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The Daily Wrap Up

26 Jan, 2026

Jan 27

[Transcript edited for clarity, length and flow]

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It’s been a week in America, has it not?

On Saturday, a federal immigration officer fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, sparking hundreds of protesters to take to the frigid streets of a city already shaken by a second deadly shooting in just weeks. Mr. Pretti was a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse who worked at a VA hospital. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has activated the National Guard as protests have grown, deploying troops to the shooting site and to a nearby federal building. The killing occurred just over a mile from where 37-year-old Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE Agent Jonathan Ross on January 7.

Since Ms. Good’s shooting, protests have continued across Minneapolis. On Saturday evening, Mr. Pretti’s family released a heartbreaking statement saying they were devastated, but also furious. They described their son as a kindhearted person who wanted to make a positive impact on the world through his work as a nurse. They condemned what they called the administration’s lies, writing:

The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs, federal agents. He had his phone in his right hand, his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down while being pepper sprayed. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.

On Sunday, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey sharply criticized federal immigration enforcement practices following the fatal shooting. She called the incident unnecessary and emblematic of an agency she described as out of control, operating without adequate training or accountability. Governor Healey had this to say:

This just isn’t right. This is so wrong, what’s happened. It was so unnecessary. There was no need for all of that to go down in the way that it did. It is just an example of how out of control ICE is. It’s why I call on Kristi Noem to resign. It’s why I call on ICE to get out of these cities and these states. Donald Trump needs to rein this in and take this back.

We have people who are clearly untrained who work for ICE now. As you know, a lot of people were recruited with $50,000 bonuses, come work for ICE. Minimal training. I’ve talked to colleagues in other states. Some of the training is online training. Online training. You would never run a law enforcement agency, or any agency frankly, with online training.

What we have seen happen in Minnesota now, week after week, is action and conduct that is not consistent with good law enforcement practices and is harming public safety. It’s not helping public safety. We actually have the safety and wellbeing of residents and Americans threatened by ICE’s presence in these places.

Governor Healey also made an essential point. Alex Pretti and Renee Good are dead, and others have been injured and terrorized, not because they were protesting, but because ICE was there in the first place.

At a White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered the administration’s explanation for what led to Alex Pretti’s murder. She had this to say:

But let’s be clear about the circumstances which led to that moment on Saturday. This tragedy occurred as a result of a deliberate and hostile resistance by Democrat leaders in Minnesota. For weeks, Governor Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey and other elected Democrats were spreading lies about federal law enforcement officers who are risking their lives daily to remove the worst criminal illegal aliens from our streets, murderers, rapists, pedophiles, human traffickers, and gang members.

What Leavitt is suggesting is that Alex Pretti somehow deserved to be murdered because Democratic leaders are telling the truth about ICE’s actions. Somehow, his First Amendment right to protest peacefully was negated by Democratic officials objecting to ICE’s tactics. That logic is not just incoherent. It is grotesque.

Leavitt was also asked whether Gregory Bovino would remain in Minneapolis overseeing ICE operations. Her response was revealing:

Mr. Bovino is a wonderful man and he’s a great professional. He is going to very much continue to lead Customs and Border Patrol throughout and across the country. Mr. Homan will be the main point of contact on the ground in Minneapolis.

Donald announced on his Truth Social media platform that he is sending Tom Homan to Minnesota in response to the backlash over Alex Pretti’s murder. Here is what he wrote:

Governor Tim Walz called me with the request to work together with respect to Minnesota. It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength. I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I! We have had such tremendous success in Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and virtually every other place that we have touched, and even in Minnesota, crime is way down, but both Governor Walz and I want to make it better!

In reality, the murder rate in Minneapolis is up, thanks to ICE. Tom Homan is not a moderating influence. He is as aggressive and unrestrained as Greg Bovino. Swapping one for the other is not going to make a meaningful difference. I do not hold out much hope that Homan will be any better.

The Hill reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz demanding that Minnesota abandon its sanctuary policies and turn over voter rolls to the Department of Justice to “confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law.” She also requested data on SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries. Bondi had this to say:

I am confident that these simple steps will help bring back law and order to Minnesota and improve the lives of Americans.

