Federal Agents Under Scrutiny After Pretti Killing

0:00Excessive litigation raises costs, car insurance, rent, even groceries. Governor Hochul is reforming our liability laws to stop bad actors from gaming the system and put New Yorkers first. Learn more at KeepNewYorkAffordable.org. Courage. I learned it from my adoptive mom. Hold my hand. You hold my hand. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care at AdoptUSKids.org. You can't imagine the reward. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. Welcome to The Beat, everyone. I'm Ari Melberg. We're reporting amid the fallout of another killing of an American by federal agents working under the Trump administration's obviously unusual, many say unprecedented in the modern era, and to be clear, possibly unlawful deployment of these different types of DHS and ICE agents in Minnesota.

0:49The new shooting of this nurse, Alex Preddy, which involves several shots to the back while he was already restrained, according to the video showing it in real time and later reported analysis, that shooting is stoking grave legal questions and pushback from Congress. And I'll show you that tonight. We begin with the very latest, though, a personnel change by the Trump administration in Minnesota. The top controversial chief involved in much of this, a Customs and Border Patrol official named Greg Bovino, is, according to the Wall Street Journal's new reporting crossing late today, leaving Minnesota immediately.

1:28The journal reporting he'd emerged as the public face of Trump's immigration enforcement activity in the state. He'd accompanied agents on operations. And this is widely interpreted as a vote of no confidence in what he's done recently, if not overall. Bavino was an official who had claimed prior to any fact finding that he thought Preddy wanted maximum damage and to massacre law enforcement. To be clear, these are the kind of statements that if a random person made them about another person in America, you could easily end up in a defamation case. This, of course, is coming with the authority of the federal government.

2:01And the videos flatly contradicted that. So unless we got more fact finding or new reporting, it would already seem to be a false statement. whether it was made recklessly or knowingly would be the legal standard. The shooting, though, continues to spark protests around the whole area. This is despite freezing temperatures. We're seeing this show of force and, as has been demonstrated now with two different people who were basically protesting or peacefully observing officers now being killed, it is understandable that some people would view even going outside to use their First Amendment rights against the Trump administration right now as itself potentially dangerous.

2:38And yet there they are, being seen and heard around the country. Now, I will mention in terms of following each development that the president posted online today about what he tried to describe as a positive call with Governor Tim Walz. That is a different tone than Trump has taken towards Walz and other Minnesota officials recently. And this other change that I just told you about, yanking this official from Minnesota, is an effort to put a different face on what they've been doing than what's been happening. So that includes Bovino, who I mentioned, or DHS chief Kristi Noem, because at that level of the more public leadership officials, Trump has now sent Tom Holman to Minnesota to play a kind of more active role.

3:20The Times reporting on that. So when you look at Bovino's departure, when you look at turning the volume down on Noam and this sending of the borders are there, you have an administration that is losing something. And they are trying to change something about at least how it's viewed in response. And Noam has been criticized for aggressive and misleading statements amid both of these shootings of Americans. But in this administration, Trump shifting roles around among different leaders at DHS or immigration enforcement will only involve rotating among roughly equally hardline individuals. Because unlike, say, the famed War of Rivals cabinet or having different people bounce off each other that we've seen in other cabinets in both parties, immigration in the second term is all hardliners.

4:12So there isn't a balanced or smart on deportation voice among the incumbent members of leadership for Trump to turn to. And so that matters tonight because even as we can report on the pressure getting to Trump in an effort to change the face, it is still the policy, the tactics and the violence against the public that goes forward. Homan has been strict and strident about the Trump deportation agenda, defending the use of force, defending agents doing just about anything. That was clear the last time he appeared on this very program. And for the record, we've invited him and other immigration officials back to join us any time this week so that we can discuss factually and journalistically all of these important issues.

4:56Now, ousting Bovino suggests that pressure can also work. It's a step towards some kind of change or accountability. with who's doing what. But the policy, as best we can tell, remains unchanged. The president is using what our executive authorities, which means unlike some debate over a law, any time this president could say, instead of sending Homan in or pulling someone else out, he could say, looking at this type of loss of life, we are pausing this plan. We're pulling people back. Or we're pausing this policy for a week. We don't have news like that to report on, not yet anyway. And the Trump agenda continues to deploy what is at minimum an unusually aggressive level of force for what are documentation and ICE patrols and what at maximum may be under investigation for the potential homicide or murder of American citizens.

5:47That has to be investigated. But unlike the many situations where we cover use of force and you say it looks like what in policing we call a good shot, or you get to a situation where you say this was a tough, tragic situation, but there's not an investigation being opened. Then you have another bucket where you definitely open an investigation because of the potential misuse of force. And then you have where we are tonight, where an American citizen was grabbed, restrained, held down, as the New York Times put it, and then shot 10 times to death. That's when you definitely open a homicide investigation.

