Uncensored Free Speech Platform

Trump tight-lipped on whether he backs agents’ decision to shoot Pretti
Who's accountable for the results?

President Donald Trump dodged on whether he supported federal agents’ decision to shoot and kill 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday during an immigration operation.

Trump was pressed by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Dawsey on whether Border Patrol agents responded appropriately when they killed Pretti, who briefly intervened when an agent pushed a woman to the ground during the operation. According to Dawsey, Trump twice did not answer the question, before saying his administration was “reviewing everything.”

“We’re looking, we’re reviewing everything and will come out with a determination,” the president responded.

Trump did express displeasure with the shooting as a whole, while remaining critical of Pretti’s decision to open-carry a handgun while protesting.

“I don’t like any shooting. I don’t like it,” he 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 Department of Homeland Security said after the shooting that Pretti was armed with a “9 mm semi-automatic handgun” and likely “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

Trump appeared to stand by that account on Sunday, fixating on the gun itself and calling it “dangerous and unpredictable” and suggesting it could have fired unexpectedly.

Bystander footage, however, has largely called that characterization into question. Pretti is seen holding just his cell phone during the entire encounter and only briefly steps between the agent and the woman, before being pepper-sprayed and later dragged to the ground by at least five agents. While he was armed, an agent appears to remove the weapon from Pretti’s waistband and away from the scene just before he is shot dead.

The shooting has led to backlash from both sides of the political spectrum, with multiple congressional Republicans calling for an investigation and the removal of federal immigration agents from Minneapolis.

BORDER PATROL AGENTS INVOLVED IN PRETTI SHOOTING REASSIGNED

Trump appeared open to that move in the Wall Street Journal interview, saying federal agents will leave the city “at some point.”

He did, however, maintain that some agents would be staying indefinitely to continue investigating the Minnesota fraud scandal, which he has attempted to tie to the shooting by alleging a “COVER UP” by state lawmakers.

Federal immigration officials privately fume over DHS claims after deadly Minnesota shooting
Every delay has consequences.

Deep internal divisions have emerged within federal immigration enforcement over how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is handling the public fallout and messaging after a deadly Border Patrol shooting in Minneapolis, Fox News has learned.
More than half a dozen federal law enforcement officials involved in immigration enforcement tell Fox News there is growing frustration with how senior officials have framed the incident publicly, fueling internal debates about tone, strategy and credibility as scrutiny intensifies.
The shooting happened during a morning immigration enforcement operation Saturday, when a Border Patrol agent fatally shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and Veterans Affairs intensive care unit nurse. Authorities say Pretti was armed with a handgun and two magazines.
In the hours and days that followed, DHS officials publicly described Pretti as a domestic terrorist and said he was attempting to "inflict maximum damage" on federal agents or carry out a "massacre," language that has drawn internal criticism from within the department, Fox News is told.
VANCE CALLS MINNEAPOLIS UNREST 'ENGINEERED CHAOS' AFTER DEADLY SHOOTING
Officials say multiple videos that later emerged have called into question the DHS narrative, fueling frustration among agents who believe senior officials moved too quickly to characterize the incident before all facts were known.
The internal disputes, officials say, have been damaging from a public relations and morale standpoint, eroding trust and credibility and intensifying broader debates within the administration over how DHS leadership handles high-profile, politically charged incidents.
The officials who spoke with Fox News said they support the mass deportation agenda, though they have serious hesitations about the messaging and how the agenda is being carried out.
GOP LAWMAKER RENEWS OVERSIGHT HEARING REQUEST OF DHS AGENCIES FOLLOWING FATAL SHOOTING IN MINNEAPOLIS
Some also expressed frustration that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is routinely blamed for the actions of the Border Patrol, which is a separate agency.
Some officials described DHS’ response to the shooting as "a case study on how not to do crisis PR," with one saying they are so "fed up" that they wish they could retire, another saying "DHS is making the situation worse," and another adding that "DHS is wrong" and "we are losing this war, we are losing the base and the narrative."
Fox News reached out to DHS for comment on concerns that its rhetoric and communications may have damaged the agency’s …

JD Vance shares ‘crazy' story of ICE and CBP officers being mobbed in Minneapolis
This affects the entire country.

