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As federal immigration tactics face mounting legal and political scrutiny after a U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot a Minneapolis man over the weekend, Donald Trump announced Monday he was dispatching his border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota.
Until now, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino has overseen the federal government’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. But as the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security faces widespread criticism for its aggressive tactics since it launched Operation Metro Surge in December, Trump signaled Monday that he could be shifting strategy as he deploys Homan to the region.
“He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there,” Trump said of Homan on TruthSocial. “Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me.”
Trump’s deployment of Homan comes as a federal judge hears arguments Monday on whether to temporarily halt the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Democratic senators plan to oppose a funding bill for DHS, raising the possibility of a partial government shutdown, and a small but growing number of Republicans have joined Democratic calls for a thorough investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti
The Department of Homeland Security said Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse, approached federal officers on the street Saturday morning with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun and “violently resisted” when officers tried to disarm him. But cellphone videos recorded by eye witnesses contradict that account.
According to videos taken on the scene, Pretti was holding a phone, not a handgun, when he stepped in front of a federal agent who was targeting a woman with pepper spray. Federal agents pulled him to the ground and shot him.
Pretti is the second U.S. citizen in Minneapolis to be killed by immigration officers this month. On Jan. 7, Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother, was shot in the head by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem raised criticism this weekend when she said that her agency would lead the investigation into Pretti’s killing.
After federal officials denied Minnesota state investigators access to the shooting scene in South Minneapolis, local and state officials in Minnesota accused DHS of mishandling evidence. Late Saturday, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension asked a federal court to block Homeland Security and Justice Department officials from destroying or concealing evidence.
It is not immediately clear how Bovino’s role could change as Homan arrives in Minneapolis.
Noem, who has backed Bovino’s aggressive tactics, said Monday it was “good news” that Homan was going to Minneapolis.
“I have worked closely with Tom over the last year and he has been a major asset to our team,” Noem wrote on X. Homan’s “experience and insight,” she said, would “help us to remove even more public safety threats and violent criminal illegal aliens” off Minneapolis streets.
But some Democrats in Minnesota oppose sending Homan to Minnesota. Minneapolis City Council member Soren Stevenson said the move would only aggravate tension.
“They are losing the battle in people’s minds,” Stevenson told CNN, noting that people could see video evidence contradict federal accounts of border patrol agents’ actions.
“They’re losing this narrative battle, and so he’s sending in his top guard,” Stevenson added. “And really, it’s escalating, because we just want to be left alone. The chaos in our community is coming from ICE. It’s coming from this invasion that we’re under … and it’s got to stop.”
In a short interview with The Wall Street Journal Sunday, Trump criticized Pretti for carrying a gun during protest activity.
“I don’t like any shooting. I don’t like it,” Trump said. “But I don’t like it when somebody goes into a protest and he’s got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also. That doesn’t play good either.”
The President declined to comment on whether the agent who shot Pretti had done the right thing. “We’re looking,” Trump said when pressed. “We’re reviewing everything and will come out with a determination.”
Democratic officials, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, have called on federal immigration officers to leave Minneapolis. On Sunday, Trump suggested they could withdraw, but he did not give a timeline.
“At some point we will leave,” the president said. “They’ve done a phenomenal job.”
MINNEAPOLIS — A federal judge will hear arguments Monday on whether she should at least temporarily halt the immigration crackdown in Minnesota that has led to the fatal shootings of two people by government officers.
The state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul sued the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month, five days after Renee Good was shot by an Immigration and Customs officer. The shooting of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol officer on Saturday has only added urgency to the case.
On Monday, President Trump said he is sending border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota. The president’s statement comes after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, who had become the public face of the administration’s crackdown, answered questions at news conferences over the weekend about Pretti’s shooting. Trump posted on social media that Homan will report directly to him.
Since the original court filing, the state and cities have substantially added to their original request in an effort to restore the order that existed before the Trump administration launched Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota on Dec. 1.
Democratic Minnesota Atty. Gen. Keith Ellison said he plans to attend.
The lawsuit asks U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez to order a reduction in the number of federal law enforcement officers and agents in Minnesota back to the level before the surge and to limit the scope of the enforcement operation.
Justice Department attorneys have called the lawsuit “legally frivolous” and said “Minnesota wants a veto over federal law enforcement.” They asked the judge to reject the request or to at least stay her order pending an anticipated appeal.
Ellison said during a news conference Sunday that the lawsuit is needed because of “the unprecedented nature of this surge. It is a novel abuse of the Constitution that we’re looking at right now. No one can remember a time when we’ve seen something like this.”
It is unclear when the judge might rule.
The case has implications for other states that have been or could become targets of ramped-up federal immigration enforcement operations. Attorneys general from 19 states plus the District of Columbia, led by California, filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Minnesota.
“If left unchecked, the federal government will no doubt be emboldened to continue its unlawful conduct in Minnesota and to repeat it elsewhere,” the attorneys general wrote.
Menendez ruled in a separate case on Jan. 16 that federal officers in Minnesota can’t detain or tear gas peaceful protesters who aren’t obstructing authorities, including people who follow and observe agents.
An appeals court temporarily suspended that ruling three days before Saturday’s shooting. But the plaintiffs in that case, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, asked the appeals court late Saturday for an emergency order lifting the stay in light of Pretti’s killing. The Justice Department argued in a reply filed Sunday that the stay should remain in place, calling the injunction unworkable and overly broad.
In yet another case, a different federal judge, Eric Tostrud, issued an order late Saturday blocking the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence” related to Saturday’s shooting. Ellison and Hennepin County Atty. Mary Moriarty asked for the order to try to preserve evidence collected by federal officials that state authorities have not yet been able to inspect. A hearing in that case is scheduled for Monday afternoon in federal court in St. Paul.
“The fact that anyone would ever think that an agent of the federal government might even think about doing such a thing was completely unforeseeable only a few weeks ago,” Ellison told reporters. “But now, this is what we have to do.”
George Skelton and Michael Wilner cover the insights, legislation, players and politics you need to know in 2024. In your inbox Monday and Thursday mornings.
SACRAMENTO — When a California governor goes to Europe and lectures world leaders that they must “grow a spine” and “stand tall” against the American president, I wince.
Not that they shouldn’t, nor that President Trump doesn’t deserve almost any nasty thing said about him. It just seems a tad arrogant.
A world stage in the Swiss Alps is not the proper place for a state governor to be scolding leaders of foreign nations about how they should deal with the U.S. president, no matter how despicably Trump behaves.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is merely the top elected official of one state, even if he can boast that it’s the fourth- or fifth-largest economy in the world. It still doesn’t have a seat at the United Nations or an awesome military that is the heart of NATO and the Western alliance.
Contrary to hackneyed bragging points, California is not a “nation state.” We’re a state — highly populated, but one of 50.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Newsom was like the lightweight boxer trying to punch far above his class.
And that’s fine for here in the U.S. This is the arena where it belongs.
One can argue that Newsom overdoes it, reaching for all the national exposure he can grab and not focusing enough on the job Californians hired him for at the state Capitol. But there’s no disputing his political success nationally. He’s leading the early polls of potential contenders for the presidential nomination.
But that was probably of little concern for the foreign leaders and other global elites attending the prestigious annual World Economic Forum.
Newsom was given two speaking slots, presumably to inform international movers and shakers about California’s golden investment opportunities. But after arriving, he began blathering about the evil American president, Trump’s threats to hike tariffs and seize Greenland and how European leaders are allegedly cowering before him.
The governor soon after was disinvited to speak at one event, a series of interviews hosted by Fortune magazine at USA House, the Trump administration headquarters.
Newsom blamed Trump for blocking his participation, accusing White House staffers of pressuring the event sponsors.
Well, duh! You can’t shoot spit wads like a little kid at a big meanie and not expect some to be shot back.
“No one in Davos knows who third-rate governor Newscum is or why he is frolicking around Switzerland instead of fixing the problems he created in California,” asserted White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly, using the classless president’s oft-repeated derogatory name for the governor.
Whatever. Snatching Newsom’s mic was probably the right decision. Davos delegates didn’t need to hear a political stump speech attacking the American president or be berated by a governor for also not beating up on him.
This was some of the fiery, expletive-laced stuff the governor had been telling reporters, referring to European leaders:
“Wake up! Where the hell has everybody been? Stop this bullshit diplomacy of sort of niceties. … Have some spine, some goddamn balls ….
“The Europeans should decide for themselves what to do, but one thing they can’t do is what they’ve been doing. … And it’s embarrassing. Just, I can’t take this complicity, people rolling over. I should have brought a bunch of knee pads for all the world leaders. … I mean, it’s just pathetic.
“And I hope people understand how pathetic they look on the world stage.”
The leaders of Canada and France demonstrated how to make the same point — but with dignity — about standing firm against bullying.
French President Emanuel Macron said, “We do prefer respect to bullies. And we do prefer rule of law to brutality.”
Newsom was allowed to keep one speaking slot: an interview on the forum’s main stage with Ben Smith, editor in chief of the news outfit Semafor.
“Is it surprising the Trump administration didn’t like my commentary and wanted to make sure that I was not allowed to speak? No,” Newsom said. “It’s consistent with … their authoritarian tendencies.”
There’s something distasteful — perhaps even unpatriotic — about an elected American official, regardless of party, vilifying a U.S. president when among allied leaders abroad. Even if it is the dreadful Trump.
But American politics has changed greatly for the worse in recent years, as evidenced by the Newsom-Trump spitball flinging.
California Gov. George Deukmejian spoke at the 1989 Davos forum and was a model of civil diplomacy, promoting the state’s trade and investment opportunities and laying off demagoguery.
