"Abolish ICE"

0:00Noel King:Renee Good's last words, that's fine dude, I'm not mad at you, to ICE agents, one of whom killed her. Alex Preddy's last words, according to bystanders, are you okay, to a woman he tried to shield from Border Patrol agents. After their deaths, federal officials painted the two Minnesota protesters as radicals. This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement. If you look at what the definition of domestic terrorism is, it completely fits the situation on the ground. The feds, in part because they spoke before investigations even began, have lost control of their narrative.

0:36Noel King:President Trump seems to have copped on. He said today he's sending his border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis and that Homan will report directly to him. Homan famously dislikes Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who has, along with Kristi Noem, become the public face of the catastrophe in Minneapolis. Coming up on Today Explained, ice, lies, and videotape.

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2:03This is Today Explained. My name is J. Patrick Kulikin. I'm the editor-in-chief of Minnesota Reformer, which is a small nonprofit online news outlet covering politics and policy in Minnesota.

2:16Noel King:What's been like running cover to this story? It's been exhausting and exhilarating and at times depressing and debilitating. I've never quite encountered a story like this with so many moving pieces and it's evolving so quickly. And then, bam, you get hit with something new that is catastrophic and causes you to really shift focus. I was watching video, you know, here in D.C. of what happened this weekend and of the reaction afterward. And, you know, you see people being really angry, really heartbroken. It feels like right now that the people are being packed in the corner because we are being invaded on our state.

3:06I'm 70 years old. Angry. Stop. Look out.

3:15Noel King:You see people being really, I don't know, you see people being really brave. And I wonder which of those emotions, which of the emotions do you think is surfacing the most right now? I think it's bravery. You know, you see people doing things that I don't think they expected of themselves. I don't think they knew that this is something they could do. and that so much of it is around the togetherness of it, that we're kind of all in it together, and I think that can fuel people's courage. We see parents organizing group chats, working in shifts to protect families at daycares and school drop-offs, neighborhoods who are collectively alerting each other to the presence of ICE with honks and whistles.

4:02I want to show you what struck me the most when we first got out onto the scene is this effort that has now popped up of neighbors and volunteers coming together. But I also don't want to minimize the impact of Saturday's killing in particular. I talked to a volunteer yesterday who used the word demoralized. And that's certainly understandable and obviously frightening, too. It takes considerable physical courage to actually go out and do this because it's become so unpredictable what could happen, as we've seen in two weeks. As Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O 'Hara pointed out on some Sunday shows yesterday.

4:47People have had enough. 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.

5:04Noel King:Let's talk about Alex Preddy and what happened this weekend. You've seen the video. Most of us, I would imagine, have seen the video. What do we know about why Alex Preddy was shot? Well, he appears to have been recording federal agents with his phone, like has become common.

5:28Everybody's doing it. And then he seems to try to intervene after a woman was pushed down by a federal agent. And then he gets into this scuffle with probably a half dozen federal agents. He is a law-abiding concealed carry permit holder who was armed. And in this scuffle, they disarm him. And if you watch the video in very slow motion, you can see he's then shot after he's disarmed, despite the accounts of the federal officials that we heard almost immediately afterward.

6:15Noel King:The Constitution still! Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said Preddy was part of a riot. He was obstructing law enforcement. During this operation, an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol agents with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. The agents attempted to disarm the individual, but he violently resisted. What does the evidence show? There's no evidence of that. There's also been a kind of false impression that we're talking about protests. and I mean it's not exactly wrong but these people are actually what they prefer to be called as observers and so the idea that there was some sort of riot going on is not true they are just alerting people to the presence of federal officials which they're allowed to do they were recording and observing which they're allowed to do it turns out that the the person they were looking for.

7:18The State Department of Corrections put out a statement saying that apparently this guy was not the heinous criminal they were claiming. And furthermore, Bovino actually seemed to walk back his contention yesterday when he gave a much softer line. I wasn't there wrestling him myself. So I'm not going to speculate. I'm going to wait for that investigation to come. Now, don't interrupt me. I'm going to wait till that. Said we're going to wait and find out what happens with the investigation. But that's sort of a little, seems disingenuous a day after you call the, you say that the person was trying to engage in a massacre.

8:00Stephen Miller called him an assassin. And the video is pretty clear that none of those things are true. And I think that's absolutely destroying the administration's credibility, not just with the people you would expect that from, progressives and Democrats, but also some Republicans and certainly independents.

8:22Noel King:There is, as you pointed out, a very interesting dynamic right now in Minneapolis where you have federal officers, local police, and the local police do not seem to trust the Fed. So the question becomes, who is investigating what happened on Saturday? Who has the evidence? Who is trying to run down what happened here? Well, there's a really sharp conflict here. The state and local officials showed up on the scene with a judicial warrant, and the Fed still did not allow them access. And so there's a court hearing today at two o 'clock to sort all this out. But it's a conflict between law enforcement agencies I think we have not seen in quite a long time, especially publicly.

9:11We actually had a series of stories after George Floyd was murdered about the MPD, the Minneapolis Police Department's Blue Wall of Silence. And from what I can tell these past few weeks, it's really crumbled, at least as far is talking about other police agencies. It's just not something you see. And yet Brian O 'Hara, the MPD chief, is out there really hitting the federal law enforcement hard. And it's been pretty breathtaking. 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, and it is generating a lot of outrage and fear in the community.

