By Nia-Malika Henderson / Bloomberg Opinion
Over the course of the last many days, indelible images have dominated the White House’s mass deportation efforts in Minnesota.
A teary-eyed five-year-old named Liam Ramos, wearing a blue bunny hat and carrying a Spider-Man backpack, and bound for a Texas detention facility. A man pinned to the ground by federal agents as another sprays a chemical agent in his face. ChongLy “Scott” Thao led out of his house in boxers in the falling snow. Renee Good saying, “I’m not mad at you,” seconds before being shot and killed. Now there is Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, first filming border agents on his phone, then on his knees surrounded by masked Border Patrol agents; and then, seconds later, shot dead.
President Donald Trump is said to be privately frustrated with the images coming out of Minneapolis.
To this administration, mass deportation was the stuff of cinema. It has pumped out slickly produced videos of “the worst of the worst” loaded up on cargo planes and headed out of the country. But ordinary citizens with cell phones and whistles have shifted the narrative.
That’s why President Donald Trump began the press conference marking the anniversary of his inauguration with images of people he claimed were among the 10,000 apprehended in Minnesota in recent weeks. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn’t offered any evidence to support this claim.) It is why Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino does the same thing when he takes the podium, attaching criminal offenses to glossy, menacing images. It’s why Kristi Noem, head of the Department of Homeland Security, keeps going in front of the cameras to call slain protesters “terrorists.” And it’s why Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed what he called “engineered chaos” in Minneapolis as the “direct consequence of far left agitators, working with local authorities.”
The administration is now trying to add Pretti, who worked at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, to this roll call of dangerous people they have gotten off the streets. But their story appears to be falling apart.
“This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go — What is that all about?” Trump posted on Truth Social, with an image officials say was the gun that border agents took from Pretti right before they killed him.
Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who reportedly continues to push for aggressive actions in Minneapolis even as other Trump allies call for more restraint, called Pretti a “would-be assassin” on X.
Bovino has labeled Pretti a suspect and the immigration agents victims. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” he said, while offering no proof, in the hours after the shooting.
By all accounts, Pretti was an upstanding U.S. citizen with no criminal record and a permit to own the gun he appears to have been carrying. A New York Times analysis of video of Pretti’s apprehension and death indicates that he was holding up a cell phone, not a gun, when ICE agents wrestled him to the ground and then shot him multiple times. Minnesota authorities say the White House is preventing them from investigating Pretti’s killing.
All except the most committed Trump followers will believe their own eyes. The steady drumbeat of imagery out of Minnesota is persuading the last few persuadable voters that this deportation campaign has gone too far. More than half of independents now approve of abolishing ICE, once a rallying cry of progressives.
Does Trump, the showman, understand when it is time to quit?
“At some point we will leave. We’ve done a phenomenal job,” he said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Even if the White House removes ICE from Minnesota, the images of chaos, death and cruelty are likely to stay in Americans’ minds for a very long time.
Nia-Malika Henderson is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former senior political reporter for CNN and the Washington Post, she has covered politics and campaigns for almost two decades.
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