Of course, Deukmejian and President Bush were both Republicans. So the Duke didn’t assail the president, not that he would have anyway. He had too much respect for the presidential institution when traveling abroad.
But unlike today’s top elected Republicans, Deukmejian didn’t shy away from giving the president advice. At Davos, the governor urged Bush not to renege on his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge that got him elected. To reduce the federal deficit, cut spending, the governor cautioned.
Bush ignored such advice and raised taxes — and lost his 1992 reelection bid to Democrat Bill Clinton.
Clinton’s campaign motto is still a classic: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Newsom needs to pick up on that. Or at least work it into his anti-Trump rant.
President Trump has an army of bootlickers that seems to stretch to the sunset. Many of them creep around on social media and almost certainly legions of them come from bot accounts on X.
Then there’s Bill Essayli. When it comes to saying anything to please a president with autocratic dreams, the former Assembly member is a bootlicking All-Star.
Att. Gen. Pam Bondi appointed him as the top prosecutor for the Central District of California in April with the explicit mandate to do Donald J. Trump’s will. His record so far has been unsurprisingly embarrassing and outlandish.
The guy can’t even call himself acting U.S. attorney anymore after a judge ruled in October he was “not lawfully serving” in the position since he was never formally appointed in the first place. So you’d think Essayli would hear the music and go back to being an inconsequential California legislator, but no! If there’s one thing Trumpworld has shown, it’s that once you’ve knelt to offer the Dear Leader a lick-and-shine, you better keep it up until your tongue’s as dry as Death Valley.
Which leads us to this weekend. And Essayli’s bootlicking-gone-wrong.
On Saturday morning, Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti after they gang-tackled him. He had tried to help a woman shoved to the ground by a federal immigration officer; an officer maced him and he soon collapsed — and shortly after, was dead. A Department of Homeland Security social media post justified what happened by saying Pretti seemed intent on “want[ing] to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” because he was in possession of a legally registered handgun. He never brandished it though. In fact, multiple videos showed Pretti clearly holding what looked like a phone as agents swarmed him.
Even though the incident was thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, Essayli had to flick his tongue — it’s the bootlicker way, after all.
“If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” he snickered on social media hours after Pretti died. “Don’t do it!” He also reshared the posts of right-wing social media influencers Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo who claimed Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, was following “antifa” tactics.
A sign is raised in support of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at a candlelight vigil during a peaceful protest at the federal building in Los Angeles on Saturday.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
It blasted his rant as “dangerous and wrong” on social media, adding that “responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”
The Gun Owners of America, a group that’s even more conservative than the NRA, called Essayli’s comments “untoward,” leading to the first assistant U.S. attorney — because bootlickers love their titles — to whine about the nonprofit “adding words to mischaracterize my statement” even though they directly quoted him.
When history looks back at all the cowards, sycophants, apologists, enablers, henchmen and other miscreants that made Trump possible, the bootlickers will have a starring role. The “I voted for this” tribe — even when this is cruelty and actions that are more those of a Macbeth than an American president.
The bootlicker is a universally reviled archetype. Their bread-and-butter is comforting the most comfortable by afflicting the most afflicted. They try to top fellow bootlickers with even more obsequious acts of flattery, hellbent on making the most damning line of Orwell’s “1984” come to life: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
The bootlicker’s moral compass is malleable. Wherever the Big Boss has moved the goal posts, that’s where he or she will kick the ball. If all goes to hell and America devolves into a rank dictatorship, beware the bootlicker.
The Trump regime currently has a lineup of them that’s like the bootlicking version of the 1927 Yankees.
In addition to Essayli, you have Stephen Miller, who kept calling Pretti an “assassin” and “domestic terrorist” on social media as if repeating the slurs would make them true. Vice President JD Vance, who described Renee Good, a woman shot and killed on Jan. 7 by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis after she tried to drive away from him, as a “deranged leftist.”
Repeating what the big bootlickers say is a character trait. Call it the bootlicking trickle-down-effect.
There’s Border Patrol chief at large Gregory Bovino, a migra man a federal judge accused of “outright lying” during depositions over the actions of his team in Chicago this fall. During a news conference about the death of Pretti, Bovino claimed that the victim looked like he “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” — the exact same language used in the original Department of Homeland Security social media post on the killing. Hours later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also impersonated a macaw, parroting Miller by accusing Pretti of “domestic terrorism.”
On Fox News on Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel — the agency that in ye olden days would be leading an impartial investigation into what happened to Good, Pretti and other victims of la migra — told host Maria Bartiromo that “No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm. That led a skeptical-looking Bartiromo, who’s about as liberal as the Spanish Inquisition, to ask, “And how was he using that handgun in terms of threatening Border Patrol?”
A wide-eyed Patel could only say he trusted Noem’s version of the events.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a news conference on Saturday to address an incident where federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti during operations in Minneapolis.
(Al Drago / Getty Images)
These are just some of the most prominent, powerful bootlickers stumbling right now on their own deceit and desperation.
Space prohibits me from quoting all the Republicans who last week were stalwart 2nd Amendment fans now saying Pretti had no right to carry his legally registered firearm to a protest even though they cheered on Kyle Rittenhouse when the Wisconsin teen showed up at one very openly carrying an AR-15, which he ended up using to fatally shoot two people who tried to assault him. There’s no evidence Pretti ever handled his firearm during the protest, let alone threatened federal agents with it.
Then there’s the bootlickers who cheered on the Jan. 6 rioters for rising up against what they saw as government tyranny, who insist the dozens of law enforcement officers injured that day were just deep-state agents. Today, those bootlickers are telling folks pushing back against Trump’s police state to respect it.
Obey or die.
The Roman philosopher Plutarch described flatterers in his immortal essay on the subject as “the plague in kings’ chambers, and the ruin of their kingdoms” that “prey upon a noble quarry.” So to Essayli, Patel, Noem and all the other bootlickers in Trump’s orbit, and to the relatively anonymous legions beyond, I’ll leave you with the warning that I saw in a meme that I’m sure Plutarch would endorse:
No matter how hard you lick it, the boot will never love you.
WASHINGTON — The crisis touched off by President Trump’s demand to take ownership of Greenland appears over, at least for now. But the United States and its European allies still face a larger long-term challenge: Can their shaky marriage be saved?
At 75 years old, NATO has survived storms before, from squabbles over trade to estrangement over wars in Vietnam and Iraq. France, jealous of its independence, even pulled its armed forces out of NATO for 43 years.
But diplomats and foreign policy scholars warn that the current division in the alliance may be worse, because Trump’s threats on Greenland convinced many Europeans that the United States has become an unreliable and perhaps even dangerous ally.
The roots of the crisis lie in the president’s frequently expressed disdain for alliances in general and NATO in particular.
Long before Trump arrived in the White House, presidents from both parties complained that many NATO countries weren’t pulling their weight in military spending.
But earlier presidents still considered the alliance an essential asset to U.S. foreign policy and the cornerstone of a system that prevented war in Europe for most of a century.
Trump has never seemed to share that view. Even after he succeeded in persuading NATO members to increase their defense spending, he continued to deride most allies as freeloaders.
Until last year, he refused to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to help defend other NATO countries, the core principle of the alliance. And he reserved the right to walk away from any agreement, military or commercial, whenever it suited his purpose.
In the two-week standoff over Greenland, he threatened to seize the island from NATO member Denmark by force, an action that would have violated the NATO treaty.
When Britain, Germany and other countries sent troops to Greenland, he threatened to hit them with new tariffs, which would have violated a trade deal Trump made only last year.
Both threats touched off fury in Europe, where governments had spent most of the past year making concessions to Trump on both military spending and tariffs. When Trump backed down, the lesson some leaders drew was that pushing back worked better than playing nice.
“We do prefer respect to bullies,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.
“Being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else,” Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said.
The long-term danger for the United States, scholars said, is that Europeans might choose to look elsewhere for military and economic partners.
“They just don’t trust us,” said Richard N. Haass, a former top State Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
“A post-American world is fast emerging, one brought about in large part by the United States taking the lead in dismantling the international order that this country built,” he wrote last week.
Some European leaders, including Macron, have argued that they need to disentangle from the United States, build military forces that can defend against Russia, and seek more reliable trade partners, potentially including India and China.
But decoupling from the United States would not be easy, fast or cheap. Europe and Canada still depend on the United States for many of their defense needs and as a major market for exports.
Almost all NATO countries have pledged to increase defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product, but they aren’t scheduled to reach that goal until 2035.
Meanwhile, they face the current danger of an expansionist Russia on their eastern frontier.
Not surprisingly for a group of 30 countries, Europe’s NATO members aren’t united on the question. Macron has argued for more autonomy, but others have called for caution.
“Despite all the frustration and anger of recent months, let us not be too quick to write off the transatlantic partnership,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at Davos.
“I think we are actually in the process of creating a stronger NATO,” said Finnish President Alexander Stubb. “As long as we keep doing that, slowly and surely we’ll be just fine.”
They argue, in effect, that the best strategy is to muddle through — which is what NATO and Europe have done in most earlier crises.
The strongest argument for that course may be the uncertainty and disorder that would follow a rapid erosion — or worse, dissolution — of an alliance that has helped keep its members safe for most of a century.
The costs of that outcome, historian Robert Kagan warned recently, would be borne by Americans as well as Europeans.
If the United States continues to weaken its commitments to NATO and other alliances, he wrote in the Atlantic, “The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies, and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less. … If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.”
In the roiling debate over California’s proposed billionaire tax, supporters and critics agree that such policies haven’t always worked in the past. But the lessons they’ve drawn from that history are wildly different.
