US President Donald Trump speaks to the media as he walks to Marine One prior to departure from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, January 27, 2026, as he travels to Iowa.
Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he wants “a very honorable and honest investigation” into the controversial killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by a federal agent in Minnesota over the weekend.
“We’re doing a big investigation,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
“I want to see the investigation, I’m going to be watching over it,” he said. “I want to see it myself.”
Shortly after Trump spoke, MS Now, citing three people briefed on the matter, reported that the Department of Justice had decided not to conduct a civil rights investigation of Pretti’s death.
“And instead two units of the Department of Homeland Security will investigate their officers and the man they killed,” MS Now reported.
Trump’s comments were the latest in a series of recent statements and moves by him and the White House that have sought to dial back his administration’s initially bellicose comments on Pretti’s killing on Saturday in Minneapolis.
Pretti’s death came weeks after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the city fatally shot another U.S. citizen, Renee Good, as she attempted to drive away from another agent telling her to exit her car.
On Monday, Trump said that Tom Homan, his administration’s border czar, would go to Minnesota to manage ICE’s on-the-ground operations there.
Homan reportedly has been at odds with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who initially called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who wanted “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”
“Tom Homan … is in Minnesota now, he’s meeting with governor [Tim Walz], and he’s meeting with the mayor [Jacob Frey], I think later,” Trump said. “And I hear that’s all going very well.”
Trump spoke on the phone with Walz and Frey on Monday. Both officials are Democrats who for weeks have been strongly critical of the Trump administration’s surge of immigration enforcement officers to Minneapolis and elsewhere.
On Monday, multiple news outlets reported that Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander at large, was leaving Minneapolis, where his comments on Pretti’s death and other immigration-enforcement related issues had inflamed tensions.
Bovino had claimed that Pretti, who had a licensed handgun on his person at the time of the confrontation with federal agents, may have intended to “massacre law enforcement.”
Noem and Bovino’s claims have been undercut by videos taken of Pretti’s shooting, which shows him on the ground when he is apparently shot from behind by an agent.
