Pictures of Alex Pretti sit in front of his Minneapolis home on Jan. 26, 2026. Pretti, an ICU nurse, died Jan. 25, after being shot multiple times during a brief altercation with Border Patrol agents in south Minneapolis. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined during a U.S. House hearing Tuesday to apologize to the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, the victims of fatal shootings by immigration officers in Minneapolis last month.

Top Trump administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, had said both Minneapolis residents engaged in “domestic terrorism.” Good was a poet and mother of three and Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse. 

ICE acting Director Todd Lyons demurred when asked by California Democrat Eric Swalwell if he would apologize for that characterization. 

“I’m not going to speak to any ongoing investigation,” Lyons said.

Lawmakers on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee grilled Lyons, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow during Tuesday’s hearing, following the fatal shootings of Good on Jan. 7 and Pretti on Jan. 24. The deportation campaign in Minneapolis began more than two months ago.

Following the shootings, Democrats have pushed for policy changes to the appropriations bill that funds the agency for fiscal year 2026, scrambling a bipartisan agreement on the measure. 

If lawmakers don’t reach a deal by Friday, funding for much of DHS will run out. Funding for immigration enforcement will remain due to provisions in Republicans’ tax cuts and spending law last year.

Scott called the thousands of protestors and legal observers in Minnesota “paid agitators.” There is no evidence of that. 

Noem, who Democrats are pushing to impeach, was not at the hearing. 

The chair of the committee, Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York, acknowledged that the country was at an “inflection point” and called the deaths of Good and Pretti “unacceptable and preventable.”

But he otherwise largely defended federal immigration officials and the Trump administration’s enforcement tactics. 

The top Democrat on the committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said the Trump administration was weaponizing DHS against Americans. 

Body cameras, masks and roving patrols

Democrats questioned Scott and Lyons on a handful of policy proposals that Democrats are pushing for in the DHS appropriations bill.

The Democrats’ proposals include mandating body cameras for immigration agents and requiring those officers to identify themselves and not wear masks.

Thompson asked Lyons how many body cameras ICE officers have. Noem earlier this month announced DHS would be sending body cameras to all ICE officers across the country. 

Lyons said about 3,000 ICE officers currently have body cameras with another 6,000 cameras on the way.

Scott said that about 10,000 Border Patrol agents have body cameras out of 20,000 agents. 

Democratic Rep. Tim Kennedy of New York asked Lyons if he would commit to instructing ICE agents to stop wearing face coverings and masks in enforcement actions. 

“No,” Lyons said. 

Kennedy then asked Lyons if he believed Noem should resign, given the deadly shootings of Good and Pretti. 

“I’m not going to comment on that,” Lyons said. 

GOP Rep. Michael McCaul, a former chair of the committee who is retiring next year, said some of the roving patrols should be kept at the southern border, rather than in residential areas. 

“I’ve called for de-escalation after the two deaths, the two shootings that took place,” McCaul said. “I believe that these roving patrols should be done at the border rather than in the major cities of the United States.”

Democrats are also calling for an end to those roving patrols in enforcement in the interior of the U.S.  

McCaul added that federal immigration agents “are not trained to effectuate crowd control.”

“They are trained to move in surgically, go in and remove these dangerous, violent criminals from the United States of America,” he said.

Judgment day, Klan invoked 

The hearing had a few heated exchanges between Democrats and the administration officials.

New Jersey Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver, who is facing federal charges after a clash with immigration officers at a detention facility in Newark where she tried to conduct an unannounced oversight visit, asked Lyons if he considered himself a religious person. 

Lyons said he did and McIver asked him how he thought “judgment day would work for you with so much blood on your hands.”

“I’m not going to entertain the question,” Lyons said.

She asked Lyons if he thought he was “going to hell.”

Garbarino quickly shut down her line of questioning. 

Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois criticized the officials before her, and called for ICE to be abolished.

“I have as much respect for you as I do for the last white men who put on masks to terrorize communities of color. I have no respect for the inheritors of the Klanhood and the slave patrol,” she said. “Those activities were criminal and so are yours.”

People whistle and film as federal agents block an alley near 35th Street and Chicago Avenue while they break a car window to detain a man and his young daughter Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

Less than an hour after the Saturday morning killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in south Minneapolis, conservative influencer Cam Higby took to social media with a sensational claim: Higby had “infiltrated” the group chats fueling local resistance to Operation Metro Surge.

