Stephen Miller Pulls Stunning 180 on Alex Pretti Killing

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has suddenly changed his story on Alex Pretti’s killing after Donald Trump’s inner circle began to turn on him.

In a statement Tuesday, Miller conceded that Customs and Border Protection agents “may not have been following protocol” when they shot and killed Pretti.

Miller claimed that the White House had “provided clear guidance to DHS that the extra personnel that had been sent to Minnesota for force protection should be used for conducting fugitive operations to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors.”

“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” he added.

To be sure, Miller’s statement didn’t meet the level of an apology or even a revelation, considering that any person who actually watched a video of the shooting could tell that it’s not protocol to fire 10 rounds at a disarmed man who was pinned to the ground.

But it’s a long way from Miller’s initial baseless claim that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” who’d attempted to murder federal law enforcement officers.

Miller’s callous response to federal agents killing an American citizen in broad daylight has not impressed his fellow Republicans. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Senator Thom Tillis took Miller to task for attacking Pretti “before he had even talked with anybody on the ground.”

“Stephen Miller never fails to live up to my expectations of incompetence,” Tillis said, adding that if he were president, Miller would already be out of Washington.

Speaking to the press Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not defend Miller’s “assassin” comment, and the ghoulish policy adviser was notably absent from a two-hour meeting Monday between Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The president’s social media addiction may have just cost him another court case.

In a post on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Donald Trump openly attempted to sway Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey into fulfilling his immigration agenda, a blatant violation of the Tenth Amendment.

“Surprisingly, Mayor Jacob Frey just stated that, ‘Minneapolis does not, and will not, enforce Federal Immigration Laws,’” Trump wrote. “This is after having had a very good conversation with him. Could somebody in his inner sanctum please explain that this statement is a very serious violation of the Law, and that he is PLAYING WITH FIRE!”

The problem for Trump’s bloviating is twofold. Not only is Minnesota—or any state, for that matter—not required to enforce federal law under the “anti-commandeering doctrine” of the Tenth Amendment, but his insistence that the North Star State do so effectively spells out that he’s attempting to strong-arm Minnesota into changing its local policies.

Legal reporters noted that detail alone could prove disastrous for Trump’s side in Minnesota’s federal lawsuit, which requests a temporary restraining order to end Operation Metro Surge. Officials have described ICE’s presence as an “unprecedented surge of DHS agents into the state.”

“Trump could not have designed a better statement to convince Judge Menendez that Operation Metro Surge is meant to coerce policy changes,” posted Politico’s Kyle Cheney. “And the menacing ‘playing with fire’ is exactly the kind of statement (‘retribution is coming’) that worked against the administration in court earlier this week.”

The Supreme Court has ruled several times that states cannot be forced to enact federal policy and that the federal government cannot sway state policy, setting national precedent in rulings such as Printz v. United States (1997) and New York v. United States (1992).

In just a few short weeks, Operation Metro Surge has conducted militarized raids across Minnesota, terrorizing residents while carrying out what state officials have described as “dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional stops and arrests, all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.”

The federal presence has also claimed the lives of two U.S. citizens. In the last month, agents with ICE and Customs and Border Protection shot and killed two U.S. citizens: Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti and award-winning poet Renee Nicole Good.

In 2025, the agency killed 32 people—its deadliest year in more than two decades.

ICE may have provoked an international incident by attempting to enter the Ecuadorian Consulate in Minneapolis Tuesday.

At about 11 a.m., diplomatic staff had to block an ICE agent from entering the building, which is off limits to law enforcement without prior authorization from Ecuador under the Vienna Convention. Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry lodged a formal diplomatic complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador over the attempted entry “so that acts of this nature don’t happen again.”

In a video of the incident, consulate staff can be seen rushing to the building’s entrance after the agent opens the door. The staff informed him, “This is the Ecuadorean Consulate, you’re not allowed to enter.” In response, the ICE agent replied, “If you touch me, I’ll grab you.”