6:21And I have more on that aspect of it later tonight. Now I want to continue with the latest because whether the wider policy that I mentioned is actually changed may depend on other forces intervening. And that's also big news today where Minnesota officials use their authority to go to court demanding that this stop. Quote, just end it. End the whole thing, said the lawyer for these Minnesota officials in rebuking these types of DHS deployments and the recent killing as a quote, illegal means to an illegal end. That's a Minnesota attorney suing DHS, which is why you see Minnesota versus Kristi Noem.

7:01Attorney General Bondi, meanwhile, has been caught doing something that on its own would be a giant scandal full stop, even if she doesn't pull it off, which is she has admitted that they at the DOJ and under the Trump administration want to invoke federal powers to force or extort material from Minnesota relating to elections. And you might say, well, what does valid ICE enforcement have to do with local authority over elections? And the answer is nothing. Nothing valid here. Sometimes we tell you stories that have two or more sides. This isn't one of those stories. And there is no precedent for the federal government offering to use or withhold armed federal agents in order to get voter rolls.

7:49So a judge is now reviewing this sort of electoral angle from Trump's DOJ to assess the Minnesota objection that Bondi is trying to pull off a shakedown, a ransom. So that is also being reviewed in the court process. There's the probe of the killing itself, whether that will be independent and credible. More on that later tonight in this program. But I also want to make sure you see this. You need to see it with your own eyes. The latest pushback from different Republican officials, some in D.C., some on the ground elsewhere with these concerns. If I were President Trump, I would almost think about, OK, if the mayor and the governor are going to put our ICE officials in harm's way and there's a chance of losing more, you know, innocent lives or whatever, than maybe go to another city.

8:38So I would encourage the administration to be more measured, to recognize the tragedy and to say, we don't want anyone's lives to be lost. I think the death of Americans, what we're seeing on TV, it's causing deep concerns over federal tactics and accountability. Americans don't like what they're seeing right now.

9:03Americans don't like what they're seeing. that Republican official referring to federal agents shooting Americans twice in three weeks on video where people can see exactly how it was at a minimum a poorly trained, unnecessary taking of an American life and at maximum under investigation a question of whether or not this was a homicide. No, people don't like that. And this is where we are in 2026 with everything that's happened that it takes Ted Cruz and these other Republicans to publicly have to remind the administration killing Americans for next to no reason or no reason at all, bad. Those reactions are based on what's known from the video and the reporting.

9:50And that also means there has been a failure by the Trump administration to do what it has sometimes effectively done to spin, confuse, or lie to people. And our job here is to tell you what's really happening. The Trump administration has had officials, one now yanked out of Minnesota, who responded to these tragic killings of Americans with falsehood, spin, and sometimes outright lies. Here's how the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal put it. They rebuked this moral and political debacle by the Trump administration, noting people don't believe the spin. And on politics, the Murdoch-owned journal says, quote, this is backfiring against Republicans.

10:27Americans don't want to see law enforcement shooting people in the street. Now, you'll notice the common theme here. We are at a point where it takes Republicans in public after whatever they tried to say in private or meekly to Trump's aides and officials, and he is gettable by phone, he is that kind of president, people reach him more than some other ones. Whatever they said in private didn't work. So you have Republicans in public saying shooting Americans is bad. You have the Wall Street Journal saying shooting Americans is bad. You have now the Trump administration saying, hey, we're trying to work with Walls, we're pulling these other people back.

11:08but they have yet to even verbally get to the point to agree shooting Americans is bad, acknowledging that, and perhaps some baseline empathy for this family and the other family and all the other people scared in Minnesota, which would still only be a first step to saying, if you acknowledge it is bad to kill Americans, whether or not it rises to the level of a crime, then what do you do to prevent that from continuing to happen? Andrew Weissman, who is overseeing the FBI and worked at DOJ on exactly how you deal with these tough problems, is here. We're back in 90 seconds.

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13:14We're back with former prosecutor and FBI general counsel, Andrew Weissman, who's an MSNOW legal analyst. Your views on this tonight? Well, one view is for the public not to be distracted by a change in lower level people. What we are seeing in Minnesota and frankly, around the country, from the West Coast to now the far East Coast in Maine, is a result of the policy of Donald Trump. When you have a president who very much is a unitary executive, and everyone knows he is controlling all of this, you really can't just, you know, put lipstick on a pig and say, it has nothing to do with me. And so changing around who is there in Minnesota is not changing the policies.

14:10It's not changing the license that was given to ICE that caused Renee Good to be killed. The reaction to that murder was a license to then have what happened to Mr. Pretty. So if If you go around not having an investigation of Renee Goode, and then you say that nothing happened there, it was all fine with no investigation, what's the message to ICE? It's we have your back no matter what. The normal process for anyone in law enforcement is to have an investigation. Everyone in law enforcement knows that. And so this is why this happened. And if the policies don't change, this will continue. You're speaking about policy in the causal chain.