The Billionaire Tax Act, which backers are pushing to get on the November ballot, would charge California’s 200-plus billionaires a one-time, 5% tax on their net worth in order to backfill billions of dollars in Republican-led cuts to federal healthcare funding for middle-class and low-income residents.
Critics of the proposal have argued that past failures of similar wealth taxes in Europe prove they don’t work and can cause more harm than good, including by driving the ultra-rich out. Among those critics is San José Mayor Matt Mahan, a tech-friendly Democrat who is contemplating a run for governor.
“Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen a dozen European countries pursue national-level wealth taxes,” Mahan said. “Nine of them have rolled them back. A majority have seen a decline in overall revenue. It’s actually shrunk the tax base, not increased it, and it’s because it creates a perverse incentive and drives capital flight.”
Backers of the measure acknowledge such failures but say that they learned from them and that California’s proposal is stronger as a result.
Brian Galle, a UC Berkeley tax law professor and one of four academic experts who drafted the measure, said if it gets on the ballot, every voter in the state will receive a copy of the full text, a one-page explainer on what it does, and nearly two dozen additional pages of “rules for preventing wealthy people and their army of lawyers from dodging” it.
Many of those rules, he said, are based on historical lessons from places where such taxes have failed, but also where they’ve succeeded.
“If you understand the actual lessons of history, you understand that this bill is more like the successful Swiss and Spanish wealth taxes,” Galle said. “Part of that is learning from history.”
Warnings from Europe
Since the 1990s, several European countries have repealed net wealth taxes, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany.
A major example cited by critics of the California proposal is France, which implemented a much larger wealth tax on far more people, including many millionaires. The measure raised modest revenues, which fell as rich people moved out of the country to avoid paying, and the measure was repealed by the government of President Emmanuel Macron in 2017.
In a 2018 report on net wealth taxes, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that European repeals were often driven by “efficiency and administrative concerns and by the observation that net wealth taxes have frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals.”
“The revenues collected from net wealth taxes have also, with a few exceptions, been very low,” it found.
Critics and skeptics of the California proposal say they expect California to run into all the same problems.
Mahan and others have pointed to a handful of prominent billionaires who already appear to be distancing themselves from the state, and said they expect more to follow — which Mahan said will reduce California’s “recurring revenue” beyond the amount raised by the one-time tax.
Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which analyzes the fiscal effects of public policies, said net worth taxes in other countries have “always raised quite a bit less revenue than what was initially projected,” in large part because “wealth is easy, as it turns out, to try to reclassify or move around” and “there’s all these tricks that you can do to try to make the wealth look smaller for tax purposes.”
A bus in London promotes a campaign by British millionaires advocating for an end to extreme wealth and inequality.
(Carl Court / Getty Images)
Smetters said he expects that the California measure will raise less than the $100 billion estimated by its backers because billionaire wealth in California — much of it derived from the tech sector — is relatively “mobile,” as many tech barons can move without it affecting business.
“Policymakers have to understand that they’re not going to get nearly as much money as they often project from a purely static projection, where they’re not accounting for the different ways that people can move their wealth, reclassify their wealth, or even just move out of the state,” Smetters said. “So far, we only know of a few people — with a lot of money — who have moved out of the state, [but] that number could go up.”
Kevin Ghassomian, a private wealth lawyer at Venable who advises rich clients, said he expects the administrative costs of enforcing the tax to be massive for the state — and much greater than the drafters have anticipated.
On the front end, the state will face a wave of legal challenges to the tax’s constitutionality and its retroactive application to all billionaires living in the state as of the end of 2025.
Moving ahead, he said, there will be litigation from wealthy individuals whose departure from California is questioned or who dispute the state’s valuation of their net worth or individual assets — including private holdings, which the state doesn’t have extensive experience assessing.
Valuating such assets will be “a nightmare, just practically speaking, and it’s going to require a lot of administrators at the state level,” Ghassomian said, especially considering many California billionaires’ wealth is in the form of illiquid holdings in startups and other ventures with fluctuating market valuations.
“You could be a billionaire today, and then the market plummets, and now all of a sudden, you’re a pauper,” he said. “It could really lead to some unfair results.”
Lessons from Europe
Backers of California’s proposal said they have accounted for many of the historical pitfalls with wealth taxes and taken steps to avoid them — including by making it harder for wealthy Californians to simply shuffle money around to avoid the tax.
“There are a lot of provisions that are designed based on what has worked well in other countries with wealth taxes in the modern era, especially Switzerland, and there are also provisions meant to shut down some of the holes in some of the earlier wealth tax efforts, especially the France one, that were viewed as not successful,” said David Gamage, a University of Missouri tax law professor and another of the proposal’s drafters.
Galle said the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development study found that many of Europe’s historical wealth taxes “hadn’t figured out how to solve the problem of what small businesses were worth,” so were more narrowly focused on publicly traded stock and real estate. “Over time, there was a lot of abuse where people shifted their assets to make them look privately held.”
The California proposal “tries to solve that problem” by including small businesses and other privately held wealth in their calculations of net worth, he said — and benefits from the fact that such wealth has gotten a lot easier to track and appraise in recent years.
Doing so would be a familiar exercise for many California billionaires already, he said, as it is hard to raise venture capital, for example, without audited financial statements.
Backers of the measure said it is harder for U.S. citizens to avoid taxes by moving abroad than it has been for Europeans, and that evidence from Switzerland and Spain suggests differing tax rates between a nation’s individual states do not cause massive interstate flight.
San José Mayor Matt Mahan, who might run for governor, opposes the proposed tax on California billionaires.
(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)
For example, each state in Spain sets its own wealth tax rate, and Madrid’s is 0% — but that has not caused an exodus from other parts of Spain to Madrid, Galle said.
The risk of California billionaires avoiding the tax by simply moving to another U.S. state was further mitigated by the measure’s Jan. 1 deadline for avoiding the tax. Galle said the deadline “was intended to make it more difficult for individuals to concoct the kind of misleading, apparent moves that wealthy people have used in other places to try to avoid a wealth tax.”
Gamage said that “history shows if a tax on the wealthy can be avoided by moving paper around, claiming that you live in another location without actually moving your life there, moving assets to accounts or trusts nominally in foreign countries or other jurisdictions, you see large mobility responses.”
But when “those paper moves are shut down,” there’s much less moving — and “that’s the basis for the California model,” he added.
The outlook
Ghassomian, who said he has been “fielding a lot of inbound inquiries from clients who are just kind of worried,” said it is clear that the proposal’s authors “have done their homework” and tried to design the tax in a smart way.
Still, he said, he has concerns about the cost of administering the tax outpacing revenues, especially amid litigation. Residency battles alone with billionaires whose claims of departing the state are questioned could take “years and years and years” to resolve, he said.
“The revenue has to line up with expenditures, and if you can’t count on the revenue because it’s going to be tied up in courts, or it’s going to be delayed, then I think that creates some real logistical hurdles,” he said.
Smetters said predicting revenues from a tax on so many different types of assets is “really hard,” but one thing that has generally held true through history is that “most countries, even with less-mobile wealth, typically do not get the type of revenue that they were hoping for.”
David Sacks, a venture capitalist and President Trump’s AI czar who decamped from California to Texas, said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week that the measure was an “asset seizure” more than a tax, and that the state would be headed in a “scary direction” if voters approved it.
Darien Shanske, a tax law professor at UC Davis and another drafter of the proposal, said he and his colleagues did their best to “look at the lessons of the past, and apply them in a way that makes sense and is generally fair and administrable” — in a state where wealth inequality is rapidly growing and a wealth tax presents unique opportunities.
“Having a tax on billionaires does make particular sense in California because of the large number that live here and the large number who have made their fortune here,” he said.
Shanske said the proposed tax is designed to provide California a way to “triage” soaring healthcare premiums resulting from legislation enacted by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans. The proposal asks for contributions from people who will quickly recoup what they are taxed given the exponential growth of their assets, he said.
Emmanuel Saez, director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley and another drafter of the measure, said many of the repealed European taxes targeted millionaires while providing loopholes for billionaires to avoid paying, whereas California’s measure is “exactly the reverse.”
He said the measure will raise substantial revenue in part because California billionaire wealth more than doubled from 2023 to 2025 alone, and is “the innovative and first-of-its-kind tax on the ultra-wealthy that the moment requires.”
Thomas Piketty, a French economist and author of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” called California’s proposed tax “very innovative” and “relatively modest” compared with massive wealth taxes after World War II — including in Germany and Japan — and said it would not only improve healthcare in the state but “have an enormous impact on the U.S. and international political scene.”
“In the current context, with a deeply entrenched billionaire class, wealth taxes meet even more political resistance than in the postwar context, and this is where California could make a huge difference,” he said. “The fact of targeting the revenue to health spending is also very innovative and can help convince the voters to support the initiative.”
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
NEW YORK — Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, a frequent advisor to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, has concluded that the United States must choose between stability and democracy in Iraq — and that democracy, for now, is out of reach.
“I think that’s reality. I think that was true from the beginning,” Kissinger said in an interview last week.
“Iraq is not a nation in the historic sense,” he said, pointing to the ferocity of the conflicts among Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs. “The evolution of democracy … usually has to go through a phase in which a nation [is] born. And by attempting to skip that process, our valid goals were distorted into what we are now seeing.”
Instead of holding elections and trying to build democratic institutions from the ground up, Kissinger said, the United States should focus on more limited goals: preventing the emergence of a “fundamentalist jihadist regime” in Baghdad and enlisting other countries to help stabilize Iraq.
Speaking in unusually blunt terms at a time when the administration is reviewing policy options for Iraq, Kissinger emphasized that he did not intend to be critical of the president or other officials who have managed the U.S. effort in Iraq.