According to The New York Times, the Consulate building is clearly labeled with Ecuador’s national seal. In a statement, Ecuador’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Consulate staff immediately prevented the ICE official from entering the consular building, thereby guaranteeing the protection of the Ecuadorians who found themselves in the consular building in that moment, and activating emergency protocols issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Human Movement.”

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, detained by ICE agents last week along with his father, was a native of Ecuador along with his father, and the pair were pursuing asylum claims in the U.S. ICE agents allegedly used the child as bait to detain his family members.

The Vienna Convention clearly states that a country’s embassies and consulates are considered sovereign territory of that country, and protected by diplomatic immunity from unauthorized entry from the host nation. Tuesday’s incident is just more proof that ICE agents have no regard for the law, and see no checks on their power and authority.

The woman who filmed federal agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti still hasn’t been contacted by the government days later, only fanning accusations of a federal cover-up.

“Have you been contacted by anyone from the federal government?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Minnesota resident Stella Carlson, whose footage has been crucial in delegitimizing the Trump administration’s lies about Pretti. “FBI?”

“No, no, I have not. I do have a legal team now who are fielding much of that, and I am no longer accessible in those ways,” Carlson replied.

“I talked to your attorney this morning; she said she had not received any outreach from the FBI or anybody from the federal government,” Cooper said.

“I do not think they have my name yet,” said Carlson, a shocking oversight given that it’s been four days since the shooting. She then expressed that she had zero confidence in a federal investigation into Pretti’s killing.

“I have faith in various representatives throughout our country who are trying to do the right thing.… I have faith in our local government in Minnesota,” Carlson said. “But [the federal government is] trying to block that from happening. They wouldn’t even let the investigative team come to the crime scene. Their goal is to protect themselves and to spin stories.”

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Speaking to an eyewitness of a killing seems to be a very basic requirement in an investigation, and yet the federal government seems to have gone out of its way not to do it. Carlson isn’t the only Minnesotan who’s been alarmed by the federal government’s sparse, shady investigative protocol here.

“Feels like a cover-up to me.… One thing’s certainly true: The state government has the right to criminally charge anyone, including a federal agent, who commits a crime in our state,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told Democracy Now! on Tuesday. “But what the federal authorities seem to be doing in the three cases of shootings here in Minnesota is to say, ‘Yeah, we kind of know that you have the right to prosecute us, so what we’re going to do is frustrate your capability of prosecuting us by grabbing evidence, by spiriting people away out of the state, by allowing our agents to wear masks so they’re never accountable.’ This is the sort of tactic that they’re using.”

The man who attacked Representative Ilhan Omar by spraying an unknown substance appears to have been a big supporter of Donald Trump and MAGA. 

Anthony Kazmierczak, 55, followed multiple right-wing accounts on X, including Libs of TikTok, Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and Tim Pool. On Facebook, Kazmierczak had changed his profile picture to Trump multiple times and regularly criticized Democratic politicians like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (in addition to his attacks on Omar).

All of this seems to indicate that Kazmierczak’s attack on Omar at a town hall was premeditated, and fueled by his political sentiments. He was immediately tackled by security after spraying Omar, who refused to stop her town hall, telling the crowd, “We will continue. These f***ing a**holes are not going to get away with it!”

“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 at us,” Omar added. She continued to speak and take questions for about 30 minutes afterward. 

Trump has attacked Omar for several weeks, repeating racist tropes against her and the Somali American community, which has a large presence in Minnesota. On Tuesday, he repeated those slurs in Iowa, saying that Somalis “have to show that they can love our country. They have to be proud. Not like Ilhan Omar.… This wise guy, you know, she’s always talking about the Constitution—‘You know, provides me with the following. You know, the Constitution.’ She comes from a country that’s a disaster. It’s probably—it’s considered … it’s not even a country, OK? It barely has a government. I don’t think it does. They’re good at one thing: pirates. But they don’t do that anymore.”

The president bears responsibility for inciting these attacks on Omar, a four-term congresswoman. But he has a long history of refusing to take responsibility for his words and actions, and his initial response to the attack on Omar was to pile on.