Trump ‘de-escalates’ Minneapolis ICE effort as Omar attacked (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: We're going to head to the US because President Trump says his administration is going to, in his words, de-escalate a little bit in Minneapolis. This is after the deaths of two protesters at the hands of border agents this month. The new head of the Immigration Enforcement Operation, Tom Homan, is replacing the Border Patrol chief, Greg Bovino, who's expected to leave the city after widespread criticism, along with some of the 3,000 immigration agents deployed there. Here's our North America correspondent Peter Bowes.

[00:00:34] Speaker 2: The protests continue. Demonstrators say they won't give up until the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave Minnesota. The mood is still angry, but some of the tensions of recent weeks are slowly lifting, in large part because the man who's taken most of the heat from critics, the outspoken US Border Patrol commander, Gregory Bovino, is out. He inflamed tensions when he claimed, without evidence, that Alex Preti, the Minneapolis nurse and protester who was shot and killed, had been intending to massacre federal agents. Mr Bovino has been replaced by Donald Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, who's now in Minnesota, where he's already met local leaders. Mr Trump has talked of de-escalation, but continues to stand by his administration's tough stance on immigration.

[00:01:30] Speaker 3: Minnesota has low numbers because of the fact that we took thousands of hardened criminals out of Minnesota, so they had good crime numbers, believe it or not, and that's all working out. We have Tom Homan there now, we put him in there, he's great, and they met with the governor, the mayor, everybody else, and we're going to de-escalate a little bit, but I don't think it's a pullback, it's a little bit of a change. Everybody in this room that has a business, you know, you make little changes. You know, Bovino's very good, but he's a pretty out there kind of a guy, and in some cases that's good, maybe it wasn't good here.

[00:02:01] Speaker 2: The Trump administration is under growing pressure from its own supporters. The Republican senator, Tom Tillis, has accused the Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, of being amateurish over her management of the immigration operation in Minnesota. He said she should be out of a job and was making the president look bad on the very policies that helped him win the election. But Mr Trump is standing by Kristi Noem while insisting that there will be an investigation into the death of Alex Pratty.

[00:02:31] Speaker 4: We're doing a big investigation. I want to see the investigation. I'm going to be watching over it. I want a very honorable and honest investigation. I have to see it myself. Well, I'm looking at that whole situation. I love everybody, I love all of our people, I love his family, and it's a very sad situation.

[00:02:58] Speaker 2: But courting further controversy, risking alienating his political allies, Mr Trump, on a visit to Iowa, criticized Alex Pratty for lawfully carrying a gun while at a protest.

[00:03:10] Speaker 3: Certainly he shouldn't have been carrying a gun, but all of, hey look, bottom line, everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident, okay? Everyone, unless you're a stupid person, a very, very unfortunate incident. I don't like that he had a gun. I don't like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That's a lot of bad stuff.

[00:03:30] Speaker 2: A remarkable comment in itself from a Republican president strongly aligned with gun rights groups. President Trump appears to be walking a fine line between defending his administration's goals over immigration while resetting its tactics to be less aggressive and politically damaging. Peter Bowes, BBC News.

[00:03:51] Speaker 1: The Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been attacked by a man while delivering a speech at a town hall event in Minneapolis. Police say the man used a syringe to spray an unknown liquid onto her. Omar, who resumed speaking at the event, was not injured. The man has been arrested. Our reporter, Ana Fahey, was at the event when Omar was attacked.

[00:04:15] Speaker 5: We were in the room when this interaction happened. Congresswoman Omar was just giving a monthly town hall. She does these at different locations in her jurisdiction here. And this man approached her. He sprayed some sort of irritant at her and immediately security got up, got him out of the way. Everyone in the room was quite shaken by the incident. When he was taken away, I could hear him actually say, she's pitting us against each other. She took a moment, the room took a moment to collect themselves, and then they continued on with what they came out there to do, which was to talk about what's going on in their community. Before she continued her remarks and continued answering questions, she told the crowd, we're Minnesota strong, we're going to keep going. And afterwards, we spoke to people who were in attendance, and they said the same thing. They were very happy that she kept going, that they were able to talk about the immigration enforcement efforts that are happening here in their city.