, a public defender, because it's not a crime.

14:49So what spurred him and his team, Greg Bovino and his team of Border Patrol agents, to move to these other places? Was it President Trump returning to office? How did this happen? That, from what we understand, was under Secretary Noem. Gregor Bovino was put in charge of all these elements. He was commander of operations at large, a title that is something that DHS created. He was in charge here in Los Angeles and in the other cities in charge of anything that was related to customs board protection. And also the military would coordinate with him. So when the Marines came here, anything related to immigration enforcement, including ICE, was under his purview.

15:28that is highly unusual. Border Patrol is a separate agency from ICE, from HSI, from the FBI. But when these operations would take place in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, Greg Bovino would be in charge of all the federal agents involved in immigration enforcement. And that is leaving Minneapolis. Do you have a sense as to what may be happening behind the scenes? Not with Greg Bovino, but I think his imprint in immigration enforcement will stay. I think we saw ICE agents that historically acted very different from Border Patrol. Usually ICE agents would, it's very targeted. They would find somebody with a criminal history and go after them.

16:04What we've seen since Los Angeles in the summer of last year is that ICE agents and the host of other agencies that go out on these immigration rage, that they have been acting similar to what Border Patrol has been doing. They have been as aggressive. And we should know an ICE agent was the one who shot Rene Good. So while Gregor Bravino may be gone, his tactics and his style of bravado seems to have stayed with all these immigration agents that are continuing to go out on the streets. We've been talking to Sergio Olmos, an investigative reporter with CalMatters. Sergio, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

16:38We've got to take one more short break and we'll be back in just a minute.

16:51Some other news we're following today. A man in Minneapolis sprayed an unknown liquid at Congresswoman Ilhan Omar during a town hall event last night. This morning, President Trump suggested, with no evidence, that she staged the attack. Minneapolis police took the man into custody, and Omar continued the town hall. Also, it's a balmy 11 degrees here where I am in Chicago. Honestly, it feels like a relief after even colder days over the weekend. Millions of people are under cold weather alerts in places that are not so used to low temperatures, from Texas to Tennessee. The extreme cold across the country has been fatal, too, which makes the work of people like Rebecca Rutledge so important.

17:41She's with the Christ United Methodist Church in Easton, Pennsylvania, near Allentown. She runs a warming center two days a week during the winter. And she told Robin Young they provide food and shelter to anyone who needs it. We have a combination of people that are homeless. They are on the brink of becoming homeless. Again, we have a lot of elderly population. We do have a senior apartment across the street from the church. And they come over to join for dinner. You know, it's their, they're very isolated. It's their chance to get out and have some socialization and to be a part of it. And they're sitting amongst everybody and everybody is just, you know, having a good time.

18:18It really is a family environment. Well, and minus, you know, below zero, you would lose fingers in a very short period of time. Are you able to provide medical or do you get people where they can get medical attention? Again, I'm thinking specifically not just what you do all the time, but what you do in this severe cold. We've even opened our doors two hours earlier to get them out of that. Unfortunately, we don't have the specific medical that they would need, but we're able to get them to local hospitals, clinics. We do have different organizations that come in and supply mental health, some drug counseling, some of the wound care thing that's kind of getting ignored.

18:58We're constantly giving them warm socks, foot powder, hats, gloves, scarves, that kind of thing. Listen to the rest of that conversation and many more stories at hereandnow.org.

19:35Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. And here at NOW's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. Stay warm out there. And we'll be back with you tomorrow.