Vice President JD Vance on Sunday shared what he called a "crazy" account underscoring the dangers federal immigration officers are facing in Minneapolis, amid a series of agent-involved shootings and escalating unrest.
Recounting a recent visit to the city, Vance described an incident in which off-duty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers were doxxed while dining at a restaurant.
According to Vance, their location was publicly revealed, the restaurant was mobbed, and the officers were effectively trapped inside.
"When I was in Minneapolis, I heard a number of crazy stories. But near the top of the list: A couple of off duty ICE and CBP officers were going to dinner in Minneapolis," Vance wrote on X. "They were doxed and their location revealed, and the restaurant was then mobbed. The officers were locked in the restaurant."
ALEX PRETTI, 37, IDENTIFIED AS MAN FATALLY SHOT BY BORDER PATROL AGENT IN MINNEAPOLIS
Vance said local police refused to respond when the officers called for help.
"The officers were locked in the restaurant, and local police refused to respond to their pleas for help (as they've been directed by local authorities)," he wrote. "Eventually, their fellow federal agents came to their aid."
BARACK AND MICHELLE OBAMA SLAM ICE AFTER MINNEAPOLIS SHOOTING, URGE ACCOUNTABILITY
"This is just a taste of what's happening in Minneapolis because state and local officials refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement," Vance wrote. "They have created the chaos so they can have moments like yesterday, where someone tragically dies and politicians get to grandstand about the evils of enforcing the border."
Vance urged Minneapolis officials to change course.
"The solution is staring everyone in the face. I hope authorities in Minneapolis stop this madness."
A day earlier, Vance described the unrest in Minnesota as "engineered chaos" following another fatal federal agent-involved shooting.
NOEM SAYS MINNEAPOLIS SUSPECT COMMITTED ‘DOMESTIC TERRORISM,’ ACCUSES WALZ, FREY OF INCITING VIOLENCE
On Saturday, 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis nurse who was carrying a licensed handgun while protesting a federal immigration enforcement operation, was fatally shot by a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Authorities say Pretti resisted arrest after trying to intervene in the operation.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Fox News Digital's Amanda Macias contributed to this report.

The far-left network that helped put Alex Pretti in harm's way, then made him a martyr
Every delay has consequences.

The skirmish that led to Saturday's fatal shooting of an agitator by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis and the response that followed were driven by a complex network of far-left organizations with a wide range of causes, a Fox News Digital investigation found.
A coordinated web of encrypted chats, street alerts and tracking of ICE "Abductors" in a sophisticated database reviewed by Fox News Digital shows that agitators were already mobilized at the scene where 37-year-old Alex Pretti was killed minutes before any shots were fired. 
ICE and Border Patrol agents were there to arrest an illegal immigrant criminal, and Pretti and others were there, outside a donut shop, to meet them as part of a strategic pattern of organized interference with law enforcement operations.
Over the following hours, a national network of socialist, communist and Marxist-Leninist cells in the United States leveraged the tragic fatality into a nationwide protest operation. While grief and outrage over Pretti's death is genuine, the network's real-time rapid response, using short sensational video clips and emojis as weapons of propaganda, offers a window into the disciplined logistics, messaging and coordination of far-left warriors fomenting insurgency-like confrontation with authorities.
VANCE CALLS MINNEAPOLIS UNREST 'ENGINEERED CHAOS' AFTER DEADLY SHOOTING
"This level of engineered chaos is unique to Minneapolis. It is the direct consequence of far left agitators, working with local authorities," Vice President JD Vance observed in a Sunday post on X.
The encrypted Signal messages obtained by Fox News Digital in real time show that anti-ICE "rapid responders" were actively tracking, broadcasting and summoning "backup" around federal agents outside Glam Doll Donuts on Nicollet Avenue, where the shooting happened. Local "rapid responders" made at least 26 entries into a database called "MN ICE Plates" in the critical hours before and after the killing, documenting the license plate numbers and details of alleged ICE vehicles they claimed to see around Nicollet Avenue.
The entry at row 344 read, "At the nicollet [sic] murder," chronicling a black Jeep Wagoneer at the location with agents allegedly "involved in shooting." Row 338 had a "Glam Doll Donuts" entry, tracking a black Ford Taurus. 
BONDI BLAMES MINNEAPOLIS LEADERS AFTER ARMED SUSPECT KILLED, UNREST ERUPTS DURING ICE OPERATION
At 9:50 a.m. ET, just before the killing, a user identified as "Willow" shared a 22-second video on an encrypted Signal chat for anti-ICE "rapid responders."
"26and 3rd," wrote "Willow," …

Canada has ‘no intention’ of signing free trade deal with China, Carney says
Who benefits from this decision?

