WASHINGTON — After Donald Trump and his top aides rushed to portray Alex Pretti as a “gunman,” “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin” in the hours after he was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents on Saturday, the president shuttled back and forth between the Oval Office and his adjacent private dining room, where he watched news coverage of the incident and fielded calls from concerned aides, lawmakers and other allies, according to two senior administration officials.
Trump already had posted an image of Pretti’s legally permitted Sig Sauer P320, along with a message referring to Pretti as a “gunman” whose firearm was “loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go.”
But as he absorbed clips of the fatal confrontation, and the news reports surrounding it, Trump grew increasingly disturbed by what he saw, according to one of the senior administration officials.
“He doesn’t like chaos on his watch,” the official said.
If Trump wasn’t ready to change the tactics, he was starting to understand that he needed to change the optics.
By Sunday night, Trump decided to hit the reset button while preserving the mass-deportation operation he promised to execute during his 2024 presidential campaign. After all, in the signature tax and spending legislation of his second term, Trump and Congress had provided an additional $170 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, including tens of billions of dollars for detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants and billions more for recruiting federal agents.
This account of how Trump came to the conclusion that he needed to switch the script — dominated by the shooting deaths of two American citizens, the fast-declining popularity of his deportation tactics and calls for the ouster of prominent administration officials — was told to NBC News by 15 sources, many of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly.
It is hard to overstate how much is at stake for Trump, and for his Republican Party, both in terms of the substantive goal of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and the politics of appealing to swing voters before the midterms. It is inconceivable to some of his allies that he would alter the underlying aim of the mission.
“The reality is, you can’t stop what you’re doing,” said a former White House official. “This is the whole point of ICE existing in these cities, and Minnesota is not going to be the last state that ICE goes to. Oregon was next. We were not done. We need to keep going.”
On Monday, Trump executed a bureaucratic face-lift by removing confrontational Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino from the scene in Minneapolis, subbing in border czar Tom Homan — widely viewed as more placative — and effectively sidelining Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Trump also spoke by phone with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Democrats he has harshly criticized in the past, about turning down the temperature.
While those moves may assuage establishment Republicans in Congress — and political independents distressed by the violence in Minnesota — they do not come without a cost for Trump among the MAGA base voters who did not want to see any sign of retreat from the hard-core immigration crackdown, said one Republican strategist with ties to the White House.
“The conservative base is pissed” about what they see as signs of weakness in his new approach in Minnesota, the strategist said, arguing that Trump is “demoralizing” voters he needs to turn out for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. At the same time, Trump’s aides have broken into ugly rounds of finger-pointing over the botched initial response to the shooting, blaming one another in private conversations with reporters.
A botched response
When federal agents encountered Pretti on a street in Minneapolis on Saturday morning, Washington, D.C., was bracing for a major snowstorm. Trump had recently returned from Switzerland, where he had agreed to compromise on his plans to take Greenland.
Just after 9 a.m. in Minneapolis, Border Patrol agents killed Pretti.“Shots fired in Minneapolis,” Bovino alerted on a text-message chain with top White House and DHS officials about five minutes later, at 10:10 a.m. in Washington, according to the senior administration official. Within the hour, Noem spoke to Trump about the shooting.
By 11 a.m. ET, Walz had talked with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and he posted to X his demand that Trump withdraw “thousands of violent, untrained officers” from his state. Despite the heated rhetoric, Walz and Wiles had a productive first conversation. She would become a key intermediary between Walz and Trump, working over the weekend to lay groundwork for the president and governor to speak directly.
Seven minutes after Walz’s tweet, at 11:10 a.m., DHS launched its public-relations campaign, telling reporters on “background,” without naming a particular official, that the “suspect had a firearm with two magazines — situation evolving.” The agency then shared a photo of a handgun, which it said was taken from the victim, sitting on a car seat. The implication from DHS was that Pretti had been a threat to federal agents.
What unfolded in the aftermath would lead to perhaps the most intense interagency blame-casting of Trump’s second term.