“I supported going in,” he said. “I’m basically supporting the administration. And these are the criticisms of a friend of the administration who thinks well of the president.”
Kissinger has made some of these points before, especially his argument that the United States should try to “internationalize” the problem of Iraq by enlisting other countries, including Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Russia, in a joint effort.
But as debate escalated over possible changes in U.S. strategy in the wake of the Democrats’ victory in the congressional election, his latest comments amounted to a sharp critique of the administration’s course.
He said he would have preferred a post-invasion policy that installed a strong Iraqi leader from the military or some other institution and deferred the development of democracy until later. “If we had done that right away, that might have been the best way to proceed,” he said.
In Iraq, he said, elections, the centerpiece of the administration’s political strategy, merely sharpened sectarian differences.
“It [was] a mistake to think that you can gain legitimacy primarily through the electoral process,” he said.
And he suggested that Bush may have been slow to change course in Iraq because advisors told him the United States was winning the war.
“As long as he was told he was winning, he had every reason to pursue the recommended strategy” that his advisors had proposed, Kissinger said.
He declined to elaborate, except to add that it was impossible to portray the current state of affairs in Iraq as “winning.”
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that what we’re seeing now would be an odd appearance for a victory,” he said.
In public, Bush and his aides have given no indication that they intend to scale back their efforts to build democracy, which the president has declared his central goal not only in Iraq, but across the Middle East.
In private, however, middle-ranking administration officials have acknowledged that the goal of building a democratic Iraqi government supported by Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds has become increasingly distant in the face of unremitting sectarian violence.
The task now, Kissinger said, is to manage the devolution of Iraq into a “confederal state” in which Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions would govern themselves “with substantial autonomy.”
“The question now is, how do you manage that?” he said. “That’s not an exercise in political science. That’s something that has to reflect some balance of forces and some balance of interests.”
An initial step, he said, would be to convene an international “contact group” including Iran, Syria and Turkey to try to create a stable balance among Iraq’s factions.
“The reason I favor an international conference is that many countries have an interest in avoiding” a radical Iraq, he said. “Iran doesn’t want a Taliban in Iraq.”
“That creates a framework to internationalize it to some extent,” he said. “It will not solve the problem by itself.”
Until now, the administration has resisted offering Iran and Syria a formal role in stabilizing Iraq, although it has offered to talk with their governments about U.S. complaints that Iran is supporting Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria is aiding Sunni insurgents.
Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who with former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) leads a bipartisan commission that is working on proposals for new policy options in Iraq, has also said he favors bringing Iran and Syria into a diplomatic effort.
“My basic approach to the Baker-Hamilton commission is to try to support it,” Kissinger said. “I think we need a bipartisan approach to this, so I will not look at flyspecking the outcome.”
His advice to the commission, he said, would be this: “Where are we? Where are we trying to go? What is it that we must avoid? What is it that we should try to achieve? We are in an extremely difficult situation because we are fighting an insurrection in the middle of a civil war. Undoubtedly, significant mistakes were made, but it doesn’t help us now to say that.”
Asked about his increasing prominence as a frequent outside advisor to Bush and Cheney despite his long-declared skepticism about making democratization the primary goal of U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger shrugged.
“It’s five to six meetings a year, starting in about the last two or three years,” he said. “It started with one or two meetings, and then expanded.”
He said he supported Bush’s call for more democracy overseas — on a measured timetable.
“America can take pride in its president’s stated national objectives,” he said. “Can they be accomplished in one presidential term? I would say no. The direction can be set, but the implementation requires longer historical periods.”
WASHINGTON — President Trump said the U.S. used a secret weapon he called “The Discombobulator” to disable Venezuelan equipment when the U.S. captured Nicolás Maduro. Trump also renewed his threat to conduct military strikes on land against drug cartels, including in Mexico.
Trump made the comments in an interview Friday with the New York Post.
The Republican president was commenting on reports that the U.S. had a pulsed energy weapon and said, “The Discombobulator. I’m not allowed to talk about it.”
He said the weapon made Venezuelan equipment “not work.”
“They never got their rockets off. They had Russian and Chinese rockets, and they never got one off,” Trump said in the interview. “We came in, they pressed buttons and nothing worked. They were all set for us.”
Trump had previously said when describing the raid on Maduro’s compound that the U.S. had turned off “almost all of the lights in Caracas,” but he didn’t detail how they accomplished that.
The president also indicated the U.S. would continue its campaign of military strikes and could extend it from South America into North America as the administration tried to target drug cartels.
“We know their routes. We know everything about them. We know their homes. We know everything about them,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit the cartels.”
When asked if the strikes could occur in Central America or Mexico, Trump said: “Could be anywhere.”
The U.S. on Friday carried out a strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean, the first such action since Maduro’s capture.
It marks at least 36 known strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since early September that have killed at least 117 people.
Trump said the U.S. had removed the oil aboard seven oil tankers connected to Venezuela that it had seized, but he wouldn’t reveal where the ships are now.
“I’m not allowed to tell you,” Trump said. “But let’s put it this way, they don’t have any oil. We take the oil.”
During the interview, the president also said that he was still trying to figure out where to hang the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, which she gave to him earlier this month. The prize was leaning against a statue in the Oval Office.
Trump also told the newspaper that the framework of an Arctic security deal he struck with NATO chief Mark Rutte would give the U.S. ownership of the land where American bases are located.
“We’ll have everything we want,” Trump said. “We have some interesting talks going on.”
Much of the potential deal remains unclear. Leaders of Denmark and Greenland have said the island’s sovereignty is non-negotiable, and a NATO spokesperson said Rutte, in his conversations with Trump, did not propose any “compromise to sovereignty.”
MINNEAPOLIS — Saturday morning started frigid and quiet on Minneapolis’ “Eat Street,” a stretch of road south of downtown famous for its small coffee shops and restaurants ranging from New American to Vietnamese.
Within five hours, seemingly everything had changed. A protester was dead. Videos were circulating showing multiple federal agents on top of the man and gunshots fired. Federal and local officials again were angrily divided over who was to blame.
And Eat Street was the scene of a series of clashes, before federal officers and local and state police pulled back and protesters took over the area.
It all started around 9 a.m. when federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti there, about a mile and a half from the scene where Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot Jan. 7 by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, sparking outrage and daily protests.
And in just over an hour, anger exploded again in the city already on edge. Even before the current immigration enforcement surge, networks of thousands of residents had organized to monitor and denounce it while national, state and local leaders traded blame over the rising tensions.
Two Associated Press journalists reached the scene minutes after Saturday’s shooting. They saw dozens of protesters quickly converging and confronting the federal agents, many blowing the whistles activists use to alert to the presence of federal officers.
They had been covering protests for days, including a massive one Friday afternoon in downtown Minneapolis, but the anger and sorrow among Saturday’s crowd felt more urgent and intense.
The crowd, rapidly swelling into the hundreds, screamed insults and obscenities at the agents, some of whom shouted back mockingly. Then for several hours, the two groups clashed as tear gas billowed in the subzero air.
Over and over, officers pushed back the protesters from improvised barricades with the aid of flash-bang grenades and pepper balls, only for the protesters to regroup and regain their ground. Some five hours after the shooting, after one more big push down the street, enforcement officers left in a convoy.
By midafternoon, protesters had taken over the intersection next to the shooting scene and cordoned it off with discarded yellow tape from the police. Some stood on large metal dumpsters that blocked all traffic, banging on them, while others gave speeches at the growing impromptu memorial for Pretti, who was a 37-year-old ICU nurse at a VA hospital.
People brought tree branches to form a circle around the area, while others put flowers and candles at the memorial by a snow bank.
Many carried handwritten signs demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave Minnesota immediately, using expletives against ICE that have been plastered all over the Twin Cities for weeks.
The mood in the crowd was widespread anger and sadness — recalling the same outpouring of wrath and grief that shook the city after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020, although without the widespread violent protests then.
Law enforcement was not visibly present in the blocks immediately around the shooting scene, although multiple agencies had mobilized and the National Guard announced it would also help provide security there.
At an afternoon news conference, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said his officers and members of the Minnesota National Guard in yellow safety traffic vests were working to keep the area around the shooting safe and avoid traffic interfering with “lawful, peaceful demonstrations.” No traffic except for residents was allowed in a 6-by-7-block area around the scene.
Stores, sports and cultural institutions closed Saturday afternoon, citing safety. Some stayed open to give a break to the protesters from the dangerous cold, providing water, coffee, snacks and hand warmer packets.
After evening fell, a somber, sorrowful crowd in the hundreds kept a vigil by the memorial.
“It feels like every day something crazier happens,” said Caleb Spike. “What comes next? I don’t know what the solution is.”
Brook and Vancleave write for the Associated Press.
Utah police arrested a man accused of assaulting a Florida congressman this weekend at a Sundance Film Festival after the man allegedly hurled racist comments to several patrons of a Creative Artists Agency party.
Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Florida) posted on X that he was “okay” after being slugged by the man, identified by police as 28-year-old Christian Young.
“I was assaulted by a man at Sundance Festival who told me that Trump was going to deport me before he punched me in the face,” Frost wrote Saturday in an X post. “He was heard screaming racist remarks as he drunkenly ran off. The individual was arrested.”
Frost, 29, has the distinction of being the first member of Gen Z elected to U.S. Congress. Born in Orlando, Frost is in his second term representing a Central Florida district. He is Afro-Latino.
On his website, Frost noted his “diverse heritage with roots in Puerto Rican, Lebanese, and Haitian ancestry.” He was adopted at birth “by a Kansas-born musician-producer and … a special education teacher who immigrated to the US from Cuba as a child in the 1960s.”
