The Journal. - Are We at a Turning Point in Minneapolis?

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

Over the weekend, a federal officer shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse in Minneapolis. WSJ’s Joe Barrett describes how events unfolded in the wake of Pretti’s killing, and WSJ’s Michelle Hackman breaks down how ICE tactics have led to clashes with local residents. Jessica Mendoza hosts. Further Listening: The Florida Cops Who Act as ICE Agents The Hyundai Plant Raided By Immigration Authorities Inside the ICE Hiring Blitz Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good evening and thanks for joining us. A city already on edge, now faced with yet another deadly shooting by federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis. On Saturday morning in Minneapolis, a man named Alex Preti was wrestled to the ground by federal immigration officials. Predi was shot just before 9 a.m. after a heated confrontation between agents and protesters who opposed the government's immigration enforcement tactics. In total, 10 shots were fired in five seconds. Then he was fatally shot. The second deadly shooting by immigration agents in less than three weeks. Immediately after the shooting, administration officials blamed Preddy, who had a gun on his body.

Deputy Chief of Staff and Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, called Prattie a domestic terrorist. Here's the Secretary of Homeland Security, Christy Noam. I don't know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition. rather than a sign. This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers. But videos of the shooting contradict the administration's account. Footage reviewed by the Wall Street Journal showed a federal officer pulling the handgun away

from Preti. Less than a second later, an agent fire several rounds. The killing, the second by immigration authorities this month, sparked more protests in Minneapolis, which has been the site of an unprecedented immigration crackdown called Operation Metro Surge. As Minneapolis is reeling, even some of Trump's allies are beginning to question the president's push. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, January 26. Coming up on the show, what a second deadly shooting in Minneapolis means for President Trump's immigration plans.

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Commissions, fees, and expenses may apply. Read the funds or ETSs prospectus before investing. Funds in ETS are not guaranteed. Their values change and past performance may not be repeated. This morning we talked to our colleagues. Joe Barrett, who's in Minneapolis. He says that on Friday, people had gathered for a planned demonstration against immigration officials.

There was a huge protest on Friday. Thousands of people peacefully going down the streets to protest ISIS involvement in the city. And, you know, everybody was feeling pretty good about the response and how well managed the whole thing was. They also closed down many businesses. Hundreds of businesses were shuttered just for the day and sort of what they were calling a general strike. And then Saturday morning, everybody woke up to another ice shooting.

What has been the response to the killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota? I mean, you know, people are angry. They're sad. They kind of feel like they've been saying something like this could happen. I mean, two weeks ago, it was Renee Good, another person trying to observe ice who was shot in the head by an ice agent. And now it happens again. So, yeah, people are very upset. Yesterday, Joe went to the site where Prattie, a 37-year-old ICU nurse was killed, a commercial strip in Minneapolis. Residents had set up a memorial with flowers and pictures of Prattie. A saxophone played in the distance. So I just am getting to the scene of yesterday's shooting, and the street here is still closed off.

At this point, you know, probably 100, 200 people just coming to pay their respects. lots of media, lots of well-wishers. The police are here to direct the traffic. People are bringing their dogs out. I saw one older couple. They had a framed photo of the victim and a candle. What did people at the scene have to say? What was generally the feeling there?

Just sadness and anger. I mean, I saw a lot of people in tears. I spoke with people, and it just doesn't take long for them to get to a real sense of hopelessness and sadness that somebody who had dedicated his life to helping other people and was, you know, a gun down in the street. After the shooting, the State's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said its agents were blocked from investigating the scene by federal authorities.

The Department of Homeland Security is investigated, the shooting, but Governor Walls demanded access for state law enforcement and said, quote, the federal government cannot be trusted to lead this investigation. State investigators sued the Trump administration on Saturday, and the judge ruled that the federal government could not destroy or alter evidence. The cooperation is still just not happening, and so the state's trying to launch their own investigation, but it's very difficult when they don't have access to the evidence like body cam footage or any of the forensics or anything else.

When Joe arrived at the site of the shooting on Sunday, he saw some state agents trying to make sense of the crime scene. I mean, the integrity of the crime scene has been completely lost, but they were there right in front of a business is where it happened, and they were knocking on the door to see if anybody inside had any information. There was a man being interviewed on TV, and one of the investigators asked to speak with him afterwards and had the guy walk over in point where he had seen blood,

On the day of the shooting, there were flowers all over, but they were still trying to get a few photographs to see whether there was any markings of what had happened. I think they were probably looking for bullet casings, too, but there just was nothing. It was all covered in flowers and memorials at this point. After visiting the scene of the shooting, Joe went to other parts of the city. He came across a protest in downtown Minneapolis. Probably 300 people on the street corner, just yelling, Fice. out, spoke with some of those people who had protested Friday and thought, you know, maybe

they'd have the weekend off, but then ended up protesting again on Saturday and again, again, on Sunday. One of the people Joe spoke with was Matthew Steggeman, a 34-year-old urban planner. He had on a placard over his chest saying, you know, peaceful observer, do not shoot. So I'm here in support of our community members. Immigration is a close issue to me. I have close friends and family who have immigrated from other countries. And, you know, he's like a sort of typical Minnesota guy.