15:00When you have these incidents, they are, of course, the front burner. So they are training exercises in that they matter more to the public and many officials, agents, than any training they got two years ago because they're the lived reality of what the rules are. and lethal force is supposed to be a last resort when the when the agent faces only actual lethal threats such as a drawn weapon uh or something close enough that could cause grievous bodily harm and here do you do you see that on the video and if not why would an agent or multiple agents think they could unload that many shots so two things one the first thing before you, if you, even for the people who are listening to this who have any question, that's why you have an investigation and you have an impartial investigation and you don't announce the conclusion of the investigation before the investigation.

15:55That is what's, so with Renee Goode, there's no investigation. Now there's the conclusion. Then we're told there will be an investigation. This is not the queen in Alice in Wonderland. And then with respect to what we know so far, I would still have not heard anyone explain the legitimate second and third bullet shots with respect to Renee Good. When her car was already past Agent Ross, why is he shooting her two more times? And my understanding of the autopsy is it's one of those two shots that killed her. Then with respect to Mr. Pretty, he, as you said, Once you have disarmed him and he is on the ground, what is the explanation for not just 10, but even one shot at that point?

16:51And this is not to quote senior people up to Stephen Miller, a domestic terrorist. This is not somebody who he said was a would-be assassin of law enforcement. You see gun rights advocates who are denigrating that characterization because this is an administration that believes in the Second Amendment. So carrying lawfully a gun is not a crime. And just to have some empathy here, the last thing on earth that Mr. Preddy did was help a woman who had been pepper sprayed, who was thrown on the ground. and he paid with his life. So everything I'm talking about has a consequence in a real-life tragedy, and we're not seeing the administration respond to that.

17:54Finally, it's worth pointing out that Mr. Homan, who is being sent there, is somebody who himself has not had an investigation into the allegations of his taking a$50 ,000 bribe in a Kava paper bag, and there's been no investigation of that. And this is the person who's being sent in, who we're supposed to think is the white knight who's going to be a savior in Minnesota. I mean, it's really, it's so preposterous, the world we're in. And I mean, this wouldn't happen in any normal Democratic or Republican administration. And I've served in normal Democratic and Republican administrations. Sure.

18:38We also see that the ICE and in this case, DHS agents are being pulled in with their militarized look to engage in hand to hand combat that at times they're initiating with what are small clumps of protests. where does that fit into their duties? Because it would seem that if they have an assignment to go find the undocumented and they didn't find any on that block, they can get in their car and move on and continue to search for them. What does it tell you about what you spotlighted tonight, Andrew, the policy failure and problem that they seem to now feel open season to initiate physical contact?

19:17We saw a very strong shove to open that interaction. We saw the pepper spray. We also saw people with pepper spade while held down. That's a very clear violation. And then the use of force this way. But it's starting with them picking picking violent interaction with these people. And unlike, say, when we see the National Guard patrolling, sometimes it happens a big event. These are just neighborhoods. They can drive off and continue to look for the undocumented. it. That is such a great point. So my friends who used to work who are agents in the FBI, that is exactly one of the things that they pointed out.

19:55It's not just a question of de-escalation, that that's your job in law enforcement. It's that you understand when you're going to speak to someone and you're in law enforcement, if you are arresting a civilian in law enforcement, you understand that that person is going to be scared, is new, it can be terrifying, they may react badly, and you have to figure out ways to de-escalate and calm that situation down. I was listening to a police officer in Minnesota talk about how of the over sort of 900 guns that were taken off the street last year and the hundreds and hundreds of arrests done by the local police, not a single shot was fired.

20:47That's training. That's people who are not looking to terrorize a civilian population. But if you create ICE as a model of sort of Lord of the Flies or the Stanford prison experiment, where you're telling people they have unfettered power and nothing's going to change that. And they have absolute immunity, which we've heard, it was retracted, but we initially heard from the vice president. We've heard the same thing from Stephen Miller. That is what results in a group of law enforcement officers who are really not doing what many, many law enforcement officers in this country are trained to do and do day in and day out.

21:35So you can really understand why the Minnesotans are saying, you know what, let us handle this. We have a police force here that can do the job and we do not need to have you terrorize the civilian population. Yeah, all important points. Thank you, Andrew Weissman. Later tonight, we broaden out to the autocracy questions and the dual state problem here of who's being treated like what. Also the ICE scrutiny and Border Patrol tactics that have led us down this path. We have an expert who's going to show you exactly how this is supposed to work. So we stay informed amid the lies. That's next.