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney insisted he has no plans to pursue a free trade agreement with China, as President Donald Trump fumes over a recent partnership between the two countries.

Canada and China struck a “preliminary agreement” on Jan. 16 that saw both lower tariffs on certain goods. It included Canada importing 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles annually at a lowered rate of 6.1%, and China agreeing to lower tariffs on some Canadian agricultural products.

The move has angered Trump, who threatened a 100% tariff on all Canadian exports to the United States if Carney “makes a deal” with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Carney responded to the threat on Sunday by denying he had such a plan and defending the recent agreement.

“We have commitments under CUSMA not to pursue free trade agreements with nonmarket economies without prior notification,” he told reporters. “We have no intention of doing that with China or any other nonmarket economy.”

Carney instead framed the recent China deal as fixing “some issues that developed in the last couple of years,” particularly with EVs. He maintained that it is “entirely consistent” with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement.

His comments come as tensions between him and Trump are high, particularly after they attacked each other in respective speeches at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.

Without name-dropping Trump or the U.S., Carney warned of “great powers” using “economic integration as weapons,” specifically through tariffs.

Trump responded to that speech by saying Carney “wasn’t so grateful” and that “Canada lives because of the United States.”

“Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements,” he added.

Trump would later go on to revoke Carney’s invitation to join the Board of Peace, a Trump-chaired coalition primarily focused on Gaza’s reconstruction after the Israel-Hamas war.

But the concern over China’s increase presence in Canada’s economy has extended beyond any personal disagreements the two leaders may share.

Earlier on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressed alarm about Carney’s trade deal with Xi, specifically with the possibility that Canada becomes “an opening” for China to dump cheap products into the U.S.

BESSENT SAYS CARNEY ‘NOT DOING THE BEST JOB’ FOR CANADA AMID CHINA TRADE TALKS

“I’m not sure what Prime Minister Carney is doing here, other than trying to virtue signal to his global friends at Davos. I don’t think he is …

Clinton and Obama blast federal agents over Pretti shooting
Who's accountable for the results?

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama released statements on Sunday critical of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent. Both presidents expressed sympathy over Pretti’s death while criticizing the string of events that led to it. They also lamented the recent events in Minnesota and condemned the conduct and actions of federal agents. Both considered it a pivotal moment for the country’s future.

“In recent weeks, we’ve watched horrible scenes play out in Minneapolis and other communities that I never thought would take place in America,” Clinton said in his statement. “People, including children, have been seized from their homes, workplaces, and the street by masked federal agents.”

Over the course of a lifetime, we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come.  This is one of them.
— Bill Clinton (@BillClinton) January 25, 2026

“Peaceful protesters and citizens exercising their constitutional right to observe and document law enforcement have been arrested, beaten, teargassed, and most searingly, in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, shot and killed,” Clinton said.

Obama expressed similar sentiments, calling Pretti’s death a “tragedy” and claiming that the nation’s values were “under assault.”

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 25, 2026

“The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy,” said Obama. “It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.”

He then proceeded to blast federal law enforcement officials, claiming they engaged in reckless behavior “designed to intimidate and harass” while lacking “discipline and accountability.” He said that Americans were “rightly outraged” over the agents’ behavior amid recent events. 

“For weeks now, people across the country have been rightly outraged by the spectacle of masked ICE recruits and other federal agents acting with impunity and engaging in tactics that seem designed to intimidate, harass, provoke, and endanger the residents of a major American city,” Obama said. “These unprecedented tactics — which even the former top lawyer of the …

Alexander Bowen: It’s high time we looked at the ‘special relationship’ with a far more realistic eye
We're watching the same failure loop.

Alexander Bowen is a trainee economist based in Belgium, specialising in public policy assessment, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

In 1991, for four days, Kazakhstan stood alone as the Soviet Union – despite there being no other soviets to be in Union with – including the Russians.

For 243 years, from the end of Mary I to the Act of Union that merged Ireland into the UK, the English and British sovereigns self-styled themselves as the rulers of France despite having no French land.

