Minnesota Shooting Upends Homeland Security Funding Negotiations, With Democrats and Republicans Expressing Alarm

The killing of an ICU nurse by a Customs and Border Patrol agent on Saturday is suddenly throwing government funding negotiations on Capitol Hill into chaos. The Department of Homeland Security’s funding is due to lapse at the end of this week, and the shocking footage of Alex Pretti’s death now has Democrats and Republicans alike concerned about the tactics of DHS agents. In a number of videos that went viral on social media on Saturday, Pretti can be seen holding his phone while protesting DHS agents, seemingly to record them or take photos of them. As he tries to help a woman up from the ground after she was aggressively shoved to the ground by an ICE agent, he is taken down by agents, pepper sprayed, beaten, and then shot multiple times.Federal officials say he was carrying a weapon at the time agents confronted him, though some of the videos show what appears to be a gun being removed from his body by agents before he was shot. For weeks following the shooting death of Renee Good, Democrats mused about potentially holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security in order to extract some policy changes at ICE and other agencies within the department. Senate leadership, however, seemed uninterested in those tactics. “The suggestion that a shutdown in this moment might curb the lawlessness of this administration is not rooted in reality: under a CR and in a shutdown, this administration can do everything they are already doing,” the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Senator Patty Murray, said last week. She was an avid believer in Democrats’ last shutdown strategy, which resulted in the longest shutdown in American history.Democrats have the power to block any funding bill for DHS in the Senate, given that it takes 60 votes to end debate and proceed to final passage of the bill. Senator Chuck Schumer, who has hinted for weeks that Democrats would not block the DHS spending bill, now says he and his colleagues will not allow the legislation to pass following Pretti’s death. “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included,” Mr. Schumer said Saturday. During the last shutdown, one of the Democratic lawmakers most opposed to the strategy was Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a moderate Democrat from Nevada. For weeks, she consistently voted to reopen the government even as her colleagues said the shutdown was worth it. Now, she is endorsing a blockade of the DHS funding bill unless real reforms are made. “They are oppressing Americans and are at odds with local law enforcement. This is clearly not about keeping Americans safe, it’s brutalizing U.S. citizens and law-abiding immigrants,” she said of DHS agents and Secretary Kristi Noem on Saturday. A small band of Republicans on Capitol Hill have also spoken out against the shooting, despite President Trump’s insistence that the agent who shot Pretti is innocent. “The events in Minneapolis are incredibly disturbing. The credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake,” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said in a statement Saturday. “There must be a full joint federal and state investigation. We can trust the American people with the truth.”The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Congressman Andrew Garbarino, also says that DHS leadership must come to Capitol Hill to answer questions in the coming weeks. In a letter Saturday, the chairman invited the leaders of CBP, ICE, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to testify before his committee in either February or March. “As chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, my top priority remains keeping Americans safe and ensuring the Department of Homeland Security can accomplish its core mission,” Mr. Garbarino said after the shooting on Saturday. “I take my oversight duties for the department seriously, and Congress has an important responsibility to ensure the safety of law enforcement and the people they serve and protect.”The overwhelming majority of Republicans have said that agents were justified in shooting Pretti because he was carrying a concealed firearm for which he had a permit at the time he was being taken down. “No one has the right to impede law enforcement officers carrying out their duties,” Senator Lindsey Graham wrote on X in response to the shooting. “If you go to such events with a loaded gun, bad things can happen.”The acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, Bill Essayli, argued that there is a “high likelihood” that officers will be justified in killing an individual should that person approach them with a weapon. The statement, which was made after it was made clear that Pretti never brandished his weapon, immediately drew protests from conservative gun rights groups. “We condemn the untoward comments of [Mr. Essayli],” the Gun Owners of America said in response to the prosecutor. “Federal agents are not ‘highly likely’ to be ‘legally justified’ in ‘shooting’ concealed carry licensees who approach while lawfully carrying a firearm. The Second Amendment protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting — a right the federal government must not infringe upon.”“This sentiment from the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California is dangerous and wrong. Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens,” the National Rifle Association wrote on X. The same day Pretti was killed, YouGov conducted a poll about Americans’ feelings towards ICE and Mr. Trump’s deportations. The results show that one of the president’s few areas of political strength — immigration and deportations — has quickly become a liability. The YouGov survey contacted more than 3,000 people on Saturday, and found that a plurality of them now support getting rid of ICE entirely, 46 percent to 41 percent. When asked to describe how agents are behaving, 58 percent of respondents said they were being “too forceful,” while only 23 percent said they were behaving correctly.

Minnesota Shooting Upends Homeland Security Funding Negotiations, With Democrats and Republicans Expressing Alarm

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