Democrats Who Voted to Keep Funding ICE Scramble to Backtrack

Democrats that voted in favor of the Department of Homeland Security’s latest funding package were hit by a maelstrom of public fury over the weekend, forcing some lawmakers to do a complete 180 on their decisions—albeit too late.

Not even 48 hours after seven Democrats banded together to help pass DHS’s $64.4 billion funding bill, ICE agents killed another U.S. citizen in Minnesota: 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti. His death summoned mass outrage, partially directed at the liberals who afforded the violent agencies more dough.

In an email to his campaign list Monday, New York Representative Tom Suozzi said that he had underestimated the significance of his vote, claiming he did not realize that the funding vote would be interpreted as a “referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis.”

“I hear the anger from many of my constituents, and I take responsibility for that,” Suozzi wrote. “I have long been critical of ICE’s unlawful behavior and I must do a better job demonstrating that.

“The senseless and tragic murder of Alex Pretti underscores what happens when untrained federal agents operate without accountability,” he continued. “President Trump must immediately end ‘Operation Metro Surge’ and ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis that has sown chaos, led to tragedy, and undermined experienced local law enforcement.”

The other Democrats who voted in support of the bill were Representatives Henry Cuellar (Texas), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Laura Gillen (New York), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Washington), Jared Golden (Maine), and Don Davis (North Carolina).

Ahead of the vote, Suozzi claimed that the bill—which would continue to fund ICE operations—was a better alternative than another government shutdown.

Some of the other lawmakers also called out ICE while trying to excuse their vote. In a video statement, Gonzalez said that the last week in Washington was one of the toughest of his career, and pledged to ask for a “thorough and independent investigation” into the myriad abuses perpetrated by ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents.

“Let me make it clear, [my vote] was not to fund ICE,” Gonzalez said. “But what I was voting for was to ensure that our agencies here in south Texas were funded.”

Gillen was similarly moved by Pretti’s untimely death, though she did not retract her support for the bill. Posting on X, Gillen claimed that Pretti’s death “at the hands of ICE” warranted the immediate impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

“Under her leadership, ICE has targeted U.S. citizens and children and killed Americans,” Gillen wrote. “She is not focused on safety or border security; she’s focused on chaos and self-promotion, undermining local law enforcement and stoking violence as a result. The American people deserve better.”

After months of denials, President Trump has finally admitted that he has been falling asleep during Cabinet meetings.

In an interview with New York magazine published Monday, Trump said that he closed his eyes during those meetings because they were “boring as hell.”

“I’m going around a room, and I’ve got 28 guys—the last one was three and a half hours. I have to sit back and listen, and I move my hand so that people will know I’m listening. I’m hearing every word, and I can’t wait to get out,” Trump said.

It’s a stark admission in an article about Trump’s health that the president agreed to in an attempt to quash negative reports about his age and his visibly declining mental and physical fitness. The president previously claimed to be “resting” or “blinking” his eyes, despite having fallen asleep multiple times in full view of the press and public: in the middle of his own military parade, while meeting foreign leaders, and four different times in the month of December.

Much of the article is Trump telling doctors, staffers, and members of his Cabinet to brag to writer Ben Terris about how healthy and energetic he is. At one point during his interview, he turned to his physicians from Walter Reed hospital and asked, “Real fast. Is my health perfect?”

“Your health is excellent, sir,” said Colonel James Jones, a physician’s assistant with a Ph.D. in health science.

The president’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said that Trump “can work harder and he has a better memory and he has more stamina and has more energy than a normal mortal. The headline of your story should be ‘The Superhuman President.’”

Sycophancy aside, it’s quite obvious that Trump’s health is declining, as the article points out, with bruising repeatedly showing up on his hands, his own admission that he takes a massive dose of aspirin each day, and the fact that he had trouble remembering the name of Alzheimer’s disease. But don’t worry, Trump doesn’t think about Alzheimer’s at all because, as he says, “I don’t have it.”

As Donald Trump’s administration proceeds to cover up the latest killing in Minneapolis, Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino confirmed that the agents who killed Alex Pretti are already back on the streets.

During a press conference Sunday, Bovino was asked for information about the two officers who were caught on camera firing multiple shots at Pretti after he was already pinned to the ground and disarmed.

“Are they both working right now, or are they on administrative leave?” the reporter asked.

“All agents that were involved in that scene are working, not in Minneapolis, but in other locations,” Bovino said. “That’s for their safety. There’s this thing called doxing. And the safety of our employees is very important to us, so we’re gonna keep those employees safe.

“As far as the number of shots, the number of agents involved, that again, is going to come out in the investigation,” he continued.

Not only did Bovino openly admit to moving the agents responsible out of Minneapolis jurisdiction, he referred to accountability as “doxing.” The commander prioritized the impunity of his officers over the safety of civilians they’re killing in broad daylight.

As for the so-called “investigation,” federal agents have blocked local access to the scene of the shooting, preventing local investigators from conducting an independent investigation into the incident—for the second time this month. A federal judge granted a request from Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and local prosecutors to prevent the federal government from “destroying or altering” evidence at the scene of Pretti’s killing.

