Karoline Leavitt Appears to Throw CBP Chief Under the Bus on Minnesota

Customs and Border Patrol boss Greg Bovino’s time in Minnesota appears to have come to a close.

The commander-at-large has overseen ICE and Border Patrol operations across the country, moving from city to city as the agencies violently scour neighborhoods to satisfy Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s mandate to arrest upwards of 3,000 people per day.

But press secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed during a White House press briefing Monday that the Trump administration is shuffling Bovino elsewhere, apparently replacing him with border czar Tom Homan.

“Mr. Bovino is a wonderful man and he’s a great professional,” Leavitt said. “He is going to very much continue to lead Customs and Border Patrol throughout and across the country. Mr. Homan will be the main point of contact on the ground in Minneapolis.”

CNN reported just a few hours after Leavitt’s press briefing that Bovino and some CBP agents are expected to leave Minneapolis soon and return to their normal areas of work.

Bovino’s ousting from the North Star State appears to be a part of a larger restructuring in which the Trump administration is attempting to reinvent its approach to its immigration agenda.

Donald Trump announced Monday morning that he planned to send Homan to Minnesota “tonight” and work with Governor Tim Walz.

“I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I!”

Republicans have balked at the national backlash to ICE’s violence in Minnesota, which so far has involved the senseless killing of two U.S. citizens just weeks apart.

In the aftermath of their deaths, thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in protest. Trump’s job score has nosedived; he currently has a net approval rating of -19 percent.

The country, by all means, appears fed up with the reality of Trump’s immigration agenda, which has thus far deported people from the U.S. without due process, ripped children from their parents, and ushered thousands of untrained ICE agents into cities and neighborhoods where they are not wanted.

A CBS News poll published days before the Saturday killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse working with veterans in Minneapolis, found that 61 percent of surveyed Americans felt that ICE agents were “too tough” when stopping and detaining people.

Even Texas Governor and vocal Trump supporter Greg Abbott has taken issue with federal agents’ deadly shootings in Minneapolis, saying that ICE needs to “recalibrate.”

“In general, we need to have respect for law enforcement officers in the country. ICE, they are law enforcement officers,” Abbott said Monday morning on conservative radio host Mark Davis’s show. “So they, being the White House, need to recalibrate on what needs to be done to make sure that that respect is going to be re-instilled. And that’s not an easy task, especially under the current circumstances.”

He added that he believes the White House is “working on a game plan” to help federal agents “go about their job in a more structured way to make sure that they are going to be able to remove these people, but without causing all the kinds of problems and fighting in communities that they are experiencing right now.”

Even as Abbott refused to attack slain protester Alex Pretti like much of the Trump administration—White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called Pretti a “domestic terrorist”—he still placed most of the blame on local leaders, specifically Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz.

“Your responsibility, your duty, is to use your office to make sure that there’s going to be calm and order in your community, and that means tamping down the rhetoric, tamping down ... the anger that your local residents feel, and instead instill calm and order,” he said. “This is truly the problem in Minnesota. It’s more about the lack of leadership, and the lack of calming by the governor, by the mayor—and candidly, I think they want it that way.”

Still, it seems that the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—both caught on video and both so clearly contrary to the Trump administration’s narrative of their domestic terrorism—are a red line for more on the right than they would admit.

The White House appears to be distancing itself from comments deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller made about Alex Pretti, the Minnesota nurse shot and killed by Border Patrol agents over the weekend.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked Monday about Miller’s comment on X immediately after the shooting, in which he summarized the incident as: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” Miller’s tweet was reposted by official administration accounts, including @TrumpWarRoom and @RapidResponse47.

NBC News’s Gabe Gutierrez asked Leavitt why Miller, a White House official, would jump to conclusions before an investigation.

“Well, look, this has obviously been a very fluid and fast-moving situation throughout the weekend. As for President Trump, whom I speak for, he has said that he wants to let the investigation continue and let the facts lead in this case,” Leavitt replied.

Leavitt went on to avoid defending Miller’s comments two more times. Mary Bruce, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also called Pretti a domestic terrorist in addition to Miller, and asked if President Trump agreed with that assessment. Again, Leavitt deflected, saying that she hadn’t heard Trump describe Pretti “in that way.”