9:57Noel King:There is another thing that's going before a court in Minnesota today. A federal judge is going to consider the question of whether this deployment violates Minnesota's sovereignty under the 10th Amendment. What do you know about this legal challenge and what it might mean for ICE agents in the streets, federal agents in the streets? Yeah, this one seems like a bit of a long shot. It seems to me that the courts have given the executive branch wide latitude to enforce federal law. It's also interesting that the claim here is it's a civil rights claim, and yet the Tenth Amendment was used by Jim Crow as a way to defend southern state sovereignty during the civil rights movement.

10:50So it's an interesting turn of events on that front.

10:55Noel King:I want to ask you about this statement that was signed by about 60, as I understand it, 60 CEOs. Minnesota has a lot of big companies, right? State is an economic powerhouse in some ways. And so there was this statement sent out kind of like calling for calm, even as people had been asking, like, where are the business leaders? Why are they not saying anything? Do you feel like that statement does anything here? Do you feel like that statement comes down on one side or the other? I think it was carefully crafted to be neutral, and it was taken by Democrats, including even the Democratic Farber Labor Party chair, as a betrayal because there's no neutrality in this situation.

11:39But I think that it is an important signal to the Trump administration that they should start looking for a way out. You're right, though, they had been completely silent. We published a story a couple weeks ago, 10 days ago, making that very point. We called a bunch of these corporations and the lobby group that represents the biggest companies, and they didn't even get back to us. I think they were bruised by the George Floyd experience, where many of them made robust statements in support of DEI and racial equity. And of course, there was a backlash to that and then a backlash to the backlash.

12:27And so I think they chose silence. And at a certain point, that became untenable.

12:36So it's one of the signals to me that there's some cracks in the Trump armor.

12:55J.

12:55Noel King:Patrick Kulikin is editor-in-chief of the Minnesota Reformer. And speaking of cracks, President Trump said on Truth Social this afternoon that Minnesota's Tim Walz called him and they seem to be, quote, on a similar wavelength. Coming up, the Senate votes this week on whether to fund the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and Border Patrol, and some Democrats say they're going to shut the government down again.

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17:14This is Today Explained.

17:17Noel King:I'm Noelle King with Leanne Caldwell. She's the chief Washington correspondent for Puck. All right, Leanne, let's start here. The Senate is back in session this week and is going to vote on a package to fund transportation, health and human services, and the Department of Homeland Security. Now, this bill passed the House last week. And then what happened? Yeah. So obviously there was another tragic shooting of a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis. And what's interesting is that this bill, including the DHS funding, was expected to pass. You know, it only got a little more than a handful of votes, Democratic votes in the House.

17:59But the Senate was going most likely to move forward on this. It only needed about eight Democratic senators. It looked like it was going to get that. And then the shooting happened, obviously the second shooting in a matter of weeks. And Democrats nearly unanimously in the Senate came out adamantly opposed to giving the Department of Homeland Security, especially ICE, more money on the heels of this shooting.

18:28Noel King:I am strongly opposed to more funding for ICE. I was strongly opposed when they tripled their budget this summer. Well, I'm not giving ICE or Border Patrol another dime, given how this agency, these agencies are operating. Democrats are not going to fund that. We cannot fund a Department of Homeland Security that is murdering American citizens. Before the shooting this weekend, some Democrats in Congress had introduced a bill called the Melt ICE Act, which would defund ICE, as I understand it. Where does the conversation around defunding or abolishing ICE stand at this moment? So Democrats, for the most part, the majority of Democrats do not want to go there on this abolish ICE movement.

19:14They think it's counterproductive. It plays into Republican talking points, especially when this was a big movement back in 2019 during Trump's first term. So what they would rather do is try to rein in this agency. But there's also additional conversations on impeaching DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. That is something that is becoming overwhelmingly popular among House Democrats.

19:43Noel King:Today, I am announcing that I'm joining over 100 Democrats and calling for the impeachment of Kristi Noem for criminal acts and violation of the Constitution. She needs to be held accountable and she needs to know that Congress is watching. But more importantly, people are watching. The public is watching. She has created an absolute disaster in this agency. It's got to stop. And even a few Senate Democrats are saying the same. You know, Democrats are obviously in the minority with little power to do this. But that's where they would rather have the conversation rather than around defunding or abolishing ICE.

20:28Noel King:Let me ask you about the Republicans. Are any Republican lawmakers changing the way that they talk about ICE in light of what happened this weekend? Yeah, you know, it's been really interesting because Republicans have mostly very publicly anyway been in lockstep with this administration for the most part. But after this weekend, we're starting to see some signs of Republicans being very uncomfortable with this. You have Representative James Comer, who's head of the Oversight Committee. And 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 innocent lives or whatever, then maybe go to another city and let the people of Minneapolis decide, do we want to continue to have all of these illegals?

21:20You know, it wasn't very graceful on how he said it, but he is essentially saying that ICE should leave Minnesota and it should be up to local officials to deal with how it wants to address immigration there. You have senators, including Dave McCormick, who put out a statement saying that it was a tragedy, that there perhaps should be some sort of investigation. You have Andrew Garbarino. He is from New York. He could potentially have a very difficult reelection race. He is the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, and he has called for top DHS officials, including Kristi Noem, to come testify before his committee.

22:05That is the first time we have seen any sort of oversight from Republicans or trying to do oversight from Republicans in this Congress.

22:15Noel King:What does it mean that there are divisions here forming in the Republican Party? It means that this is actually becoming a big political liability for Republicans. We will see how Speaker Johnson, who has been in lockstep with this president and defended this president day in and day out, how he deals with it because he also wants to keep the speaker's gavel. And that means that he has to defend and support his vulnerable Republican colleagues. But some of these Republican vulnerable colleagues are the ones who are becoming most uneasy with this as this is becoming a huge problem for them back home, putting Republicans in a very difficult spot.