Video analysis of the shooting shows that the CBP officers were not in any danger from Pretti, a 37-year old ICU nurse, who had been filming agents and civilians on his iPhone Saturday. Footage of the incident showed that Pretti was tackled by several federal agents after he approached a protester who’d been pepper-sprayed. When the agents realized the man they’d beaten and pinned to the ground was armed, they took his gun, and two of the agents shot him roughly 10 times.

Vice President JD Vance is calling for more accountability in Minnesota—but not from federal agents.

In a missive Sunday, Donald Trump’s number two claimed that the “crazy stories” he had heard while visiting Minneapolis last week did not involve any of the violent overreaches by ICE agents under his purview, but rather what he considered to be an inappropriate magnitude of local hatred for the federal officers.

“When I was in Minneapolis, I heard a number of crazy stories. But near the top of the list: A couple of off duty ICE and CBP officers were going to dinner in Minneapolis,” Vance posted on X. “They were doxed and their location revealed, and the restaurant was then mobbed. The officers were locked in the restaurant, and local police refused to respond to their pleas for help (as they’ve been directed by local authorities). Eventually, their fellow federal agents came to their aid.

“This is just a taste of what’s happening in Minneapolis because state and local officials refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement,” Vance continued. “They have created the chaos so they can have moments like yesterday, where someone tragically dies and politicians get to grandstand about the evils of enforcing the border.”

Vance, who spent weeks vilifying Renee Nicole Good as a domestic terrorist after she was shot dead by ICE agents, toured Minneapolis last week in a hollow effort to deescalate boiling tensions between federal officers and Minnesotans.

Speaking with reporters Thursday, Vance claimed that Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey needed to cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration agenda in order to quell the “chaos.”

“The directive that I got from the president of the United States is meet these guys halfway, work with them, so that we can make these immigration enforcement operations successful without endangering our ICE officers and so that we can turn down the chaos a little bit,” Vance said.

Local leaders roundly rejected Vance’s suggestion, throwing back that Washington needed to withdraw the 3,000 immigration agents in the city in order to restore order among residents.

“We don’t need 3,000 ice agents in our streets—more than every local police department combined,” Walz responded on X. “Take the show of force off the streets and partner with the state on targeted enforcement of violent offenders instead of random, aggressive confrontation.”

In his own words, Frey similarly urged for peace in his city—and he didn’t direct his message toward the thousands of protesters.

“Peace is not spraying irritants and chemicals at peaceful protesters, it’s not detaining a 5-year-old, it’s not dragging a pregnant woman through the streets,” he said.

Still, Vance has continued to blame Minnesotans for attempting to defend their own against the long arm of the federal government.

“The solution is staring everyone in the face. I hope authorities in Minneapolis stop this madness,” Vance concluded Sunday.

Far-right political operative Steve Bannon is calling on the Trump administration to crack down even harder in its “Operation Metro Surge,” claiming on his War Room podcast Monday that Minneapolis protests are part of a larger, advanced Marxist-antifa network.

“This is just not Minneapolis—this is an organized, well thought through effort to invade the country,” Bannon said of local activism in Minneapolis in the wake of a Border Patrol agent shooting Alex Pretti 10 times.

“Let me be blunt. If you blink in Minneapolis, they’re gonna overwhelm you, and they’re gonna win. You cannot blink in Minneapolis. That is one of the festering sores of this country, and that’s where they all come together.... You have to lance the boil there,” Bannon said, calling for even more targeted militance from the federal government.

Bannon was joined by fellow right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who offered his own belligerent insight, claiming that leftist insurgents are flooding into Minneapolis on “Soros buses.”

“There are now these insurgents that are coming in.... We’ve got evidence of people coming from Boston, people coming from New England who are now flooding into Minneapolis,” he said, a claim that has not been corroborated. “Thanks to the One Big Beautiful bill, we can go into Maine, we can go into these places. But if you blink now in Minneapolis, they’re gonna send the insurgents to Maine.... If you blink in Minneapolis, you’ll never make it to Detroit, to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to Los Angeles, to New York. Take the fight here.... Put the insurgency down immediately.”

“They wanna put the people that defend the American republic on trial.... Double down, triple down. Sending Homan there is a good first effort,” Bannon continued, referring to Trump’s announcement earlier in the day that border czar Tom Homan will head to Minneapolis. “This is a Marxist—this is the red-green alliance coming together to try to take down the American republic.... It’s a domestic terrorist mob.”

What a strange reality these people live in. Is it not possible that Minneapolis residents watched masked men in tactical gear invade their city, pull people from their homes, arrest children, and shoot and kill two of their neighbors—and then organically decided to act on their constitutional right to protest? Perhaps these policies really are just as unpopular as nearly every major poll says they are, and blaming George Soros is not a sufficient dismissal of this activism.

Furthermore, the left wishes they were as organized as Bannon seems to think they are. What has antifa won? Who are their leaders? The conversation between Bannon and Posobiec was sparked by a tweet from a left-leaning account smaller than theirs that read “minneapolis could be our Fallujah. organize supply drives.” It has less than 80 likes currently. They also pointed to a GoFundMe for a “Community Defense Initiative” that barely raised any money and has since been taken down. And yet Bannon is calling for even more federal agents to flood into Minneapolis.