He wants everybody to know that we're, you know, we're regular people. Nobody's getting paid to be here. And, you know, we're just, you know, trying to make this case and do it peacefully and hopefully, you know, get ice out of town. We are here because we have to be. And we are here for our... anybody else in the country who's going to face this next. Later in the day, Joe met Charlie Sellers, who works in tech at a gathering in the neighborhood

where Alex Pretti lived. I think a lot of us have been uncomfortable with how aggressive the administration has been with its tactics, but that aggression went to another level when our neighbors started getting murdered. And so regular folks like us have gotten off of our couches and felt compelled to do something about it. And what's your sense of what the people of Minneapolis will do next? Do you expect to see more of these protests in the next weeks?

Yeah, I mean, I think as long as it goes on, I don't think that they're going to be deterred. I mean, you know, ice has ramped up its tactics. And, you know, there are people who follow their vehicles around in cars. And, you know, we're hearing reports of those people getting boxed in by ice, their windows broken. people dragged away to jail or to the federal Whipple Center where that's where they would take ICE detainees, but they're also taking people now who are protesters. And I think that they're more determined than ever at this point, even though it's clear what the consequence can be when they cross ICE in the wrong way.

The Trump administration says observers hinder immigration authority's ability to do their job. Were there any ICE or borderline? patrol agents around that you saw while you were there? No, I didn't see any activity at the places I was going. I mean, you know, they're not here to police the demonstrators, but they're being followed around when they're trying to make their apprehensions, and that's where these clashes tend to happen. On Sunday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat,

called on Trump to remove federal immigration officials from his state. President Trump, you can end this today. Pull these folks back. do humane, focused, effective immigration control. You've got the support of all of us to do that. That same day, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, also a Democrat, said something similar. Here she is on ABC News. My message is simple.

ICE is making us not more safe. They're making us less safe. And they need to get out of our state. After the break, what Minneapolis reveals about the Trump administration's larger immigration policy. The federal immigration push in Minneapolis is part of Trump's efforts over the past year to carry out his mass deportation pledge, especially in Democratic-led cities like Chicago and Los Angeles. The spark in Minneapolis was a large-scale welfare fraud scandal that was already unfolding in the state. Prosecutors alleged over a billion dollars of welfare funds had been misused by a network within the local Somali community. Here's our colleague Michelle Hackman.

She covers immigration policy. Over the last year, we've seen Trump basically target one city after another. It's part of a coordinated strategy to sort of take on liberal sanctuary cities. They think this is a fight that's worth having that plays well for them. And so when this welfare scandal exploded in Minnesota, they thought it would be a great opportunity to go sort of take on the liberals in Minnesota and send a huge deployment of people So it was sort of an opportunity in this welfare fraud case that was already playing out as a chance to say, hey, let's take on Minneapolis next. Absolutely. And you know, I should say from the start, like it didn't make sense on its face.

Minnesota actually just has a relatively low percentage of people who are here in the country illegally. It's about half the national average and much lower than places like New York, California, Texas. and Florida, which we have not, for the most part, seen the Trump administration target. But the Trump administration decided to deploy more federal immigration authorities to Minneapolis than it did to other bigger cities. So I want to just give you a comparison. I think a lot of our listeners are familiar with what they saw happening in Chicago in the fall. That was a deployment of roughly 300 to 600 agents and officers to Chicago, which is a

city of about 2.5 million people, you have 3,000 federal agents and officers sent to Minneapolis, which is a city of closer to about 450,000. So you can imagine, I mean, it's just so much larger proportionally that what you're getting is sort of like close quarters of all these agents all over the city running up against immigrants, but also protesters who are trying to resist them. What we're seeing in Minneapolis feels like a culmination of what this past year has been building up to. For the past year, we've seen ICE sort of change tactics. This administration has favored what I've been describing as a splashier, sort of more confrontational approach. They're out on the street.

They're arresting people and these huge deployments to cities. are what's triggering protesters to come out and then clash with, you know, ICE or Border Patrol, whoever it may be leading to even more confrontation. And so let's talk about these arrests. What is ICE's goal when it comes to making arrests? So ICE is operating under daily quotas. And this all started when at the start of the administration, Trump said we're going to deport a million people in our first year in office.

And so they've created these quotas. They've worked backwards and said, okay, in order for us to get to a million, we need to do 3,000 arrests per day. And those have been the set quota since the start of the administration. ICE has never come close to hitting those quotas. I mean, the high mark has been maybe 2,200 arrests in a day,

but they really average closer to 1,000. The thing that you've got to understand, though, is that people, I mean, people's job performance is held up against these quotas, and so they are motivated to make arrests. Even if later on, you know, they arrest someone and later they find out, oh my gosh, this person has legal status.

We can't arrest them and let them go. It still counts as an arrest. Can you talk about the new tactics that ISIS is using to identify or arrest people? They've become much more aggressive. They've been using more militarized tactics. tactics. We've seen in numerous cases that when they want to arrest someone in a car, that they won't even pause before smashing a window to pull someone out of their car, for example.