At 11:30 a.m., the first draft of a public statement circulated among top officials at the White House and DHS, and these officials negotiated for nearly an hour over the exact wording of the information they would release to the public.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and longtime Trump adviser who has broad authority over immigration enforcement — including a supervisory role over Noem and her DHS team — later said that officials in Washington worked from information provided by Customs and Border Protection, the agency that encompasses the Border Patrol, which is also part of DHS.
“The initial statement was based on reports from CBP from a very chaotic scene on the ground. That’s precisely why an investigation is underway and DHS will let the facts lead the investigation,” a DHS spokesperson said.
But when DHS’s official X account tweeted the statement at 12:31 p.m., not all of the key players at the White House had signed off on it yet, according to the senior administration official. Some aides realized it was out only when they looked up at the TV and saw it on Fox News.
The statement said that Pretti, who had not been identified publicly by name, “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” It accused him of having “violently resisted” being disarmed and asserted that an agent, “fearing for his life” fired “defensive shots.”
In a Minneapolis news conference that began shortly thereafter, state and local officials confirmed that Pretti had a gun in his possession when he was confronted by Border Patrol agents and noted that he had a permit to carry it.
His shooting followed a Jan. 7 incident in which Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minnesota woman, was killed by a federal agent in her car. Witness videos show that at the moment the federal officer fired his first shot into the front of Good’s SUV, its wheels were directed away from him. His legs appeared to be clear of the car. The second and third shots into the open driver’s side window came as the car was moving.
Her death became an instant partisan flashpoint, with some of Trump’s supporters and officials calling her a “domestic terrorist“ and arguing that she endangered the agent by driving at him, and the president’s critics insisting that the agent had no reason to fear for his safety.
After first blaming Good for driving at the agent — inaccurately claiming that she “ran him over” in an interview with The New York Times — Trump later called the incident a “tragedy.”
On Saturday, the administration was racing to define another crisis. Officials leaned on Bovino’s version of events. Miller took on the role of chief spokesperson for the White House position, sending three tweets between 1:22 p.m and 1:43 p.m. in which he called Pretti “a domestic terrorist” who tried “to assassinate federal law enforcement,” a “would-be assassin” and “an assassin.”
Trump followed suit at 2:06 p.m., posting the picture of Pretti’s firearm with the message referring to him as a “gunman.”
Bovino, who had been appointed to the new role as commander-at-large last year and became the face of aggressive immigration enforcement operations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, held a news conference in which he repeated the talking points DHS used in its initial statement. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” he said.
Video clips of the shooting that contradicted the administration’s version of the deadly altercation were already whipping across social media platforms. But officials including Vice President JD Vance reposted Trump’s “gunman” statement, and Noem, at an early evening news conference on the impending snowstorm, repeated the allegation that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist.”
“When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism,” she said. Noem, a noted gun enthusiast, suggested, as others in the administration did, that the possession of a firearm and ammunition made Pretti an inherent threat to law enforcement officers.
Throughout the day, Second Amendment advocates, many of them Republicans and Trump supporters, bristled at the notion that a man with a permit to carry his weapon in public should be shot for doing so.
Inside the White House, Trump, an inveterate consumer of television news, assessed the images on his screen.
“He’s the smartest guy I know, and he saw it wasn’t playing well,” said a GOP lawmaker who spoke to Trump on Saturday.
In Minneapolis, Trump had hoped to win the argument over so-called sanctuary cities, where municipal officials refuse to cooperate fully — or at all — with federal immigration enforcement agents, and to highlight allegations that Somali-Americans are at the heart of a massive scheme to defraud the federal government of daycare subsidies. Instead, those aims were being frustrated by weeks of videos of federal officers strong-arming civilians, culminating in Saturday’s killing of Pretti.
“He knows the sanctuary city debate is a good one,” the lawmaker said. “But the visuals were not playing well. He understands TV. … He saw it for himself.”
Still, as guests gathered at the White House that same night for a private black-tie screening of the first lady’s new documentary, “MELANIA” — Queen Rania of Jordan and Apple CEO Tim Cook among them — there was no public indication from Trump that he was displeased with the conduct of Border Patrol or anyone else in his administration.