A person who was at the party told The Times that the suspect crashed the party and said “offensive things” to several partygoers, including in the men’s restroom, before allegedly assaulting the congressman.
Security personnel removed the suspect from the venue, the source said. Police quickly arrived.
Park City Police Lt. Danielle Snelson said that officers responded to a report of an assault just after midnight at the High West Saloon on Park Avenue — the location of the Friday night party hosted by CAA.
“Upon arrival, officers conducted an investigation and determined that Christian Young unlawfully entered a private party after previously being turned away for not having an invitation,” Snelson wrote in an email. “Once inside the saloon, Young assaulted Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost and a female who was attending the private event.”
Frost’s companion was not identified.
After the incident, the congressman was seen speaking with Park City police officers outside the restaurant. In his X post, Frost wrote: “Thank you to the venue security and Park City PD for assistance on this incident.”
The suspect was arrested and booked into Utah’s Summit County Jail on charges of aggravated burglary and two counts of simple assault.
Axios reported that County Judge Richard Mrazik ordered Young to be held without bail because of “convincing evidence” that he may flee the area and “would constitute a substantial danger” to the community.
“I am horrified by the attack on Congressman Maxwell Frost. Grateful that he is okay, but appalled that this terrifying assault took place,” Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote on X. “The perpetrator must be aggressively prosecuted. Hate and political violence has no place in our country.”
The altercation occurred several hours before the deadly shooting of an ICU nurse in Minneapolis by a federal agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Saturday shooting has sparked widespread outrage. It was the third shooting in Minneapolis by ICE officers in the last three weeks, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told CBS News.
On Sunday, a small group of about a dozen anti-ICE protesters walked up Park City’s Main Street, urging festival attendees to join them.
Staff writer Samantha Masunaga contributed to this report.
PARK CITY, Utah — A man was arrested Friday night at a party during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, for allegedly assaulting a Florida congressman.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost wrote on X Saturday that he was punched in the face by a man who told Frost that President Trump was going to deport him. Frost was born in Orlando, Fla.
The altercation occurred at a private party hosted by talent agency CAA at the High West Distillery, a popular venue for festival-adjacent events.
“He was heard screaming racist remarks as he drunkenly ran off,” wrote Frost, who is Black. “The individual was arrested and I am okay.”
Frost, the first Gen Z member of Congress, thanked the venue security and the Park City Police Department for their help.
Christian Joel Young, 28, was arrested on suspicion of aggravated burglary, assaulting an elected official and assault and transported to Summit County Jail, according to court records.
Young is also accused of grabbing a woman by the shoulder. He appeared to have crashed the party by jumping a fence and had a Sundance Film Festival pass that was not issued in his name, according to the police affidavit.
Sundance Film Festival representatives released a statement saying that they “strongly condemn” the assault, noting that though it occurred at a non-affiliated event, such behavior is “against our values of upholding a welcoming and inspiring environment for all our attendees.”
“The safety and security of our festival attendees is always our chief concern, and our thoughts are with Congressman Frost and his continued well-being,” the statement read. “We encourage anyone with additional information on this matter to contact the Park City Police Department.”
County Judge Richard Mrazik ordered Young held without bail, on the grounds that he would constitute “a substantial danger to any other individual or to the community, or is likely to flee the jurisdiction of the court if released on bail.” Young has a prior misdemeanor conviction, according to court records.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wrote on X that he was horrified by the attack and that “the perpetrator must be aggressively prosecuted.”
“Hate and political violence has no place in our country,” Jeffries continued.
Messages seeking comment were left for representatives for the Park City Police Department and CAA.
The Trump administration has blamed the death of an American citizen at the hands of immigration agents in Minnesota on the victim within hours of their killing for the second time this month, calling the late Alex Jeffrey Pretti an “assassin” and “domestic terrorist” without opening an independent investigation.
The crisis response from President Trump’s top Homeland Security officials followed a familiar playbook from an administration eager to project grit and resolve, particularly on immigration, in the face of inconvenient facts. Despite their efforts, damage from the incident continued to reverberate Sunday, creating political jeopardy for the president.
Videos that emerged of Pretti’s killing enraged the public. Government lines justifying the use of lethal force prompted blowback among staunch Republican supporters and conservative groups. Negotiations in Congress to thwart another shutdown were upended over Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding. And a Trump-appointed judge blocked the administration from attempting to destroy evidence in the case, lending weight to fears of a cover-up.
It is new terrain for Trump, whose handling of immigration had been a rare bright spot in polling of his job performance throughout his first year back in office. Now, for the first time, surveys show a plurality of Americans disapprove of the administration’s enforcement tactics, with one in three Republicans expressing concern they have grown too harsh.
Pretti, 37, an intensive care nurse at a hospital for veterans in Minneapolis, was shot 10 times at close range by two ICE agents. Multiple videos of the incident appear to show Pretti attempting to aid a fellow civilian who had been pushed by an ICE officer, before he himself was wrestled to the ground by agents.
He had been carrying a firearm that Minneapolis police said was lawfully purchased and registered. The videos that circulated on social media do not indicate that he had brandished, or was attempting to reach for, his weapon, despite Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accusing Pretti of attending the protest with the aim of committing violence.
Bill Essayli, the assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, warned that approaching law enforcement while armed created “a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.” But the administration’s decision to blame Pretti’s death on his decision to bear arms drew harsh rebuke from 2nd Amendment advocates across the Republican Party.
“Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens,” the National Rifle Assn. said in a statement.
Erick Erickson, a prominent conservative commentator, accused Noem and Greg Bovino, Trump’s head of the U.S. Border Patrol, of making matters “far worse by being unrestrained in how they proceed.”
“The President is a great marketer and PR guy,” Erickson wrote on X. “While those around him may not realize it, I’m pretty sure he understands another dead American with his team rushing to undermine second amendment arguments and define the dead guy with a lot of facts still unknown is a bad look.”
The general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term said he was “enraged and embarrassed” by the agency’s “lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty,” and called for the president’s impeachment and removal.
“People have had enough,” Brian O’Hara, Minneapolis’ police chief, told CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “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. And now this is the second American citizen that’s been killed, it’s the third shooting within three weeks.”
Earlier this month, Renee Nicole Good, also 37 and a mother of three, was shot to death by an ICE agent while driving her car, shortly after dropping her son off at school. Just as in Pretti’s case, Noem and other senior administration officials justified the incident within hours of her death by impugning the victim’s motives without producing substantive evidence.
The aggressive response comes as the administration has faced accusations of misrepresenting other facts to the public.
After the president confused Greenland with the separate island nation of Iceland four times in a speech last week in Switzerland, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, flatly denied he had made the mix-up.
And on the same trip, Trump dismissed the role of NATO’s allies in the war in Afghanistan, where partner nations lost more than 1,000 soldiers over the course of the war, falsely claiming they “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.” The remark has infuriated some of Washington’s closest allies.
Only when Noem was questioned by a conservative reporter on Fox News about the circumstances of Pretti’s death did she suggest error may have been at fault.
“This happened in seconds,” Noem said, asked whether Pretti had been shot and killed after being disarmed of a weapon he hadn’t brandished in the first place. “They clearly feared for their lives and took action to defend themselves.”
MINNEAPOLIS — Democrats demanded federal immigration officers leave Minnesota after a U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot a man in Minneapolis and set off clashes with protesters who poured into the frigid streets in a city already shaken by another shooting death weeks earlier.
The latest shooting also sparked a legal fight over control of the investigation and renewed calls by state and city officials for an end to the immigration surge that has swept across Minneapolis and surrounding cities.
Federal officials say agents fired defensively Saturday morning when Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse, stepped into a confrontation between an immigration officer and a woman on the street. Officials say Pretti was armed, but no bystander videos appear to show him holding a weapon; he appears to be holding a phone. The Minneapolis police chief said Pretti had a permit to carry a gun.
Pretti’s family said they were “heartbroken but also very angry” at authorities, saying in a statement that Pretti awas kindhearted soul who wanted to make a difference in the world.
A federal judge has already issued an order blocking the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence” related to the shooting, after state and county officials sued.
Minnesota Atty. Gen. Keith Ellison said the lawsuit filed Saturday is meant to preserve evidence collected by federal officials that state authorities have not yet been able to inspect. A court hearing is scheduled for Monday in federal court in St. Paul.
“A full, impartial, and transparent investigation into his fatal shooting at the hands of DHS agents is nonnegotiable,” Ellison said in a statement.
Spokespersons for the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, which are named in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Sunday.
Another federal judge previously ruled that officers participating in the federal immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota cannot detain or tear-gas peaceful protesters who are not obstructing authorities, though an appeals court temporarily suspended that ruling days before Saturday’s shooting.
The Minnesota National Guard was assisting local police at the direction of Gov. Tim Walz, officials said, with troops sent to both the shooting site and a federal building where officers have squared off daily with demonstrators.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said during a news conference Saturday that Pretti showed up to “impede a law enforcement operation.” She questioned why he was armed but did not offer details about whether Pretti drew the weapon or brandished it at officers.
Gun rights groups have noted it’s legal to carry firearms during protests.
“Every peaceable Minnesotan has the right to keep and bear arms — including while attending protests, acting as observers, or exercising their First Amendment rights,” the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus said in a statement. “These rights do not disappear when someone is lawfully armed.”
Trump blames Democrats
The Republican president weighed in on social media Saturday by lashing out at Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
He shared images of the gun that immigration officials said was recovered and said: “What is that all about? Where are the local Police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE Officers?”
Trump said the Democratic governor and mayor “are inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was among several Democratic lawmakers demanding that federal immigration authorities leave Minnesota. She also urged Democrats to refuse to vote to fund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying via social media: “We have a responsibility to protect Americans from tyranny.”
