Minnesota officials moved Monday to counter federal narratives about deaths during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, and they did so on two fronts: a newly launched state website and litigation seeking court protection for evidence gathered by federal authorities after a fatal shooting.
The conflict began after immigration agents fatally shot two residents, including Alex Pretti, during enforcement actions under the Trump administration. Minnesota officials said they encountered what they characterized as misinformation from federal agencies and they also pointed to federal actions they said curtailed the state’s ability to participate in custody transfers and evidence handling.
As part of that response, the Minnesota Department of Corrections launched a website it said was dedicated to combating Department of Homeland Security misinformation after Pretti was killed, according to the report. The site includes examples meant to show Minnesota honoring requests to hold people subject to deportation orders, designed to refute a claim by the Trump administration that such people are routinely allowed to go free.
State corrections officials also published videos depicting what they described as peaceful custody transfers from prison to federal authorities of several individuals the Trump administration said were arrested by immigration agents. In addition, the department issued a news release aimed at dispelling federal claims about criminal records associated with people sought by federal agents, including the person at the center of the Saturday operation near where Pretti was shot.
The state’s evidence dispute has played out in federal court, where the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office filed a lawsuit after the Saturday shooting. The lawsuit sought to preserve evidence collected by federal officials from the Pretti shooting, and a federal judge granted a motion blocking the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence.”
Federal officials, according to the report, called the lawsuit and claims that evidence would be destroyed “ridiculous.” Experts interviewed for the story said the litigation was part of a wider rift that departs from years of cooperation between local and federal agencies on law enforcement missions, particularly when investigations follow fatal force.
Jimmy Gurulé, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and a former federal prosecutor, said he had seen turf battles and other disagreements when he worked with local authorities on task forces in Los Angeles and later as an undersecretary at the U.S. Treasury Department. But he said the situation in Minnesota was “unprecedented,” adding, “The disagreements were always handled behind the scenes. There were never any public statements criticizing other agencies.”
Gurulé also questioned how the breakdown reached the point of court action, saying: “It’s not even a question of collaboration at this point. It’s such a broken relationship,” and he asked, “How did it get to this point, where state and local law enforcement have such little trust in the federal agencies they feel they need to go to court?”
Former federal prosecutor Chris Mattei, now a partner at Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder and representing former FBI employees in lawsuits over their terminations, said he expected the Justice Department to investigate a fatal shooting in normal circumstances. “What you would expect in normal times is the Justice Department would open an investigation into the circumstances of the shooting,” Mattei said, describing the Justice Department and its Civil Rights Division as the independent bodies he said typically handle such matters. He said that, in his view, the Justice Department and Civil Rights Division appeared to have “zero interest in enforcing constitutional rights for citizens in the immigration context.”
Mattei said that under the Trump administration it appeared the Justice Department did not want to change what he described as the wide latitude agents have to conduct immigration enforcement, and he contrasted the idea of uncooperative evidence handling with a stated interest in credible investigations. “These are career investigators,” he said, adding, “They may have different opinions on how to pursue an investigation or how certain evidence should be handled. But usually in my experience they have the same objective to conduct a credible investigation.”
Gurulé called the state effort to preserve evidence “shocking,” saying: “The implication was they are not just keeping evidence from them but possibly destroying it.” He also said the state’s attorney general and Minneapolis police have “grave distrust with ICE and DHS” and that there are “strong disagreements with the tactics that ICE has used.”
The reporting also pointed to how federal and state messaging about the deaths and investigations could affect public confidence. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt distanced President Trump from comments by deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller that had characterized Pretti as an assassin, saying the situation had moved quickly since Saturday and noting that Trump had never used those words.
Gurulé said statements made publicly before an investigation were at odds with norms for impartiality, saying: “You don’t express your conclusion before an investigation and make it public. That is unheard of and upside down.”
Even as experts described the dispute as unusually severe, the report said a call Monday between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and President Donald Trump may signal a path toward reconciliation. Walz’s office said the governor made the case for an impartial investigation of the shootings and that Trump agreed to talk to DHS about ensuring state investigators could conduct an independent investigation. The governor’s office also reiterated that Minnesota would continue honoring requests to hold incarcerated individuals who are not U.S. citizens until federal authorities can take them into custody.
The AP report included a correction that the lawsuit to preserve evidence was filed by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, and that the earlier version incorrectly reported the Minnesota Attorney General as a plaintiff.