Good morning and welcome to White House Watch. Washington is buried in deep, icy snow following an intense winter storm. Elsewhere on today’s agenda:

Donald Trump will send his “border tsar” to Minnesota as he faces a growing backlash over the fatal tactics of aggressive immigration officers in the state.

Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse and a US citizen, was shot dead by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis on Saturday. He is the second American to be killed by ICE agents in less than a month, after Renée Nicole Good was shot three times at close range through her car window.

Many of the encounters between ICE and the people of Minneapolis have been filmed by bystanders on their phones, flooding social media with footage of federal law enforcement officers wrestling people to the ground, deploying pepper spray at close range, and — in the past month — killing two Americans.

All of this has led to growing anger over ICE’s tactics and behaviour on the streets and unease among some elected Republicans. The president said yesterday he was deploying border tsar Tom Homan to Minnesota, in a move that was widely seen as a rebuke of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, who has been central to Trump’s immigration enforcement actions, and some other agents were expected to leave Minnesota as early as today.

The shootings have also triggered public opposition from a small handful of elected Republicans, including Kevin Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma, who warned that “the death of Americans” was “causing deep concerns”. Trump, he said, was “getting bad advice right now”. 

Other senior Republicans too have sounded the alarm.

“The events in Minneapolis are incredibly disturbing,” said Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis called for a “thorough and impartial investigation” into the shooting. Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said the incident “should raise serious questions within the administration about the adequacy of immigration enforcement training and the instructions officers are given”.

The Republican voices add to a groundswell of opposition to the increasingly violent law-enforcement tactics on display in Minnesota.

The latest headlines

• The dollar sank to a four-month low yesterday and gold surged to more than $5,000 a troy ounce for the first time, as speculation over potential joint US-Japan action to support the yen piled further pressure on the US currency.

• Europe is “dreaming” if it believes it can defend itself without US backing, Nato’s secretary-general Mark Rutte has warned.

• The Trump administration has indicated to Ukraine that US security guarantees are contingent on Kyiv first agreeing a peace deal that would likely involve ceding the Donbas region to Russia, according to people familiar with talks.

• White House adviser Sriram Krishnan is being referred as the “connective tissue between Silicon Valley and Washington” as he steers Trump on AI.

• The US Treasury department has said it is cancelling contracts with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, as punishment for the leaking of Trump’s tax returns.

What we’re hearing

Trump had a prolific weekend on his Truth Social website. Among the flurry of posts was a big weekend threat of huge tariffs on a US ally — in this case Canada, one of the US’s largest trading partners.

Notionally, the threat was made because Trump took umbrage at the prospect of Canada striking a trade deal with Beijing.

“If Canada makes a deal with China, it will immediately be hit with a 100 per cent tariffs against all Canadian goods and products,” Trump wrote.

But Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded that Canada had signed commitments under its trade deal with the US and Mexico “not to pursue free trade agreements with non-market economies without prior notification”.

“We have no intention of doing that with China or any other non-market economy,” he told reporters.

The threat also follows tensions between Trump and Carney at Davos. Carney won praise for a speech arguing that the rules-based international order was undergoing a “rupture”.

Trump responded, in his own speech: “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

On Monday, the US president started his week with another tariff threat — this time against South Korea, the Asian country he struck a deal with last year. US tariffs on goods from the country would increase to 25 per cent, Trump said.

“Our Trade Deals are very important to America,” he wrote. “In each of these Deals, we have acted swiftly to reduce our TARIFFS in line with the Transaction agreed to. We, of course, expect our Trading Partners to do the same.”

He added: “South Korea’s Legislature is not living up to its Deal with the United States”.

Viewpoints

• What’s the truth behind Trump’s pro-consumer rhetoric? As the US midterm elections approach, Patrick Jenkins expects the financial interests of voters to loom ever larger in the president’s agenda.

• Markets are now calmer in the face of the US president’s tariff threats — Katie Martin argues that the Taco trade has eaten itself.

• Ed Luce writes on ICE and propaganda, saying that easily discredited propaganda is undermining Trump’s assault on the constitution.

• Is liberal democracy in terminal decline? John Burn-Murdoch digs into the data.

• Ruchir Sharma argues that people still matter in the AI era and that the big risk is labour shortages, not mass unemployment.