When Bruce asked if Trump was alarmed to hear top administration officials “describe Pretti in that way,” Leavitt ignored the question and moved on.

But the next reporter, Agence France-Presse’s Danny Kemp, then asked Leavitt, “Will Stephen Miller be apologizing to the family of Alex Pretti for calling him ‘an assassin’ trying to murder federal agents, despite the fact that, as you say, this is still under investigation?”

Leavitt pointedly didn’t answer his question.

“Again, this incident remains under investigation and nobody here at the White House, including the President of the United States, wants to see Americans hurt or killed and losing their lives in American streets,” the press secretary replied.

On three different occasions, Leavitt, a spokesperson for the president, refused to defend Miller, who has pushed for aggressive immigration enforcement and argued against backing down in the face of criticism, going against others in the administration according to The Wall Street Journal. Instead, as criticism begins to mount from Republicans both nationally and inside Minnesota, the president appears to be trying to avoid any negative labeling of Pretti. Miller’s perspective may be losing support from the White House as it inspires a national backlash.

In the wake of yet another citizen being shot and killed in broad daylight by Donald Trump’s roving militia, the White House is now attempting to deflect blame by accusing Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar of fraud.

Trump announced the so-called investigation on Truth Social Monday morning, claiming that there was no way the Democratic lawmaker could have so much money. “The DOJ and Congress are looking at ‘Congresswoman’ Illhan Omar, who left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars,” he wrote. “Time will tell all.”

This accusation is coming from the same man who raked in at least $1.4 billion in the last year alone—at the American people’s expense.

Omar wasted no time in dismissing Trump’s desperate finger-pointing.

“Sorry, Trump, your support is collapsing and you’re panicking. Right on cue, you’re deflecting from your failures with lies and conspiracy theories about me. Years of ‘investigations’ have found nothing,” she wrote on X. “Get your goons out of Minnesota.”

Speaking at a White House press briefing later Monday, Karoline Leavitt doubled down on Trump’s baseless allegations.

“The president raised a good question over the weekend, with respect to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who now has a net worth within the millions, and one must ask themselves why and how is that possible? Is she connected to the fraud rings we’ve seen taking place within her state, and her own district?” the press secretary said. “It’s a question the American people are raising, and the president believes it’s one worth answering.”

Following the second deadly shooting by federal immigration officers just this month, the only question the American people are really asking is: When will you be out of a job, Karoline?

Leavitt also repeated Trump’s claim that the widespread backlash to ICE’s wanton violence in Minnesota was merely a “cover up” for fraud. This absurd allegation is yet another example of the Trump administration attempting to hijack the language that describes its own actions, as the apparent cover-up of the senseless killing of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Patrol agents is already underway.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s blackmail letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz after the killing of protester Alex Pretti may force the Trump administration to end its violent immigration crackdown in the state.

On Saturday, hours after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, Bondi demanded that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz give the Trump administration full access to the state’s Medicaid and SNAP records so that her office could “efficiently investigate fraud.” Bondi also demanded Walz end the sanctuary state policy and hand over all state voter registration records to Trump. Walz refused.

Now a federal judge is weighing this letter as evidence that the administration is using the presence of armed federal agents as coercion to achieve policy goals.

“They are not letting the courts work this stuff out. What they’re trying to get in court ... they’re trying to get that same thing by putting 3,000 heavily armed agents on the streets of Minnesota,” lawyers representing the state argued in court Monday. “The president of the United States said in the middle of this chaos and violence in the streets … he said, ‘Minnesota, your day of retribution is here.’ That is crazy. How can that not violate legal sovereignty?”

Judge Katherine Menendez expressed her own concerns about the federal operation, noting that Bondi’s letter to Walz clearly detailed a policy-based exchange: fewer federal agents for concessions on MAGA policy.

“Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it can’t achieve through the courts?” Menendez asked DOJ lawyers.

“Have no idea if this suit will be successful but would be objectively hilarious if the federal government lost because Trump made Bondi write a mean letter admitting that this was all extortion,” one user wrote on X.

The case, Minnesota v. Noem, is still pending.

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.