On Monday, FBI director Kash Patel said he had “opened an investigation” into the chats. Many are said to be hosted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.

“You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts law enforcement in harm’s way,” Patel said in a podcast interview with Benny Johnson, another conservative influencer. Johnson’s title for the episode’s YouTube stream, “Kash Patel Announces FBI Crack-Down of Left-Wing Minnesota Terrorist Network LIVE: ‘Tim Walz Next…’,” left little to the imagination.

In response to emailed questions about the nature of its investigation, the FBI declined to comment. 

First Amendment lawyers and national security experts expressed deep skepticism that any charges stemming from it will stick, however. 

“As a general proposition, reporting on things you are observing and sharing those observations is absolutely legal,” Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota Law School, said in an interview.

A guide that Higby described as “the watered down opsec version” of a “TRAINING MANUAL for domestic terrorist patrols chasing ICE agents in Minneapolis” instructs observers to draw attention to suspected ICE activity using whistles and car horns — but specifically warns against impeding officers.

Kirtley said Patel’s statements to date have been too vague to support firm conclusions about what the FBI will actually investigate or what charges, if any, the United States Department of Justice would bring as a result. The sorts of loaded terms that influencers like Higby and President Trump himself have used to describe organizers’ activities — such as “conspiracy” or “insurrection” — are formal legal concepts that require certain standards to be met, she added.

Jason Marisam, a constitutional law professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, said any prosecution would likely need to pass a two-part test established in a nearly 60-year-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Brandenburg v. Ohio.

Brandenburg prohibits speech only if it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” such as violence against law enforcement officers, and “is likely to incite or produce such action,” according to a summary by Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. 

Brandenburg is “a very high bar,” Marisam said. Speech that only indirectly led to “lawless action,” such as coordinating a protest that later turned violent, would likely not meet it, he added.

Marisam said Brandenburg, incidentally, is the same standard that former special counsel Jack Smith would have needed to meet had his January 6th prosecution against President Trump gone to trial, Marisam added. That case was mooted after Trump won a second term and subsequently oversaw a campaign of professional retribution against the career prosecutors on Smith’s team. 

Marisam said narrowing or overturning Brandenburg has not yet been a priority for conservatives in the judiciary, despite self-evident benefits for Trump’s efforts to quell dissent and consolidate power. But he acknowledged that the “politics of free speech” can change depending on who’s in charge in Washington.

For instance, Trump supporters castigated what they perceived to be limits on free speech during the Biden years, but have remained silent in the face of a student’s deportation for writing an op-ed. 

Still, Patel’s apparent interest in Twin Cities observers’ encrypted chats is likely less the opening move of a well-thought-out legal strategy than an effort to discourage legally permissible activity, Marisam said.

“It seems to me that (Patel’s) announcement is meant to chill speech ahead of time,” he said.

In a blog post published Tuesday, Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, said federal prosecutors would likewise struggle to make hay out of Twin Cities observers’ use of the encrypted messaging apps themselves. 

Trump officials and right-wing pundits have pointed to Signal’s popularity within the observer networks as evidence that participants want to evade legal accountability for their actions. Signal uses end-to-end encryption, meaning messages sent on properly secured devices kept in their owners’ possession are effectively impossible for third parties to see. Signal itself can’t access messages or calls sent over the app, the company says, though messages on a user’s device can be read if it is hacked or stolen. (Or, if the wrong person is added to a Signal chat, as when senior national security figures in the Trump administration — including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — sent information about military operations to the editor of The Atlantic magazine after he’d been accidentally included.) 

Eddington, who works on homeland security and civil liberties issues for Cato, said the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ 1999 ruling in Bernstein v. United States Department of Justice established ordinary citizens’ rights to use encrypted channels for communication they wish to keep private. Government efforts to curtail encryption could impede individuals’ rights under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits “unreasonable search and seizure.”

Eddington cited a much earlier precedent that may well have informed the Constitution’s privacy protections, though its contemporary legal relevance is unclear. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other members of America’s founding generation used “codes and ciphers” to communicate before, during and after the Revolutionary War, Eddington wrote. 

“The use of encryption to keep government authorities from getting access to our private communications is literally as American as apple pie,” he wrote.

People gather around the south Minneapolis site where a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a woman on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump defended a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis Wednesday, while congressional Democrats universally condemned the action.

