Chapter 1: What happened during the recent federal agent shooting in Minneapolis?
Renee Good's last words, that's fine, dude, I'm not mad at you, to ICE agents, one of whom killed her. Alex Preddy's last words, according to bystanders, are you okay, to a woman he tried to shield from Border Patrol agents. After their deaths, federal officials painted the two Minnesota protesters as radicals.
This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.
If you look at what the definition of domestic terrorism is, it completely fits the situation on the ground.
The feds, in part because they spoke before investigations even began, have lost control of their narrative. President Trump seems to have copped on. He said today he's sending his border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis and that Homan will report directly to him.
Homan famously dislikes Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who has, along with Kristi Noem, become the public face of the catastrophe in Minneapolis. Coming up on Today Explained, ice, lies, and videotape.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, figure skating legend Tara Lipinski joins us to talk about the upcoming Winter Olympics, whether this will be the comeback year for U.S.
women's figure skating, and what she learned about herself after appearing on the reality show The Traitors.
Plus, we're talking about the NWSL's high-impact player rule, a.k.a.
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Chapter 2: How did federal officials respond to the deaths of the civilians?
the Rodman rule, and why the Players Union is against it.
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This is Today Explained.
My name is J. Patrick Kulikin. I'm the editor-in-chief of Minnesota Reformer, which is a small nonprofit online news outlet covering politics and policy in Minnesota. What's it been like running cover to this story? It's been exhausting and exhilarating and at times depressing and debilitating.
I've never quite encountered a story like this with so many moving pieces and it's evolving so quickly and then bam, you get hit with something new that is catastrophic and causes you to really shift focus. I was watching video, you know, here in D.C. of what happened this weekend and of the reaction afterward. And, you know, you see people being really angry, really heartbroken.
It feels like right now that the people are being packed in the corner because we are being invaded on our state. I'm 70 years old. Angry. Stop. Look out. You see people being really—I don't know, you see people being really brave, and I wonder which of those emotions, which of the emotions do you think is surfacing the most right now? I think it's bravery. You know, you see people—
doing things that I don't think they expected of themselves. I don't think they knew that this is something they could do. And that so much of it is around the togetherness of it, that we're kind of all in it together. And I think that can fuel people's courage there.
We see parents organizing group chats, working in shifts to protect families at daycares and school drop-offs.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of President Trump's involvement in the Minneapolis situation?
Neighborhoods were collectively alerting each other to the presence of ICE with honks and whistles. I want to show you what struck me the most when we first got out onto the scene is this effort that has now popped up of neighbors and volunteers coming together.
But I also don't want to minimize the impact of Saturday's killing in particular. I talked to a volunteer yesterday who used the word demoralized. And that's certainly understandable and obviously frightening, too.
It takes considerable physical courage to actually go out and do this because it's become so unpredictable what could happen, as we've seen in two weeks, as Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara pointed out on some Sunday shows yesterday.
People have had enough. This is the third shooting now in less than three weeks. The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn't shoot anyone.
Chapter 4: What are the implications of the Minneapolis Police Department's relationship with federal agents?
Let's talk about Alex Preddy and what happened this weekend. You've seen the video. Most of us, I would imagine, have seen the video. What do we know about why Alex Preddy was shot? Well, he appears to have been recording federal agents with his phone, like has become common. Everybody's doing it. And then he seems to try to intervene after a woman was pushed down by a federal agent.
And then he gets into this scuffle with probably a half dozen federal agents. He is a law-abiding concealed carry permit holder who was armed. And in this scuffle, they disarm him. And if you watch the video in very slow motion, you can see he's then shot after he's disarmed, despite the accounts of the federal officials that we heard almost immediately afterward. The Constitution still!
Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said Preti was part of a riot. He was obstructing law enforcement. During this operation, an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol agents with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. The agents attempted to disarm the individual, but he violently resisted. What does the evidence show? There's no evidence of that.
There's also been a kind of false impression that we're talking about protests. And I mean, it's not exactly wrong, but these people are actually what they prefer to be called as observers. And so the idea that there was some sort of a riot going on is not true. They are just alerting people to the presence of federal officials, which they're allowed to do.
They were recording and observing, which they're allowed to do. It turns out that the person they were looking for, the State Department of Corrections put out a statement saying that apparently this guy was not the heinous criminal they were claiming. And Furthermore, Bovino actually seemed to walk back his contention yesterday when he gave a much softer line.
I wasn't there wrestling him myself, so I'm not going to speculate. I'm going to wait for that investigation to come. Don't interrupt me. I'm going to wait.
He said, we're going to wait and find out what happens with the investigation. But that's sort of a little, seems disingenuous a day after you call the, you say that the person was trying to engage in a massacre. Stephen Miller called him an assassin. Yeah. And the video is pretty clear that none of those things are true.
And I think that's absolutely destroying the administration's credibility, not just with the people you would expect that from, progressives and Democrats, but also some Republicans and certainly independents. There is, as you pointed out, a very interesting dynamic right now in Minneapolis where you have federal officers, local police, and the local police do not seem to trust the feds.
So the question becomes, who is investigating what happened on Saturday? Who has the evidence? Who is trying to run down what happened here?
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Chapter 5: What events led to the call for defunding or abolishing ICE?
So it's an interesting turn of events on that front. I want to ask you about this statement that was signed by about 60, as I understand it, 60 CEOs.
Chapter 6: How are Democrats and Republicans reacting to the situation with ICE?
Minnesota has a lot of big companies, right? State is an economic powerhouse in some ways. And so there was a statement sent out kind of like calling for calm, even as people had been asking, like, where are the business leaders? Why are they not saying anything? Do you feel like that statement does anything here? Do you feel like that statement comes down on one side or the other?
I think it was carefully crafted to be neutral and it was taken by Democrats, including even the Democratic Farber Labor Party chair, as a betrayal because there's no neutrality in this situation. But I think that it is an important signal to the Trump administration that they should start looking for a way out. You're right, though, they had been completely silent.
We published a story a couple weeks ago, 10 days ago, making that very point. We called a bunch of these corporations and the lobby group that represents the biggest companies, and they didn't even get back to us. I think they were bruised by the George Floyd experience, where many of them made robust statements in support of DEI and racial equity.
And of course, there was a backlash to that and then a backlash to the backlash. And so I think they chose silence. And at a certain point, that became untenable. So it's one of the signals to me that there's some cracks in the Trump armor. J. Patrick Kulikin is editor-in-chief of the Minnesota Reformer.
And speaking of cracks, President Trump said on Truth Social this afternoon that Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz called him and they seem to be, quote, on a similar wavelength. Coming up, the Senate votes this week on whether to fund the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and Border Patrol. And some Democrats say they're going to shut the government down again.
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