Jake Tapper reports:

“Someone’s going to get killed.”

The warning, from an agent of the federal Homeland Security Investigations division, sent a chill through the other officials in the room.

It was early January 2026.  The HSI agent explained how the team was afraid about what was coming, about what seemed preordained as the Trump administration sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Customs and Border Protection officers, Border Patrol agents and controversial Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino into Minneapolis for what the administration called Operation Metro Surge.

You don’t understand, Homeland Security officials had been trying to explain to local prosecutors and other officials. Border Patrol — these guys are not the right people to be doing immigration raids in a city. They’re used to standing alone at the southern border, no backup for 50 miles, thinking of themselves as the last line of defense. They get away with a lot. This is going to get ugly.

The HSI agent’s fears about the unprecedented surge of DHS personnel proved prophetic. The deaths of Renee Good on Wednesday, January 7, and Alex Pretti on Saturday, January 24, at the hands of federal immigration agents, followed soon after.

This is the story of the 18 days between the killing of Good and Pretti, the highly questionable ways the Trump administration handled immigration enforcement and the shootings, and the atmosphere of aggression and mendacity that continues to mark its enforcement operations. CNN spoke with more than a dozen former and current members of the Trump administration, most of whom refused to go on the record out of fear of retaliation by the administration.

After Good was killed but before Pretti was, Bovino asked for a call with the US attorney for the District of Minnesota, Daniel Rosen. The call fell to prosecutors in the office, but Rosen didn’t participate.

Bovino was angry that prosecutors hadn’t been filing cases against protesters whom he and his agents claimed had been guilty of AFOs — assaults on federal officers.

There was a reason for that. The prosecutors in the US attorney’s office, who had previously as a matter of course trusted the accounts of law enforcement officers when they brought AFOs to their office, had seen many of the immigration agents’ complaints proved to have been downright false when evidence was presented.

The immigration agents, the prosecutors concluded, were lying. A lot.

The prosecutors were stunned by what Bovino said on the call. The shooting death of Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, hadn’t pushed Bovino, who arrived to the city shortly after her death, into a more cautious place. Quite the contrary.

“These people are wackos,” Bovino said, referring to Minnesota protesters. “The shit is getting ready to come. We’re not putting up with anything in this city. It’s coming. We’re not going to calm it down, we’re going to put it down.”

He went on. “You’ve got 3,000 law enforcement agents that are fixin’ to lock this city down,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, we’re gonna bring 4,000 more. It doesn’t matter to me. We’re going to pacify this place, we’re going to roll ‘em up. We’re not going to wait on the local PD, we’re not going to piss with it.”

He went on to talk about occupying the city. And then he made a disparaging remark about Rosen, who is an observant Jew and couldn’t be reached during the Sabbath on Saturday, sneeringly referring to him as one of the “chosen people.”

The prosecutors were stunned at what they were hearing, that Bovino was boasting this way about quelling the protests, and doing so on a phone call with prosecutors he didn’t even know. All the fears described to them by members of the HSI had been correct. Bovino was there for all the wrong reasons, they thought, with a strategy purposely designed to inflame, to justify violence by the federal government. Some wondered if Bovino had been sent to Minnesota to spark a riot.

“They’re going to kill someone else,” a prosecutor on the call said later. Others agreed. [Continue reading…]