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York later said that Democrats will not vote for a spending package that includes money for DHS, which oversees ICE. Schumer’s statement increases the possibility that the government could partially shut down Jan. 30 when funding runs out.
Pretti was shot just over a mile from where an ICE officer killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7, sparking widespread protests.
Pretti’s family was furious at federal officials’ description of the shooting.
“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed,” the family statement said. “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
Video shows officers, man who was shot
When the Saturday confrontation began, bystander video shows protesters blowing whistles and shouting profanities at federal officers on a commercial street in south Minneapolis.
The videos show Pretti stepping in after an immigration officer shoves a woman. Pretti appears to be holding his phone toward the officer, but there’s no sign he’s holding a weapon.
The officer shoves Pretti in his chest, and pepper-sprays him and the woman.
Soon, at least seven officers are forcing Pretti to the ground. Several officers try to bring the man’s arms behind his back as he struggles against them. An officer holding a tear-gas canister strikes him on or near his head several times.
A shot is heard, but with officers surrounding the man, it’s not clear where it came from. Multiple officers back off. More shots are heard. Officers back away, and the man lies motionless on the street.
Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander leading Trump’s crackdown, was repeatedly pressed on CNN’s Sunday “State of the Union” for evidence that Pretti did anything illegal or assaulted law enforcement, as officials have claimed.
Bovino said it was “very evident” that Pretti was not following the officers’ orders.
“It’s too bad the consequences had to be paid because he injected himself into that crime scene,” he said. “He made the decision.”
Walz said Saturday that he had no confidence in federal officials and that the state would lead the investigation into the shooting.
Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said during a news conference Saturday that federal officers blocked his agency from the scene even after it obtained a signed judicial warrant.
Protests continue
Demonstrations broke out in several cities across the country, including New York, Washington and Los Angeles.
In Minneapolis, protesters converged at the scene of the shooting Saturday despite dangerously cold weather, with temperatures around minus-6 degrees.
An angry crowd gathered after the shooting and screamed profanities at federal officers, calling them “cowards” and telling them to go home. Protesters dragged garbage bins from alleyways to block streets, and people chanted “ICE out now” and “Observing ICE is not a crime.”
As darkness fell, hundreds of people mourned quietly by a growing memorial at the site of the shooting. A doughnut shop and a clothing store nearby stayed open, offering protesters a warm place as well as water, coffee and snacks.
Caleb Spike said he came from a nearby suburb to show his support and his frustration. “It feels like every day something crazier happens,” he said. “What’s happening in our community is wrong, it’s sickening, it’s disgusting.”
Raza, Brook and Karnowski write for the Associated Press. AP writers Giovanna Dell’Orto and Tim Sullivan in Minnesota, Rebecca Santanta in Washington and Jim Mustian in New York contributed this report.
Voting is the most elemental of democratic exercises, a virtuous act residing right up there alongside motherhood and apple pie. But Trump has treated it as a cudgel, something dark and sinister, fueling a partisan divide that has increasingly undermined faith in the accuracy and integrity of our elections.
One result is a batch of new laws making it harder to vote.
Since the 2020 presidential election — the most secure in American history, per the Trump administration’s own watchdogs — at least 30 states have enacted more than 100 restrictive laws, according to New York University’s Brennan Center and the Democracy Policy Lab at UC Berkeley, which keep a running tally.
In California, state Sen. Carl DeMaio and allies are working to qualify a November ballot measure that would require a government-issued ID to vote, a solution in desperate search of a problem.
“We have the lowest level of public trust and confidence in our elections that we have ever seen,” the San Diego Republican said in launching the effort, sounding the way someone would by lamenting the damage a fire has done while ignoring the arsonist spreading paint thinner all around.
Amid all the manufactured hysteria, there is a place that is unique in America, with no voter registration requirement whatsoever.
If you’re a U.S. citizen, 18 years or older and have lived in North Dakota for 30 days prior to election day, you’re eligible to vote. It’s been that way for more than 70 years, ever since voter registration was abolished in the state in 1951.
How’s it working?
Pretty darn well, according to those who’ve observed the system up close.
“It works excellent,” said Sandy McMerty, North Dakota’s deputy secretary of state.
“In general, I think most people are happy with this,” political scientist Mark Jendrysik agreed, “because it lowers the record-keeping burdens and saves money.”
Jendrysik, who teaches at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, said voter registration was abandoned at a time when the state — now redder than the side of a barn — had vigorous two-party competition and, with it, a bipartisan spirit of prairie populism.
“There was an idea we should make it easier to vote,” Jendrysik said. “We should open up things.”
What a concept.
Walk-up voting hasn’t made North Dakota a standout when it comes to casting ballots. In the last three elections, voter turnout has run close to the national average, which puts it in the middle of the pack among states.
But there also hasn’t been a high incidence of fraud. In 2022, a study by the state auditor’s office found it “exceptionally” unlikely an election in North Dakota could be fraudulently influenced. (Again, like the country as a whole.)
In fact, Jendrysik said he can’t recall a single case of election fraud being prosecuted in the 26 years he’s lived in North Dakota and followed its politics.
It’s not as though just anyone can show up and cast a ballot.
Voting in North Dakota requires a valid form of identification, such as a state-issued driver’s license, a tribal ID or a long-term care certificate. It must be presented each and every election.
By contrast, a California voter is not required to show identification at a polling place before casting their ballot — though they may be asked to do so if they are voting for the first time after registering to vote by mail and their application failed to include certain information. That includes a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.
Could North Dakota’s non-registration system be replicated elsewhere?
North Dakota is a sparsely populated state with hundreds of small communities where, seemingly, everyone knows everyone else. There are about 470,000 eligible voters, which is a lot more manageable number than, say, California’s 30 million adult-age residents. (California has more than a dozen counties with north of half a million registered voters.)
“It’s unique to this state,” Jendrysik said, “and I think if they hadn’t done it decades ago, it would have never happened.”
(Fun fact: North Dakota also has no parking meters on its public streets, owing to a state law passed in 1948, according to Jendrysik, who has published two academic papers on the subject.)
McMerty, of the secretary of state’s office, believes others could emulate North Dakota’s example.
It would require, she suggested, rigorous data-sharing and close coordination among various state agencies. “We’re updating our voter rolls daily — who’s obtained a driver’s license, births, deaths. That kind of thing,” McMerty said.
Again, that’s a much easier task in a state with the population the size of North Dakota’s. (About 800,000 at last count.)
And there’s no particular impetus for others to end their systems of voter registration — unless it could be proved to significantly boost turnout.
We should be doing all we can to get people to vote and invest in our beleaguered political system. Rather than wasting time chasing shadows and phantoms or indulging the delusions of a sore-loser president.
NUUK, Greenland — The notion that Denmark alone, or Europe together, could defend Greenland against an American force had become the source of relentless mockery within the White House. The Danish were dismissed as “irrelevant,” while Europe was portrayed as a shadow of its former self. If President Trump chose to take control of this Arctic island, the administration said, it would be his for the taking.
And yet, Europe did defend Greenland last week. Plans for a forceful economic response from the European Union spooked U.S. markets. Trump backed down from his years-long pursuit to take over the territory — and little Denmark succeeded, securing relief from an American pressure campaign that had challenged its basic sovereignty.
“We’ll get by with a little help from our friends,” Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, wrote in a guest book at Chequers on Thursday, referencing the Beatles lyric while visiting her British counterpart.
The specter of conflict has not disappeared. In Nuuk on Friday, after visiting with local leaders at a government office on the main boulevard of Greenland’s capital, Frederiksen embraced locals fearful of an imperialist United States. She declined to answer questions on whether tensions had been defused with Washington.
The Greenland crisis has proved to be an inflection point for U.S. allies, whose leaders, gathered last week in Davos, Switzerland, shed the pretense that all is well with Washington as they confront a new order. “The middle powers must act together,” said Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, in a speech widely shared in foreign capitals, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
Within Europe, disagreements still persist on how to handle Trump on an interpersonal basis. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have bristled at French President Emmanuel Macron’s diplomatic dualities, standing up to Trump in public while courting him in private with obsequious texts.
But they all agreed that a firm stance against a U.S. ploy to seize Greenland was required to prevent disastrous escalation — even at risk of jeopardizing the NATO alliance itself.
Markets rallied after Trump reversed course, rebounding to previous highs. U.S. relations with its partners will take longer to recover, experts said.
“Trump’s retreat, and the skillful European handling of him, avoided an immediate crisis, but not the longer-term damage,” said Elliott Abrams, a veteran diplomat who served under Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush, as well as under Trump in his first term. “An unpredictable and unfriendly United States threatening to use force against a fellow NATO ally was unthinkable. Now it is thinkable — because it just happened.”
“Leaders of allies will be pondering this for the next three years and figuring out what works with Trump, whom he listens to, and how much of the problem is Trump,” Abrams added, “as opposed to deeper currents in American politics that will outlast him.”
Over the course of just a week, allied leaders who for the last year hadn’t dared criticize Trump began returning fire. “There’s no point in being soft anymore,” Belgium’s prime minister told the local press.
After Trump falsely said Thursday that North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners had “stayed a little back, off the front lines” in Afghanistan, despite losing more than 1,000 troops in the war there, Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, called his remarks “insulting and, frankly, appalling.”
Peter Kastor, chair of the history department at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on the history of U.S. land acquisitions, said that Trump’s efforts to ram through a U.S. acquisition of Greenland were dramatic in the United States — but “traumatic in Europe.”