Let’s be clear about what Bondi is doing. She is essentially saying that ICE and Customs and Border Patrol will leave Minnesota only if the state hands over sensitive voter and benefits data. That is extortion. It is the Attorney General of the United States engaging in extortion. It is horrifying, and it exposes the lie at the heart of the Trump Regime’s claim that it cares about the safety of American citizens.

I am not convinced we have reached the point at which things will get better. It is still possible they will get worse before they improve. ICE agents have been unleashed, and no one is restraining them. The only real solution, short of deploying the National Guard to protect Americans from a federal agency, is to remove ICE entirely, defund it, and dismantle it.

Democrats must hold their ground and be willing to do whatever it takes, including allowing Republicans to once again shut down the government, to protect Americans from ICE and other agencies operating under the control of the Department of Homeland Security.

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We Can't Trust the Government

The Trump Administration has completely eroded any confidence that Americans once held in our institutions.

Ally Sammarco Jan 12

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Living in a democracy depends on one basic assumption: that government institutions will tell the truth and act in the public interest. When that assumption collapses, citizens are thrust into a climate of uncertainty and distrust. Today, Americans are witnessing this erosion in real time.

One of the most recent examples of this erosion is the Trump administration’s attempt to influence the Federal Reserve’s independence. President Trump has publicly and repeatedly criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting interest rates aggressively and has even taken the extraordinary step of having the Department of Justice subpoena the Fed and threaten Powell with criminal indictment over routine testimony about renovation projects—an unprecedented escalation that Powell and independent economists say appears aimed at coercing monetary-policy decisions than addressing any legitimate legal issue, drawing warnings from former Fed chairs and market analysts about the danger to central bank autonomy.

Trust has also been dismantleed in the arena of immigration enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under Secretary Kristi Noem, issued official lists of allegedly false media reports about local ICE activity—while multiple high-profile incidents have suggested that the government’s own initial narratives were inaccurate. For example, federal officials initially described the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent as justified self-defense, yet multiple bystander and body-camera videos and statements from local leaders show conflicting accounts about whether Good posed an imminent threat, prompting Minneapolis’s mayor to publicly reject the administration’s version of events and sparking widespread protest.

A particularly problematic front in the erosion of trust has been labor statistics—numbers that are integral to understanding the health of the economy and informing everything from monetary policy to individual financial planning. In 2025, President Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner after a weaker-than-expected jobs report and then publicly accused the agency of producing “phony” numbers without offering evidence. The BLS routinely revises its employment estimates as more comprehensive data comes in—a standard practice economists say is necessary and not a sign of manipulation—but Trump’s dismissal of these figures as “rigged” and his replacement of career civil servants with political appointees has alarmed statisticians and economists. These upheavals have raised real concerns that labor data, long considered among the most reliable in the world, could be politicized—undermining confidence in official economic benchmarks that ordinary Americans rely on to judge job prospects and economic policy.

Another consequential marker of distrust has been the government’s handling of the documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act to force the release of millions of pages of investigative material, but the Justice Department has published less than 1 % of the roughly two million documents it acknowledged possessing—even after missing the law’s deadline. Attorney General Pam Bondi and DOJ officials have cited the need to protect victim identities and the complexity of reviewing sensitive material, but lawmakers from both parties have criticized the piecemeal, heavily redacted disclosures as inadequate and possibly politically influenced. In one notable controversy, dozens of documents were removed from the DOJ’s public site shortly after being posted, without explanation, fueling accusations from legislative critics that the administration is obscuring evidence and failing to comply with transparency requirements.

The pattern extends beyond isolated incidents. Independent fact-checking and local political leaders have accused DHS of issuing misleading footage and narratives to shape public perception of immigration enforcement. Investigations have shown instances where “chaos” clips touted by officials were taken out of context or from different locations than claimed—actions that directly conflict with DHS statements defending their operations, and leave residents unsure of what is reality and what isn’t.

When governments twist facts to fit narratives, dismiss inconvenient truths, or leverage federal power against independent institutions, citizens pay the price: cynicism arises and polarization deepens. Living in such an environment makes it harder for ordinary Americans to believe official statements about economic conditions, inflation, employment trends, public safety, or just about anything. Trust is the implicit contract that holds democracy together. When that contract is broken, everything falls apart.