(AFP) – As the White House worked to “de-escalate” tensions in Minneapolis Tuesday, a man sprayed Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with a syringe of unknown liquid at a town hall meeting, where she called for curbing the Trump administration’s anti-immigration crackdown.
The White House is also evaluating whether the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents who gunned down a nurse failed to follow “clear guidance” to “create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told AFP. “We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” Miller said in a statement.
At the town hall Tuesday night, Omar had just spoken about the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and demanded that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem “resign or face impeachment,” when a man sprang up from the front row, made a remark, and sprayed the lawmaker, as security leapt to grab him. Omar raised a fist and stepped toward the attacker before returning to the podium to say: “Here’s the reality that people like this ugly man don’t understand: We are Minnesota strong. And we will stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw on us.”
Omar is a frequent target of President Donald Trump — who continues to defend Noem despite her oversight of federal immigration agents who shot and killed two US citizens this month, saying Noem would not step down and was doing a “very good job.” But after days of protests following 37-year-old Alex Pretti’s death, Trump told Fox News “we’re going to de-escalate a little bit,” while adding that it was not a “pullback.”
Trump also admitted that Gregory Bovino, a hardline Border Patrol commander who is now expected to leave Minneapolis, was “a pretty out-there kind of a guy” whose presence may not have helped the situation, and sent top US border security official Tom Homan to meet with officials in the city. Trump told reporters that he rejected the “assassin” label used by a top aide to describe the 37-year-old nurse, adding that he wants “a very honorable and honest investigation.” However, he criticized Pretti for carrying the licensed firearm that was taken off him before he was shot. “I don’t like that he had a gun, I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines,” the president said.
After meeting with Homan Tuesday, Mayor Jacob Frey said in a statement they discussed the “serious negative impacts this operation has had on Minneapolis,” and the city “will not enforce federal immigration laws.” Just weeks after federal immigration agents shot and killed US citizen Renee Good in Minneapolis, Pretti’s death sparked national outrage and added to a litany of complaints of abusive tactics. Good, a mother of three, was shot by an agent at point-blank range in her car on January 7. The killings capped months of escalating violence in which masked, unidentified, and heavily armed ICE and Border Patrol agents have grabbed people they accuse of violations off the streets.
Despite multiple videos showing that Pretti posed no threat, Bovino and Noem initially claimed Pretti had intent to kill federal agents, calling him a “domestic terrorist.”
Republican Senator Rand Paul said Tuesday that agents involved in the shooting should be put on administrative leave, later adding that the immigration enforcement leaders would testify before Congress next month. Centrist Democratic Senator John Fetterman said “grossly incompetent” Noem should be fired.
The turmoil could even result in a fresh US government shutdown, with Democrats calling for broad reforms to federal immigration operations at DHS and threatening to block approval of its funding, as part of the spending bills that go up for votes in the Senate later this week.
The judicial branch also pushed back on Trump’s actions in Minneapolis Tuesday, when a US judge blocked the deportation of a five-year-old boy and his father who were detained last week in another incident that went viral. Liam Conejo Ramos — wearing a fluffy blue hat and his school backpack — was photographed being detained by a federal agent, who school officials said was using the preschool student as “bait” to draw out his family, who are asylum seekers from Ecuador.
At a protest at the Minnesota State Capitol Tuesday, veteran Brian Furgen, 55, told AFP that Americans need immigration and customs enforcement agents who “know how to do the job without harming the community, without killing people, without hurting people, without imprisoning people that are law abiding.” “That’s what they are doing here, that’s ridiculous.”
– burs-dk/sms/sla/jgc – Roberto Schmidt with Danny Kemp in Washington
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