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Key events
White House avoids Minneapolis tirade as signs suggest Trump backing down
David Smith
What Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, did not say on Monday was more important than what she did.
When Leavitt stepped up to the briefing room podium to address the deadly shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, she avoided the kind of victim-blaming tirade that has become de rigueur for Donald Trump’s administration.
Instead the spokeswoman called Pretti’s death a “tragedy”, said the US president wanted to let the investigation take its course, and, strikingly, refused to endorse adviser Stephen Miller’s slander of Pretti as a “would-be assassin”.
Bovino to leave Minneapolis as White House walks back initial claims about Alex Pretti
Hello and welcome to our live coverage.
Gregory Bovino, the commander of the Border Patrol, is expected to leave Minneapolis today following the weekend killing of Alex Pretti, the second civilian to be fatally gunned down in the streets by federal immigration agents this month.
Bovino, an aggressive promoter of Donald Trump’s deportation agenda, has become the public face of the administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota – and a lightning rod for criticism from Democrats and civil liberties activists.
An unnamed source told Reuters that Bovino had been stripped of his specially created title of “commander at large” of the Border Patrol, but the Department of Homeland Security has pushed back on the demotion reports. “Chief Gregory Bovino has NOT been relieved of his duties,” the DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, pointing to earlier comments from the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, praising Bovino as a “key part of the president’s team and a great American”.
Leavitt spent Monday’s press briefing walking back initial claims made by senior administration officials about Pretti. Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, called the victim “a domestic terrorist who tried to assassinate law enforcement”, and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, accused him of perpetrating “the definition of domestic terrorism” – characterizations that have been undercut by video footage that showed Pretti getting shot in the back multiple times after being tackled to the ground by a group of US border patrol agents whom he had been filming, and disarmed of his gun.
Trump himself on Monday said he had a “a very good call” with Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, who he had perviously blamed for Pretti’s death. Walz said on X that he had a “productive” call with Trump, who had agreed to look at pulling federal agents out of the state and committed to talking to DHS about allowing the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is able to conduct an independent investigation into the shootings by federal agents, which would include the one earlier this month that killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.
More to come.