“The issue in this case is the consequences of this roller-coaster ride are so profound,” Kastor said. “Even if Trump does in fact establish a U.S. military presence, with little difference from what the United States is already entitled to do through prior treaty agreements, the damage to U.S.-European relations are real and potentially long-lasting.”
Carney’s speech in Davos struck with particular poignance among foreign leaders — including Trump, who went off-script in his own remarks to castigate the Canadian leader.
“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating,” Carney said. “This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.
“In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice — compete with each other for favor, or to combine to create a third path with impact,” he added.
On Friday, Trump disinvited Carney from joining his “Board of Peace,” an organization that Trump founded primarily to assist in the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. No European nation, other than Hungary, had agreed to join.
Permanent membership on the board required a $1-billion check. Canada declined, Carney explained in Davos, because he questioned where the money would go.
SACRAMENTO -In his first public appearance since returning from China last week, Gov. Jerry Brown spoke to a group of crime victims on the Capitol steps, and shared some of his own recent experiences with the state’s criminal element.
Brown said he has been the victim of two recent burglary attempts, one at his home in Oakland last year and one at his downtown Sacramento loft just a few days ago.
Speaking to a crowd of about 200 people carrying pictures of murdered family members on a warm, sunny Sacramento day, Brown said a man was apprehended “on my balcony trying to break in. Luckily I wasn’t home.”
In remarks to reporters later, the governor gave more details. “A guy got up to the roof, got on to the balcony and was trying to break in and one of my neighbors called the police,” he said. “He was arrested and I think he’s out on his own recognizance.
The Sacramento Police Department reported an incident at 9:35 p.m. Sunday night on Brown’s block when witnesses “called in a suspicious subject. Officers arrived, contacted and identified the subject. He was later arrested for prowling.”
In a separate incident, Brown recalled, “about a year ago, my wife was alone and three gentlemen show up about 1 [a.m.] trying to break in. The California Highway Patrol “came to the scene and held them for 40 minutes and they said they were looking to buy real estate in the neighborhood.”
Top Los Angeles federal prosecutor Bill Essayli faced blistering criticism from gun rights groups, including the NRA, after he posted on X Saturday about the fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers.
Essayli, the first assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, wrote: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.”
Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, was believed to be a “lawful gun owner with a permit to carry,” according to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara. Bystander videos show Pretti holding a phone, but nothing appearing to be a weapon appeared in those that circulated in the hours after the shooting.
In response to Essayli’s tweet, the NRA posted on X: “This sentiment from the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California is dangerous and wrong.”
The post continued: “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”
After receiving significant backlash, Essayli accused another gun rights organization of “adding words to mischaracterize my statement.”
“I never said it’s legally justified to shoot law-abiding concealed carriers,” he posted on X. “My comment addressed agitators approaching law enforcement with a gun and refusing to disarm.
“My advice stands: If you value your life, do not aggressively approach law enforcement while armed. If they reasonably perceive a threat and you fail to immediately disarm, they are legally permitted to use deadly force.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A. referred The Times to Essayli’s post on X clarifying what he initially said. He declined further comment.
Gov. Gavin Newsom joined in the criticism, writing on X, “Wow. Even the NRA thinks Trump’s DOJ stooge in California has gone too far for claiming federal agents were ‘legally justified’ to kill Alex Pretti.”
Earlier, a 2nd Amendment lobbying group, Gun Owners of America, also criticized Essayli.
“We condemn the untoward comments of @USAttyEssayli. Federal agents are not ‘highly likely’ to be ‘legally justified’ in ‘shooting’ concealed carry licensees who approach while lawfully carrying a firearm,” the group posted on X. “The Second Amendment protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting — a right the federal government must not infringe upon.”
Essayli’s post received a community note — a crowdsourced fact-check — noting that “the U.S. Constitution (particularly the 2nd, 4th, and 14th amendments) prohibit officers from shooting citizens merely for possessing a weapon that is not an “imminent threat.”
The shooting drew a large crowd of protesters in a city that had already seen widespread demonstrations after the fatal shooting by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7.
Essayli, a former Riverside County assemblyman, was appointed as the region’s interim top federal prosecutor by U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi last April.
Since taking office, he has doggedly pursued President Trump’s agenda, championing hard-line immigration enforcement in Southern California, often using the president’s language verbatim at news conferences.
Videos quickly emerged Saturday showing the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis protester by federal immigration agents, with Democratic leaders in Minnesota saying the footage showed the deadly encounter was the result of untrained federal officers overreacting and the Trump administration saying the man provoked the violence.
It was the second fatal shooting in Minneapolis by federal immigration authorities this month. The killing of Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 also was captured on videos and produced a similar schism among political leaders.
At around 9 a.m. on Saturday, federal agents patrolling Minneapolis killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti after a roughly 30-second scuffle. The Trump administration said shots were fired “defensively” against Pretti, who federal authorities said had a semiautomatic handgun and was “violently” resisting officers.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who said he watched one of several videos, said he saw “more than six masked agents pummeling one of our constituents, shooting him to death.” Frey has said Minneapolis and St. Paul are being “invaded” by the administration’s largest immigration crackdown, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti attacked officers, and Customs and Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino said Pretti wanted to do “maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” In posts on X, President Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called Pretti “a would-be assassin.”
The shooting Saturday occurred as officers were pursuing a man in the country illegally wanted for domestic assault, Bovino said. Protesters routinely try to disrupt such operations, and they sounded their high-pitched whistles, honked horns and yelled out at the officers.
Among them was Pretti. At one point, in a video obtained by the Associated Press, Pretti is standing in the street and holding up his phone. He is face-to-face with an officer in a tactical vest, who places his hand on Pretti and pushes him toward the sidewalk.
Pretti is talking to the officer, though it is not clear what he is saying.
The video shows protesters wandering in and out of the street as officers persist in trying to talk them back. One protester is put in handcuffs. Some officers are carrying pepper spray canisters.
Pretti is seen again when the video shows an officer wearing tactical gear shoving a protester. The protester, who is wearing a skirt over black tights and holding a water bottle, reaches out for Pretti.
The same officer shoves Pretti in his chest, leading Pretti and the other protester to stumble backward.
A different video then shows Pretti moving toward another protester, who falls over after being shoved by the same officer. Pretti moves between the protester and the officer, reaching his arms out toward the officer. The officer deploys pepper spray, and Pretti raises his hand and turns his face. The officer grabs Pretti’s hand to bring it behind his back, and deploys the pepper spray canister again and then pushes Pretti away.
Seconds later, at least half a dozen federal officers surround Pretti, who is wrestled to the ground and hit several times. Several agents try to bring Pretti’s arms behind his back, and he struggles.
Videos show an officer, who is hovering over the scuffle with his right hand on Pretti’s back, back away from the group with what appears to be a gun in his right hand just before the first shot is heard.
Someone shouts, “Gun, gun.” It is not clear whether that’s a reference to the weapon authorities say Pretti had.
And then the first shot is heard.
Videos do not clearly show who fired the first shot. In one video, seconds before that shot, one officer reaches for his belt and appears to draw his gun. The same officer is seen with a gun to Pretti’s back as three more shots ring out. Pretti slumps to the ground. Videos show the officers backing away, some with guns drawn. More shots are fired.
The Department of Homeland Security said Pretti was shot after he “approached” Border Patrol officers with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. Officials did not say whether Pretti, who is licensed to carry a concealed weapon, brandished the gun or kept it hidden.
An agency statement said officers fired “defensive shots” after Pretti “violently resisted” officers trying to disarm him.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz expressed dismay at the characterization.
“I’ve seen the videos, from several angles, and it’s sickening,” he said.
Trump weighed in on social media by lashing out at Walz and Frey. He shared images of the gun that immigration officials said was recovered from Pretti and said “What is that all about? Where are the local Police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE Officers?”
Eric B. Schnurer, an attorney, serves as an adviser to Democratic officeholders
PHILADELPHIA — Wishful thinking has characterized liberals for over a decade now: Signs are constantly materializing that the tide has turned and a new era of liberalism is dawning. The 1990 elections are being touted as the latest indicator. I respectfully dissent.
It is dubious, to begin with, whether there ever was a halcyon day in which everyone was liberal. The supposedly idealistic baby boomers, who came of age in the ‘60s, may not have been so idealistic at all–it is not as if draft-age students didn’t have a personal interest in seeing the Vietnam War terminated. And while joining the civil-rights movement might have been inspiring at the time, when civil rights and integration moved north, young, white liberals headed for the suburbs like everyone else.
In short, the premise that there is some golden liberal age whose return we are awaiting is seriously flawed. Nonetheless, it gave many liberals sustenance through the long drought of the ‘70s: Odd-numbered decades, the adage went, were conservative, while even-numbered decades were liberal. Well, that didn’t pan out, so many discovered a new iron-clad rule of U.S. history: Progressive decades come every 30 years (Let’s see–1930, 1960, that means . . . ). It’s thus tempting to see the 1990 elections as the harbinger of this messianic age.
The evidence is that Democrats retained or widened their smashing edge in governorships and state legislatures, gaining the upper hand in congressional redistricting. But this was true in 1970–Richard M. Nixon’s first midterm test–as well; and Democrats didn’t exactly suffer in the ‘80s redistricting.
Another supposed sign of the beating conservatives took was that Democrats enlarged their congressional majorities. That’s true–but by less than the historical average, despite a historically unparalleled freefall in the Republican President’s ratings–which also has nothing to do with growing liberal sentiment.
The final indicator of the allegedly bad news for conservatives is that such troglodytes as Clayton W. Williams Jr. in Texas and John R. Silber in Massachusetts were defeated, while liberal darlings Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York and Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey were reelected.
