Good morning. The government may avoid a partial shutdown. President Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, discussed a deal yesterday. And the Department of Homeland Security is facing a crisis after the killing of Alex Pretti. I’ll start with that.
Second thoughts?The federal government’s response to the killing of Alex Pretti has come in two phases. First there were the justifications. Then came the recriminations. Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said the two agents involved in the shooting had been placed on leave. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top aides, said they “may not have been following” protocol before they shot Pretti, who was on the ground, restrained and disarmed. Is it a sign that the administration is reconsidering what it’s doing in Minneapolis? In the White HouseTrump, my colleagues who cover the White House reported, came to realize over the weekend that he had a big problem on his hands. His usual strategy of blustering his way through a crisis — or creating diversions — could not overcome the optics of a second American dead at the hands of federal agents during the same operation. The government had said Pretti attacked the federal agents, that he was an “assassin,” a “terrorist.” But videos directly contradict this idea, and Trump could see it plain. “Nobody understands TV better than him,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told The Times. The videos led to a change in Trump’s approach. He sent Tom Homan, his border czar, to Minneapolis and ordered Gregory Bovino, the aggressive Border Patrol official who was directing operations there, to leave. (“Bovino is pretty good, but he’s a pretty out-there kind of guy,” Trump told Fox News. “Maybe it wasn’t good here.”) He softened his language about the shooting and spoke with Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, whom he had falsely accused of inciting violent protests.
In the statesDemocratic lawmakers are “redoubling their efforts to restrict and challenge federal immigration tactics in their states,” reported David Chen, who covers state legislatures. He described new bills put forward in Colorado, Delaware and California to hamper the administration’s deportation efforts. The measures would let people sue federal agents for civil rights violations, for instance, or prevent commercial airlines from getting tax exemptions on the jet fuel they use to transport migrants detained by ICE without warrants and due process. A bill in Washington State would keep federal agents out of day care centers, hospitals and election sites without a warrant or a court order. And in Maryland, David reports, one lawmaker wants to bar ICE agents recruited by the Trump administration from working at any of the state’s law enforcement agencies. “We are starting to see legislators who, last session, were afraid of being a thorn in the side of an ascendant Trump administration — they were so afraid of poking the bear,” an immigration policy advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union said. “The tide is now turning, and maybe they feel that they’ve got nothing to lose.” Legislators in states controlled by Republicans, David found, are going in the opposite direction. In South Carolina, a new bill would require county sheriffs to work with ICE. In Tennessee, a proposal would force the government to verify the legal status of residents seeking public assistance and to verify the immigration status of schoolchildren, despite a decades-old Supreme Court ruling that found schools cannot do that. On the HillThe unrest in Minneapolis has also emerged as a sticking point in the latest congressional budget battle. Senate Democrats don’t want to bankroll Trump’s aggressive immigration operations, so they’re threatening a partial shutdown — much of the government runs out of money early Saturday morning — unless Republicans agree to significant changes at the Department of Homeland Security. They want to regulate the behavior of the agency’s officers. And they want to add restrictions to the no-strings-attached slush fund the Republican Congress delivered to ICE last year, which made it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency. Democrats at the time warned that the money — $75 billion — would mean growth for the agency, and no checks on its processes. The Democrats can’t act on any of it alone, though, as my colleague Michael Gold reported. Any changes to the spending measure that keeps the government open would require the cooperation of enough Republicans to allow it to pass. Moving forwardAlthough some members of the Trump administration and the political coalition behind it may have second thoughts about the tactics in Minneapolis, the overall strategy there is not in doubt. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, announced yesterday afternoon that she was “on the ground in Minneapolis” and said that federal agents had arrested 16 “rioters” who had been “resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents.” The president was also quick to dismiss the attack on Ilhan Omar, the Muslim American member of Congress from Minnesota, after someone attacked her with a brownish liquid smelling of vinegar at a town-hall event on Tuesday night. Trump, who for years has bashed Omar, a Democrat, said she should be deported and backed a baseless conspiracy theory that she had married her brother to commit immigration fraud. (Annie Karni, our congressional reporter, explains the Trump-Omar history here.) Omar “probably had herself sprayed, knowing her,” he told ABC News. And Trump seemed for a moment to have given Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, a slap on the wrist: With Homan in Minneapolis reporting directly to him, she appeared out of the chain of command. But he also had a two-hour meeting in the Oval Office with her on Monday evening, attended by her closest aide, Corey Lewandowski, an on-again, off-again member of the president’s orbit. Afterward, Trump had a message for reporters: “I think she’s doing a very good job,” he said. For more: In the video below, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a former Marine infantryman who covers guns and gun culture, looks at the battlefield weapons that agents are using in immigration arrests. Click to watch:
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