Video obtained by the Minnesota Reformer shows an ICE officer demanding the driver of a maroon SUV get out of the vehicle. As the vehicle begins to pull away, an officer fires three shots through the windshield and driver-side window. The video shows no apparent harm to the officer, who walked away from the vehicle shortly after the shooting. 

But Trump wrote on social media that “it is hard to believe he is alive.”

“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense,” Trump wrote.

Minnesota’s Democratic congressional delegation, and other Democrats in Washington, D.C., strongly condemned the incident and questioned the subsequent comments from the administration. 

“We need full transparency and an investigation of what happened, and I am deeply concerned that statements made by DHS do not appear to reflect video evidence and on-the-ground accounts,” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the state’s senior senator, said in a statement.  

A statement from several Minneapolis City Council members identified the victim as Renee Nicole Good, 37. A photo of the SUV shows several stuffed animals hanging out of the glove compartment.

Trump, GOP back officer

Congressional Republicans largely backed Trump’s version of events, calling the shooting self-defense and blaming Democrats for rhetoric they said inspired violence.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that the woman tried to run over the agent.

“One of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism,” McLaughlin said. “An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the victim a “domestic terrorist.” 

House Republican Whip Tom Emmer gave his support to the ICE officer.

“Our brave ICE agents put their lives on the line every day to protect our communities from dangerous criminals,” he said in a statement. “May God bless and protect them in their efforts. Shame on the elected officials who endanger these agents by spewing lies and hateful rhetoric.”

Dems call for investigation

Democrats on Capitol Hill denounced the attack and the administration’s response.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for the ICE officer who shot the woman to be criminally investigated. 

“There is no evidence that has been presented to justify this killing,” Jeffries, a New York Democrat, said in a statement. “Secretary Kristi Noem is a stone-cold liar and has zero credibility. The masked ICE agent who pulled the trigger should be criminally investigated to the full extent of the law for acting with depraved indifference to human life.”

Minnesota Democrats said the ongoing immigration enforcement campaign in the Twin Cities had heightened tensions.

“For weeks, Donald Trump has directed ICE and DHS agents to racially profile and arrest Minnesotans in their homes, their workplaces, and on our streets,” Minnesota Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum said in a statement, adding that more than 2,000 federal immigration agents are in the state. 

“Trump’s reckless and dangerous immigration policies do nothing to make us safer,” she continued. “Today in Minneapolis, these actions resulted in a masked federal agent fatally shooting a woman in the head.”

Democratic Sen. Tina Smith said the woman fatally shot by an ICE officer was a U.S. citizen. She called for ICE to leave Minnesota. 

Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-American woman elected to Congress and whose district includes the site of the shooting, said the woman was a legal observer, which is a neutral third party who attends protests or other public demonstrations to observe and record law enforcement actions towards protesters.

“ICE’s actions today were unconscionable and reprehensible,” Omar said.

DHS practices, budget questioned

DHS received billions for immigration enforcement in last year’s tax and spending cuts package passed by congressional Republicans. The funding can be used for hiring new ICE officers and detention and removal of immigrants. 

On Jan. 3, ICE announced it hired 12,000 new officers, doubling from 10,000 agents to 22,000.

A top Senate Democratic appropriator, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, wrote on social media that “Democrats cannot vote for a DHS budget that doesn’t restrain the growing lawlessness of this agency.” 

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said in a statement that he was concerned the aggressive DHS practices will lead to more tragedies. 

“All evidence indicates that hiring standards have been lowered, training is inadequate, and internal controls are insufficient,” he said. “These conditions have allowed agents to operate without proper oversight, and, in some cases, unlawfully.” 

Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego also criticized the hiring practices of ICE, specifically calling out White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a lead architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.  

“What happened is a disgrace and we need an investigation immediately,” Gallego said on social media. “It’s clear that that agent didn’t have the proper training, and that’s because Stephen Miller is going full speed ahead to hire as many agents as possible.”

Day care investigation

The federal immigration operation in Minneapolis began last month but intensified this week after a right-wing influencer reported day care centers run by members of the Somali community as fraudulent. 

In response, the Trump administration directed states to provide “justification” that federal child care funds they receive are spent on “legitimate” providers and Noem has zeroed in on the city, which has a large Somali community, for immigration enforcement. 

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a Wednesday hearing on the issue of fraud in Minnesota.