The Left always jumps the gun on this stuff. They’ve called the Renee Good shooting on January 7, where she was shot and killed after ramming an ICE agent with her car, a murder. They claimed Alex Pretti’s death on January 24 was an execution. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem portrayed Pretti as a domestic terrorist who brought a gun, intending to essentially commit a mass casualty event. That’s not entirely true, and in these situations, you cannot go off half-cocked.
Pretti had a firearm and no proper ID when he was shot. In Minnesota, that’s a petty misdemeanor carrying a $25 fine, and your CCW permit isn’t revoked, nor is your gun subject to confiscation. But the overall message on that front, including from President Trump, was that you cannot bring firearms to political events. That’s also not true. This jumbled messaging added to the chaos. What we need to see is the bodycam footage from the Border Patrol agents involved in the shooting. For now, Ms. Noem, who is under siege and could be stepping down from the agency—the rumor mill is spinning hard on that one—opted to backtrack, admitting that her initial remarks might have been premature (via Politico):
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has conceded she may have gotten some information wrong in her initial response to Border Patrol’s killing of Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis ICU nurse she labeled a domestic terrorist.
[…]
Noem, who said Pretti committed an “act of domestic terrorism” against immigration agents despite videos showing otherwise, told Fox News on Thursday that the situation immediately following the killing was “very chaotic,” and the details she presented to reporters came from initial reports from Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis.
“We were being relayed information from on the ground from CBP agents and officers that were there,” Noem said. “We were using the best information we had at the time.”
It was a fumble so bad that President Trump stepped in to clean up the mess, appointing Tom Homan to oversee all deportation operations and see if he could get some cooperation from local leaders. CBP chief Gregory Bovino was shipped out of the city. The optics from all sides were a shambles, with Noem being the point of the lance regarding our side, turning this into a circus.
Is Noem out? We shall see, but it’s certainly not good right now.
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