Of course, Williams and Silber both went out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot, and neither’s conqueror–Anne Richards in Texas, and Republican William Weld in Massachusetts–ran as liberals. In fact, Richards, who really is one of the few progressives in Texas, ran away from such an image; while the quintessential Texas progressive, Agriculture Commissioner Jim A. Hightower, shockingly lost .
As for Cuomo and Bradley, both barely won majorities against non-opponents. Then, of course, there’s Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, whose race-baiting reelection can hardly be viewed as a liberal victory. The news for liberals gets worse from there.
Voters strongly rejected environmental appeals in California and New York. Overall, pro-abortion-rights candidates nationally failed to profit from that issue. In short, the environment and abortion–two issues most liberal pundits thought would be The Issues of the ‘90s, catapulting us to victory–are not proving successful hot buttons. The Republicans have proved, however, that race–at least, in the guise of quotas, a more polite way to raise the issue than the heavy-handed Willie Horton approach–still works for them .
All these other issues are electoral sideshow, however: Voters want to hear what Democrats have to say about the economy and jobs. The reality is that doing anything meaningful on that front will require both reducing the deficit–meaning some tax increases, and cuts in popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare–and some investment in the young and the poor, through education and job training, so that there is some reason for jobs and money to be in America instead of Germany or Japan
That is what America needs. It is what Democrats are inclined to say. And if they do, they will lose.
Ask Bradley or Gov. James J. Florio in New Jersey; ask defeated Gov. James J. Blanchard in Michigan. Ask George Bush and the majority of congressmen what message they’ve gotten from the election, and the answer will be: No more taxes. There is no sign whatsoever that voters will pay for increased spending on social programs of any variety to help the economically disadvantaged, and a lot of evidence that such efforts are viewed as benefiting blacks at whites’ expense–not a particularly popular concept.
Most of all, the ridiculous budget debate revealed one amazing and shameful area of solid consensus: Don’t invest in the young, and don’t touch programs like Social Security for the old. We have become an elder-oriented society, beyond even the long-standing political strength of the senior lobby. The preternaturally self-conscious baby-boomer generation has turned out to be prohibitively self-absorbed. There will be even more spending on the elderly as we go, while racial and generational prejudices combine to provide dramatic underinvestment in kids. We would appear to be a society that has given up on its future.
This should not be a surprise after a decade of orgiastic private consumption; of an elderly President who derided conservation as “running out more slowly,” and of studies finding increased sexual activity among middle-class teen-agers who expected nuclear war to cut short their chances for adult sexual activity.
Like the Vienna Hapsburgs of 80 years ago, we live for a glorious past and a sumptuous, vaguely nostalgic present. Like the Madrid Hapsburgs of 250 years earlier, we spent ourselves into near-oblivion on a combination of overconsumption and armaments that are now of little use to new politico-military realities: We can blow up the world 17 times–but the Soviet empire these missiles are meant to deter is falling apart and we can’t deploy force flexibly enough to deal effectively with Iraq.
What is to be done? We must reduce spending, public and private, relative to saving. That will require not only raising taxes but also cutting federal outlays–something the recent budget morass shows Democrats still resisting. Of course, who could blame them? Republicans, and the public at large, are still resisting the reality that spending cuts must touch the comfortable and not just the welfare class–welfare, after all, accounts for only about 7% of the budget, while Social Security and Medicare are not only the largest but the fastest-growing items. Most of all, the nation must face the difficult task of setting priorities, and choosing priorities that focus on long-term gain–investing in jobs, education, infrastructure and debt payment.
In an age of instant gratification and rapid memory loss, we must discover either large numbers of voters who care more about the future than the present (and more about the nation’s future than their own), or large numbers of politicians whose vision has not failed them. Unfortunately, as recent events proved, there are few of either.
A peaceful protest in support of a 37-year-old man shot and killed by immigration officers in Minneapolis was under way Saturday evening in downtown Los Angeles.
Demonstrators gathered at the historic Placita Olvera marketplace. A banner fluttered above reading, “From Los Angeles to Minneapolis, stop ICE terror.”
As the afternoon light began to fade, speakers led chants to “abolish ICE” and urged “ICE out of Minnesota, ICE out of L.A.”
They carried signs printed with messages “America hates ICE” and “Drop the charges on Minnesota activists.”
Aida Ashouri, a candidate running for city attorney, said she couldn’t imagine if she had been snatched as a child and deported to Iran, where her family is from. She said local city officials had created funds to aid families impacted by raids, but criticized some of those same officials for approving surveillance technology used by law enforcement.
Adi Renee, an educator who spoke at the rally said that Minneapolis protests, during which thousands of workers and hundreds of businesses shut down on Friday, had shown that labor unions could help to lead a political strike against ICE and the Trump administration.
“I’m really grateful to Minneapolis,” she said. “They’ve shown us that our public unions can call a political strike and they need to do it now.”
A speaker at the rally who identified herself as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America denounced violence by federal agents in Minnesota.
“We are here again after another shooting,” she said into a megaphone. “Our elected officials continue to fund ICE [which is] murdering and kidnapping our neighbors in the streets.”
By around 5 p.m. the protest had grown to at least 400 people. The crowd began marching down Los Angeles Street, blocking traffic. Demonstrators congregated in front of the federal building, many of them chanting, “The people united will never be defeated.”
A police helicopter circled overhead.
Prior to the protest, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass issued a statement assailing the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a nurse, by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis, the second such death in that city this month involving U.S. immigration officers.
“This morning we learned of yet another tragic shooting in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents,” Bass said. “This violence has to stop and the president must remove these armed, federal forces from Minneapolis and other American cities.”
The Los Angeles County Republican Party cautioned against a rush to judgment in what is certain to be another highly volatile case.
“In the aftermath of any officer involved shooting, it’s important to figure out what happened, which often is not possible to ascertain immediately,” the party’s chairman said in a statement provided to City News Service. “We were not present at the scene of this regrettable incident in Minneapolis, and neither was Mayor Karen Bass.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Saturday assailed the fatal shooting of a 37-year-old man by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis, the second such death in that city this month involving U.S. immigration officers.
“This morning we learned of yet another tragic shooting in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents,” Bass said in a statement after news broke of the killing of a man identified as Alex Pretti. “This violence has to stop and the president must remove these armed, federal forces from Minneapolis and other American cities.”
Bass referenced legal action she and other mayors are taking in federal court to “stop the Trump administration’s unconstitutional and unlawful deployment of federal agents in the Twin Cities.”
“Our amicus brief supports Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul’s lawsuit to immediately end this militarized presence in their communities,’’ Bass said.
The Los Angeles County Republican Party cautioned against a rush to judgment in what is certain to be another highly volatile case.
“In the aftermath of any officer involved shooting, it’s important to figure out what happened, which often is not possible to ascertain immediately,” the party’s chairman said in a statement provided to City News Service. “We were not present at the scene of this regrettable incident in Minneapolis, and neither was Mayor Karen Bass.”
Assemblyman Mark Gonzalez, D-Los Angeles and currently the Assembly’s majority whip, was even more blunt than Bass in a statement in which he wrote, “SHAME ON ICE.”
“Where there should be protection, there is only the echo of gunfire,” Gonzalez said. “Where there should be justice, there is only another name taken too soon.”
A demonstration and vigil for Pretti beganon Olvera Street in Los Angeles around 4 p.m. About 200 to 300 protesters were in attendance. Another protest was scheduled from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Federal Building, also downtown. at 300 N. Los Angeles St. in downtown L.A.
MINNEAPOLIS — A Minnesota activist who was charged for her role in an anti-immigration enforcement protest at a church released her own video of her arrest after the White House posted a manipulated image online.
The White House on Thursday posted a picture on its X page of civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong appearing to be crying with her hands behind her back as she is escorted by a person wearing a badge whose image is blurred. The photo was captioned in all caps: “Arrested far-left agitator Nekima Levy Armstrong for orchestrating church riots in Minnesota.”
A photo posted by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s account showed the same image with Levy Armstrong wearing a neutral expression.
Levy Armstrong, who was arrested with at least two others Thursday for an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest that disrupted a service at a church where an ICE official serves as a pastor, released her own video. Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen, a St. Paul school board member who was also arrested in connection with the protest, were both released Friday, according to a post by Levy Armstrong’s organization, the Racial Justice Network. Their attorneys declined to comment.
The video shot by Levy Armstrong’s husband, Marques Armstrong, shows several federal agents approaching to arrest her.
“I’m asking you to please treat me with dignity and respect,” she said to the agents.
“We have to put you in handcuffs,” one agent said, while another held up a phone and appeared to record a video.
“Why are you recording?” Levy Armstrong asked. “I would ask that you not record.”
“It’s not going to be on Twitter,” the agent filming said. “It’s not going to be on anything like that.”
“We don’t want to create a false narrative,” the agent said.
At no point in the more than seven-minute video — which shows Levy Armstrong being handcuffed and led into a government vehicle — did Levy Armstrong appear to cry. Instead, she talked with agents about her arrest.
“You know that this is a significant abuse of power,” she said. “Because I refuse to be silent in the face of brutality from ICE.”
“I’m not in here to get in a political debate,” the agent filming said.
In an audio message that Levy Armstrong’s spokesperson shared with the Associated Press, Levy Armstrong said the video of her arrest exposes that the Trump administration had used AI to manipulate images of her arrest.
“We are being politically persecuted for speaking out against authoritarianism, fascism and the tyranny of the Trump administration,” said Levy Armstrong, who recorded the message Friday morning during a call with her husband from jail.
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brook and Raza write for the Associated Press. AP reporters Giovanna Dell’Orto in Minneapolis and Tiffany Stanley in Washington contributed to this report.
