Naturally, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Representative Thomas Massie, and a handful of other congressional Republicans who regularly dare to defy Trump spoke out against the administration after Pretti was killed.
But now a growing number of Republicans are joining them in publicly pushing back against the tactics used by federal immigration agents, even if they still support the Trump administration’s broader mass-deportation goal.
On Sunday, Thom Tillis, North Carolina’s outgoing GOP senator, issued a statement calling for a “thorough and impartial investigation” of Pretti’s shooting.
“Any administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins are doing an incredible disservice to the nation and to President Trump’s legacy,” he said.
His call for an investigation was echoed by Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, who is facing a Trump-backed primary challenger:
As well as two very conservative members of the House GOP, Dusty Johnson of South Dakota and Michael McCaul of Texas, both of whom demanded a “thorough investigation.”
Representative Andrew Garbarino of New York, who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security, asked the leaders of ICE, U.S. Customs and Borders Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to testify before the committee. Though he did not explicitly criticize immigration agents or even mention Minneapolis, he noted in a statement that “Congress has an important responsibility to ensure the safety of law enforcement and the people they serve and protect.”
Other Republican elected officials are privately raising their concerns with the Trump administration, according to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, and an even larger number are hoping someone else will bring the immigration “vibe shift” to Trump’s attention so they won’t have to:
They plead with Trump and his advisers in private to calm tensions, as a handful did this weekend. However, most officials hope one of their colleagues can do that work so they don’t have to play the heavy. “You can talk to them” or “Can you talk to them?” are phrases I don’t need access to text chains to know are being relayed between top Republicans.
When lawmakers do reach Trump, the dialogue is similar to those private messages he posted last week from European leaders eager to get him off his Greenland fetish: Start with praise and flattery before moving to the heart of the matter.
And while hope may not be a strategy, as the saying goes, there’s a whole lot of hope among Republican officials — mostly that they don’t have to go public with their true feelings, because if they wait for a few days the president will consume so much media coverage he’ll recognize the depth of the crisis.
Margaret Hartmann
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