Time for a change
On Sunday morning, administration officials fanned out on public affairs programs, giving Trump and White House aides — as well as the American public — an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of their narrative.
Bovino addressed the rights of gun owners in the context of federal law enforcement on CNN, adopting a line of argument that Trump, the survivor of a 2024 assassination attempt, has echoed in the days since.
“What I’m saying is we respect that Second Amendment right, but those rights don’t — those rights don’t count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers, and most especially when you mean to do that beforehand,” he said, sparking a new round of criticism from gun rights advocates. He offered no evidence that Pretti, who never drew his weapon, intended to harm — much less shoot — federal agents.
In mirror comments on ABC News and Fox News, respectively, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and FBI Director Kash Patel blamed Pretti for carrying his gun in a place where federal agents were confronted by protesters.
“You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want,” Patel said. “It’s that simple. You don’t have that right to break the law and incite violence.” He also faced a backlash over his seeming disregard for the Second Amendment and over the conflict with his past support for people bringing guns to protests.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said that he did not know if Pretti had been disarmed before he was shot.
Behind the scenes, Wiles expressed her displeasure with the way DHS was handling the messaging, and she privately urged Trump to send Homan to Minneapolis, according to a person familiar with her discussions. Trump also fielded calls Sunday from allies who worried that the situation was spiraling out of control. Some of them also suggested that he send Homan, who had been honored by President Barack Obama for his work on immigration, to Minneapolis.
By Sunday night, Trump had signaled to aides that he was ready to change his lineup and his public posture, and White House staff set a news briefing for Monday.At the same time, a senior administration official told NBC News, Trump planned to keep his immigration enforcement policy intact and continued to have discussions with advisers about invoking the Insurrection Act in order to deploy the military to Minneapolis.
New team, same policy
On Monday morning, Trump connected with Homan by phone, and Homan offered to go to Minneapolis to take over the operations there. He said he believed he could negotiate with Democratic officials to secure greater cooperation in locating and removing undocumented immigrants with criminal backgrounds. They then met in person Monday afternoon as well, according to a White House official with knowledge of the meeting.
With the path already laid out by Trump’s allies and aides, the president said that dispatching Homan was a “great” idea and announced the move publicly on social media. Bovino was stripped of his commander-at-large title and sent back to the El Centro, California, border region, where he had worked before being elevated to carry out interior operations.
Later that morning, Trump spoke with Walz for the first time since the shooting, describing their discussion as a “good call” and saying they “seemed to be on a similar wavelength” — a noticeable shift in tone toward the governor. At a news briefing Monday afternoon, press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to defend the way in which Noem and Miller attacked Pretti on Saturday, when they accused him of seeking to assassinate federal agents.
“I have not heard the president characterize Mr. Pretti in that way,” Leavitt said.
And by Monday night, after Homan had arrived in Minneapolis, Noem and Corey Lewandowski, her most influential adviser and a former Trump campaign manager, met with the president at the White House, according to two White House officials and a DHS official. The DHS official described that meeting as “positive.”
It wasn’t until Tuesday around noon — more than three days after Pretti’s death — that Trump first appeared on camera to address the situation in Minneapolis and his decision to change his leadership team.
He told reporters that he did not believe that Pretti intended to assassinate anyone, but reiterated his view that “you can’t have guns” in a situation like the one Pretti was in.
He also said Noem would remain in her position, even as Democrats — joined later by two Republican senators — called for her immediate ouster. Most notably, he underscored a shift in tone, if not tactics, in Minnesota, where Homan met with Walz and Frey on Tuesday.
“We’re going to de-escalate a little bit,” Trump said.
On Tuesday night, there was more trouble in Minneapolis. A man confronted Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., at a town hall. He was arrested after trying to spray her with what a preliminary report later showed to to be apple cider vinegar, according to Omar’s spokesperson.
Contacted after the attack, Trump told an ABC News reporter he hadn’t yet seen video of the incident but he nevertheless blamed Omar, whom he frequently targets.
“She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her,” Trump said.