For just over a millennium, the Germans speaking little Latin, and enjoying near zero territorial or cultural continuity with Rome, declared their sovereign the Emperor of the Romans.

Each of these are titles arising from a moment in time where for a fleeting second they were indeed accurate – or at least accurate enough – but that aged into absurdity. Voltaire’s adage about the latter, the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, that it was “ni saint, ni romain, ni empire” is well known enough today. Its contemporary equivalent, that the ‘special relationship’ is neither special nor a relationship (at least not a healthy one) still needs some publicity work.

Much like the Holy Roman Empire snatching its Roman claim from the dying East, the special relationship was born in the snatching of leadership from the East. Before the special relationship Britain was what?

It was the centre of a global free trade area – a position that the US destroyed in Article VII of the lend-lease agreement. It was the home of the global reserve currency – a position the US destroyed using lend-lease and then cemented at Bretton-Woods. It was the major technological power – a position surrendered in the Quebec Agreement and Tizard Mission before the Americans having acquired the technology decided ‘perhaps not’. It was still capable of exercising power in its interests – before the Americans declared that they would break Britain if it did not back down and break itself.

You needn’t even go back to ‘ancient history’ to see what the special relationship looks like.

A US under Obama promising the Russians Britain’s nuclear secrets or Trump’s State Department making fun of British veterans and trying to dictate the UK’s purely domestic policies are not imperial history. Nor are tariff threats for standing up for basic morality as far as Greenland is concerned. The US government may be more openly hostile, more openly imperialistic, but it is, if we accept reality, not new.

We have established then the ‘What?’ but of equal consequence is the ‘Why?’. Why are ‘we’ obsessed with the Americans and our ‘special relationship’? There are I think four theories-

The first that, for about five years under Tony Blair the special relationship really was a special relationship. Blair was sincerely …

Andrew Griffith: Labour just don’t care about Britain’s small businesses
Law enforcement shouldn't be political.

Andrew Griffith MP is Shadow Secretary of State for Business & Trade and Conservative MP for Arundel & South Downs.

It’s a common refrain that Whitehall doesn’t care about the little guy.

Small businesses, the self-employed, those looking for their first job — they’re not wrong to feel neglected or ignored. This Labour government rarely thinks about business but if it does so at all, it is big business to which they turn. Perhaps as those tend to be unionised. Or they feel more comfortable amongst their armies of lawyers and lobbyists. Maybe it’s just ignorance in that if you’ve never worked in the private sector, every business seems the same.

Either way, there is a key dividing line here between Labour and our own Conservative approach.

By contrast, when I think about business – reflecting the composition of my own constituency of small towns with no single large employer at all – it is the hair salon, the chain of bakers, the one unit lock up in an industrial estate, an early years nursery, the pub or a self-employed tradesman with a van who is front of my mind. The type of family or privately owned businesses which make up 5.6 million small businesses employing 13 million people.

So, we Conservatives will put the smallest businesses, the self-employed and those at the very start of their careers or thinking of starting a business one day at the heart of our policy making.

Of course, it’s not either/or. We do need the Rolls Royces and GSKs. But good policy making starts with the end in mind and it is the smallest businesses where the rubber hits the road, where the margins of error are tightest and where the sort of ill-thought through policies and taxes that this government seems to specialise in, are fatal.

I’ve said on Con Home before that I believe in office Conservatives did not give sufficiently full-throated support to enterprise. Higher taxes post pandemic, permitting red tape to proliferate rather than be slashed, and allowing HMRC to do their worst on IR35. But the past year and a half have thrown this into stark relief.

A death tax which exempts private equity owners and multinationals but singles out British-owned family businesses. The £25 billion National Insurance rate rise and threshold changes which penalise hiring. Energy cost rises. Business rate hikes of tens and even hundreds of per cent on our high street premises.

Not for nothing is the online speculation about what the hospitality sector must have done to Rachel Reeves in a former life!

In meetings last week I spoke with dozens of business owners employing thousands of people. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things but having to make difficult choices. A hotel owner looking to move to an employment-lite, ‘’room rental’ model. A chain of early years nurseries …

James Ford and Alex Challoner: London Conservatives need our own think tank
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.