One of the biggest shifts we've seen this year is that ICE is using more profiling tactics to arrest people. They're out in the street looking for people to arrest rather than sort of knowing specifically exactly who it is. They want to go arrest. And they're using factors like, you know, does this person look Latino? Do they not speak English? Do they work in a profession that is associated with people in the country illegally? For example, are they standing in a Home Depot parking lot looking for work as a day laborer? ICE says that they're not allowed to make arrests solely on the basis of race,

but that a couple of factors together, like not speaking English and running away from ICE, can be used as a basis for reasonable suspicion. Another really notable shift is one that just came to late recently, actually, that ICE sort of secretly came up with a new legal justification to force entry into people's homes without a warrant. So if they want to go arrest someone in the past, ICE would actually have to stand outside someone's home for hours and hours and hours and wait for them to leave and make the arrest as someone was leaving to go to work or to drop their kids off at school. But now in certain cases, in particular, when an immigrant has a deportation order from an immigration judge, ISIS said, actually, it is okay for us to break in without a warrant. They haven't explained why that's legal.

And a lot of people are concerned that it's a pretty clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable search and seizure. Up until this point, Republicans and Trump supporters have, broadly backed the president's approach to immigration enforcement. But after this weekend and the death of Alex Prattie, cracks have started to show. I think it's partially influenced by how much the polling has soured for President Trump and for Republicans, that you're seeing pretty conservative Republicans come out. For example, the governor of Oklahoma, you know, not a moderate, not a liberal, come out and say, the president is getting bad advice on this issue. They need to change tactics. And he's not the only one.

on. Other Republicans speaking out include Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, a Trump ally, who was called for a transparent investigation of Preddy's death. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana also called for a full investigation and wrote on X, quote, the events in Minneapolis are incredibly disturbing. The credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake. Inside the Department of Homeland Security, is everyone still on board with the administration's approach? You know, I've had conversations with numerous current and former officials who work at ICE and across the Department of Homeland Security. At DHS, I would say people have almost adopted like a siege mentality. They are in it.

They truly believe in their mission. They think that it's, you know, that they're there to arrest people who are here in violation of our immigration laws. that trying to scale back on their operation now would basically amount to a capitulation to these left-wing protesters is how they view it. And you would expect that from people. I mean, they believe in the mission.

That's what they do all the time. At the same time, you have seen people get really frustrated at leadership and some of the choices that leadership has made. I think people have long felt uneasy about, particularly about Greg Bovino. He's the Border Patrol commander who led operations in L.A. and Chicago. He went to New Orleans,

and now his guys are in Minneapolis, and Border Patrol agents who report to Greg Bovino were the ones who shot and killed Alex Pretti. And so there's a lot of anger and frustration that he has been allowed to become the leader in the face of immigration enforcement, and that that has sort of taken away from the mission.

Greg Bovino said, quote, our operations are lawful. They're targeted and they're focused on individuals who pose a serious threat to this community. Our colleague Josh Dossi spoke to Trump last night in a five-minute interview. And the president seemed to say, you know, the administration is reviewing everything

with regards to the Alex Pretty case. I mean, what do you make of that? Trump is pretty attuned to public opinion. And he even indicated that he would be considering pulling back from Minnesota. And just today we see that he's appointed Tom Holman to run operations in Minnesota. Tom Holman is Trump's sort of White House borders are. He's been sidelined for the past roughly six months or so. He hasn't had any direct authority over ICE or DHS.

But even though Holman has this sort of gruff exterior, he actually favors that more old-school methodical approach to making arrests. And so to me, it seems like bringing him in to lead this operation in Minnesota suggests that Trump wants to really change tactics there and pull back. Today, President Trump and Minnesota Governor Tim Walls spoke on the phone. Trump said it was a, quote, very good call. And Walls' office said Trump agreed to look into reducing the number of federal agents in his state. According to administration officials familiar with the matter, Bovino,

the Border Patrol commander, will leave Minnesota imminently, along with some of his agents. The White House also said today that the FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are conducting investigations into the fatal shooting. And it is really interesting because it seems like in this moment the Trump administration has two options, either double down on. on ice going to these cities or, as you said, pulled back. What are the risks of each of those two strategies? Yeah, we've heard over the last couple days that people inside the White House were looking

for what they described as an off-ramp to sort of diffuse tension in Minnesota. They're walking a really fine line because their core base, whose die-hard Trump supporters, supports everything he does. immigration is probably the most important issue to them, and any kind of retreat on what they're doing in Minneapolis will come as a severe disappointment to those people. Could this be a turning point for Trump's immigration enforcement efforts? It's too soon to necessarily say it's a turning point,

and doing a mass deportation is certainly still a core promise of his that he can't afford to back away from, but it could signal a shift in tactics and how they try to get there. That's all for today, Monday, January 26. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode

by Joshua Chaffin, Josh Dossi, Jack Morfitt, and Marietins. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.