22:21There's mounting outrage, criticism and rebukes of how federal agents are operating in Minnesota. The problem is not that enforcement is happening. It's clearly the manner in which these things are happening. These tactics are very obviously not safe. The practices that these ICE and CBP agents are engaged in are not proper police tactics. This is not policing and it's not military service. It's something dangerously undefined. This is the third shooting now in less than three weeks. The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year, recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn't shoot anyone.

23:08We didn't shoot anyone, the Minneapolis police chief there, noting that you can patrol apples to apples the exact same region that these DHS agents have been flooding. You can collect guns, you can do a lot of work, and you can do it without shooting a nurse to death. This is about policy, as our top guest noted tonight, an FBI veteran. It's about outcomes. And critics say images like this, the gas mask, the guns drawn, the militarized body armor is exactly the wrong approach if you are honestly trying to pursue safety. The mass, the fatigues, the menacing attitude, a clear lack of crowd control training in dealing with protests.

23:49And maybe some critics say that's the point. They are not trained to deal with de-escalation in peace because from the top there is an effort to escalate, to talk about the Insurrection Act or martial law. The president talks openly about suspending elections and abusing power. So this is what the shock troops look like, say critics. Border Patrol agents accustomed to confronting cartels or illegal border crossing rather than protesters in urban areas is part of the obvious problem, the Post reports. DHS says it will handle any review of the killing of this American. That is a problem given that many Trump officials have already announced what they think the conclusion of that should be.

24:34After the shooting, local officials were also blocked from even going on the scene by federal agents, and they had a judicial warrant. We've talked about federalism and constitutional crises. This report is of your federal government defying the court-ordered requirements of your local government having access to a place where your local neighbor was shot to death by the feds. Not a good sign if this is allowed to continue to say nothing of the tragedy of the loss of life. DOJ also fighting a judge's order to block federal agents about tampering with or destroying evidence. The border agents who killed Peretti have been moved out.

25:15The question tonight is whether there is a cover-up of the killing. Will this investigation be credible? And if not, what does it say that a year into Donald Trump's term, as his actual support and credibility drops, he can now, to use the phrase, potentially get away with murder or get away with killing people without a murder investigation. The videos of the shooting make it clear what happened, who escalated, that the officials were the ones with their guns drawn, then shot him to death, including a shot in the back, while he was, as the New York Times and others have accounted, restrained.

25:55Here is some of the pushback. It was said that Mr. Peretti was banishing a weapon. Well, he was not banishing a weapon. Yes, he did have a weapon. It was said that by the White House that Mr. Peretti attacked those agents. No, he did not. I think the administration wants to get back control of the narrative and they need to. We have Bill Malusian reporting that there are some folks in DHS that are a little bit unhappy with the messaging and understandably so. It is politically disastrous for the president and also not the kind of civil society we need to limit. We certainly should not be labeling him as being a domestic terrorist who is going to execute cops.

26:38There is no evidence to support that. No, there's not. And this is not about a narrative. This is not about messaging. It's not about politics, although political pressure may yet save a future American from this kind of killing. This is, against all odds, still about facts. It is the facts on these videos that have caused so much blowback. It is the facts that the law and justice must care about. It is facts that are ultimately adjudicated when it is allowed in court. and apparently the independent pursuit of those facts, journalistically, in court, or in any other way, a local Minnesota investigation, that scares the Trump administration, scares them that the facts could come out and would force them to be held accountable for the facts.

27:31What are the facts? Well, we're still gathering them, but contrary to some of what the Trump administration has said and lied about, which I'm not going to repeat on this news program, the New York Times account of this shooting notes that about eight seconds after the victim was pinned, so eight seconds go by, sense the pinning, and then, quote, agents yell that he has a gun. Now, legally, that matters because, as the Times notes, that indicates they may not have known he was armed until he was on the ground and had been pinned, meaning no longer any kind of threat. The agents appear to have him under their control with his arms pinned near his head, the Times reports.

28:13after a detailed review and reporting of multiple video angles, as well as their reporters on the scene, and the Times notes when things turn deadly, quote, as the gun emerges from the melee, another agent aims his own firearm at Preddy's back and appears to fire one shot at close range. At least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds. Those are some of the facts that were gathered. I'm joined by Mark Claxton, retired NYPD detective and director of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance, who's worked at the intersection of these issues, public safety and policing, which he's given his life, the career to, and civil rights and accountability for proper policing.

28:57Given that New York Times account and the administration's claims that this was a terrorist clearly set out on murdering law enforcement, what do you see in the actual evidence? And what I see is really a bastardization of professional law enforcement. I see really a wasted opportunity. I know Mr. Weissman spoke about the importance of gathering evidence and conducting an investigation. and what we're seeing in real time is really the corruption of any criminal investigation, any investigation of substance, the displacement of potential evidence, the loss of possible identification evidence. There's so much going on here, but that's because the mission itself is unwieldy and unclear and dysfunctional.