By Aaron Blake, CNN
Federal agents stand near police tape as demonstators gather near the site of where Pretti was shot. Photo: ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP
Analysis - US President Donald Trump and his administration last week seemed to belatedly come to the realisation that their Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minneapolis are going poorly.
Trump appeared at a briefing and bemoaned his team's messaging. He and Vice President JD Vance began to acknowledge that ICE has been making or will make "mistakes".
CNN reported it was all born of a fear that the issue was getting away from them - a fear that is certainly backed up by polling.
What Trump and his team notably did not do, though, was signal any real shift in the tactics that have landed them in their predicament.
And now the situation risks truly spiraling out of control - both on the ground and politically speaking.
The fatal shooting of another person - 37-year-old Alex Pretti - by a federal agent in Minneapolis in many ways conjures the episode two and a half weeks ago when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good.
Pretti was a 37-year-old who worked as an ICU nurse at a veteran's hospital. Photo: US Department of Veteran Affairs
It also comes amid a snowballing series of politically problematic moves that suggest things are only getting worse for the administration.
It remains to be seen how the country will react to Pretti's killing. But what's clear is that Americans are very much predisposed to believe ICE goes too far.
And the details suggest we could be seeing a repeat of what followed in the aftermath of Good's killing, when already-negative views of ICE hardened and expanded.
For one, the administration has again leapt to defend the federal agents involved and attack the person killed in ways that are premature and strain credulity, at best.
As with Good, the administration has painted Pretti as not just causing the agents to fear for their lives, but as deliberately targeting them for death.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wagered that Pretti had been trying "to inflict maximum damage".
Her department speculated that he was trying to "massacre law enforcement". White House adviser Stephen Miller summarised the event as "an assassin tried to murder federal agents".
Pretti was armed - he had a permit to carry the gun, per the Minneapolis police chief - and engaged in a scuffle after agents sprayed toward him with a chemical irritant. But no evidence has emerged to support the accusation that he was trying to kill them, and nothing in the videos we've seen so far shows him touching his weapon.
Indeed, the video seems to show an agent pulling a weapon from Pretti shortly before the man is shot, suggesting he might not have even had his gun when he was killed. And while DHS, the agency that includes Border Patrol and ICE, claimed Pretti approached the agents, the events appeared to be set off by an agent shoving a woman next to Pretti.
People mourn at a makeshift memorial in the area where 37-year-old Alex Pretti was shot dead Photo: AFP/ Roberto Schmidt
If Pretti had aimed to massacre the agents, he was sure waiting for a precarious situation to launch his plan.
And this prejudging of the situation is part of what made Good's killing blow back on the administration. Polling showed Americans simply didn't buy what the administration was saying. Only about one-quarter agreed with Noem that Good was engaging in "domestic terrorism."
Another parallel lies in the administration's actions after the killing. It clearly tried to avoid a full-scale investigation of the ICE agent who shot Good, and instead began trying to investigate Good herself - a posture that led prosecutors to resign. In Saturday's incident, the Minneapolis police chief said federal officials tried to prevent local police from accessing the crime scene, and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said DHS is not cooperating with the state agency.
But in many ways, Pretti's killing is a crescendo rather than a singular event. Even as the administration has begun to fear the politics here, they have likely gotten worse as Americans' patience gets tested even further.
We learned this week that the administration has claimed the power to enter people's homes without a judge's warrant. We're learning more and more about US citizens being caught up in immigration raids and people potentially being racially profiled (according to local police). We're learning about ICE making mistakes in the people it's targeting. And then there are the young children - ages 2 and 5 - the administration has detained and put on airplanes with their parents.
While Americans already disapproved of ICE for much of last year, the agency's numbers have trended even further in the wrong direction this month.
CBS News-YouGov polling shows the percentage of Americans who say ICE has been "too tough" going from 53% in October to 56% in November to 61% in a survey released last week. That 61% was echoed in a New York Times-Siena College poll this week, which tested a similar question.
Those new polls were arguably even worse for the administration than in the immediate aftermath of Good's death. We're now seeing 7 in 10 independents and even 2 in 10 Republicans saying ICE has gone too far, in both of the newer polls.
That suggests it will be difficult for Americans to give the federal agents the benefit of any doubt in Pretti's killing. And yet again, we have a flashpoint that adds urgency to an issue Americans were previously more passively unhappy about.
Beyond that, the new situation seems to add some political difficulties that didn't exist with Good. Some Second Amendment hawks, including the National Rifle Association, are balking at what they see as the administration talking as though Pretti being armed gave the ICE agent more of a right to kill him.
"Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens," the NRA said in response to a Trump-appointed US attorney's comments.
And some conservatives and Republican lawmakers seemed less anxious Saturday to defend the agent's actions - with one House GOP chairman even calling for hearings.
It's normal for presidents to want to believe their problems owe to messaging rather than the merits of their policies, as Trump seems to. That allows them to believe they're still right.
But Trump was already in a bad spot politically, with some of his worst poll numbers in either of his two terms as president. He's lost major ground specifically on immigration, despite it being perhaps his signature issue and despite a massive drop in border crossings.
And his decision to basically leave the underlying mass-deportation policy alone has now created another major problem for an administration that was already on its heels - to say nothing of how much it's added to a powder keg in Minneapolis.
- CNN