Alex Challoner is a former prospective London mayoral candidate and the current Director of London Vision Network. James Ford was an adviser on transport and technology policy to former Mayor of London Boris Johnson and is now a columnist for City AM.

Any regular reader of Conservative Home that has read the past contributions of this article’s authors (in these august pages and elsewhere) will be well aware that we are restless, relentless advocates for change in London. We have long urged the party to take London more seriously as a political battleground and proposed urgent reforms needed to make the Conservative Party in London more professional, more credible, and generally more electorally competitive.

These proposed reforms have included the more timely selection of a mayoral candidate, that the party leadership and organisation needs to see the importance of the capital to the party’s national recovery, that party structures in the capital are ripe for an overhaul, and of the need to attract heavyweight political contenders as potential candidates. Given that London’s political landscape is becoming ever more crowded and unpredictable, that it is becoming increasingly obvious that the serving Mayor has overstayed his welcome, and that the Starmer Government seems to have it in for London, our clarion calls for change are only going to become more frequent – and more urgent – in 2026. To that end, our latest call to action is that London needs its own dedicated Conservative think tank.

This article does not intend to cast any shade on the sterling work that the brilliant minds of Tufton Street and elsewhere already do. Policy Exchange’s recent work revealing the harrowing true extent of knife crime in the capital, for example, proves that the existing Conservative-inclined think tanks can and do make an effective impact upon the capital’s policy discourse. But, with the process of developing policies for the next general election manifesto already underway in earnest, it is clear that their considerable intellectual firepower is likely to be directed to finding national solutions to UK-wide problems. It is important that crafting a compelling policy offer for London does not fall through the cracks or become a mere afterthought. A think tank dedicated to identifying market-orientated, centre-right solutions to the capital’s myriad policy challenges and complex issues is not just urgently needed but, arguably, long overdue.

Without a commitment to producing robust, well-researched policies that capture Londoners’ imaginations there is arguably little point in fielding a strong mayoral candidate or improving the effectiveness of the party’s campaigning. London has seemingly been engulfed by a rising tide of failure and declinism under Sadiq …

Badenoch must leave the way open to a reunification deal with Farage
Be honest—this is ridiculous.

During her ebullient performance yesterday morning on Desert Island Discs, Kemi Badenoch took the chance to warn against multiculturalism, and the identity politics which it fosters:

“You ask people to retreat into groups, into tribes, rather than find the thing that they have in common. Identity politics is a recipe for conflict.”

She went on to speak of the need to bring groups together, and the importance of preserving a British identity. This is absolutely right. It would be disastrous if Britain were to become Balkanised into competing factions, each of which believes itself to be so righteous it is justified in despising and exterminating the others.

Glimpses of this sectarian mentality can be found throughout our history, but the Conservative Party is one of the institutions which has thrived by refusing to set tests of the purity of its members’ beliefs.

The party has avoided the error of claiming to possess an infallible cure for the nation’s ills. It prefers intelligent adaptation to circumstance, the doing of the best one can in a fallen world, the choosing of what seems at the time like the lesser of two evils.

It is allergic to all forms of utopianism: it shrinks with horror from the vainglorious claim that mankind can be perfected.

As Sir Ian Gilmour remarked in The Body Politic, published in 1969, “The Tory party has emotions but no doctrine.” He went on to observe that the nearest thing it has to a doctrine is is an anti-doctrine: the belief “that all political theories are at best inadequate, at worst false”.

The Conservative Party in its modern form is above all the creation of Sir Robert Peel in the 1830s, when he published that dull and prudent statement of intent, the Tamworth Manifesto, which showed that the Tories understood modern realities and now accepted the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which they had bitterly resisted.

But before long the Conservative Party split over the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel and most of his ministerial colleagues, who at that point included the astonishingly gifted William Gladstone, had come to the view that repeal was the right policy, and in 1846 they got it through with the help of the Opposition.

Peel and his colleagues had failed to carry with them the great inarticulate mass of Tory backbenchers, most of whom were landowners and regarded the abolition of the Corn Laws as a monstrous betrayal of the programme on which in 1841 they had been elected.

These Tory backwoodsmen lacked the ability to make their case, so turned to Benjamin Disraeli to make it for them. His assaults on Peel were so brilliant and so wounding that he destroyed Peel’s career.

He also very nearly destroyed the Conservative Party, which was unable to win another majority until 1874, 28 years after the split …