Vice President JD Vance has refused to apologize to the family of late anti-ICE protester Alex Pretti after endorsing an initial claim by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller that the ICU nurse was an “assassin.”
“For what?” Vance retorted when asked by The Daily Mail Tuesday whether he would take the description back.
“If something is determined, that the guy who shot Alex Pretti did something bad, then a lot of consequences are going to flow from that,” he added. “We’ll let that happen. I don’t think it’s smart to prejudge the investigation.”
Hours after Pretti, 37, was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Protection agent during a struggle in Minneapolis Jan. 24, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) posted on X that “ICE must leave Minneapolis” and “Congress should not fund this version of ICE.”
“An assassin tried to murder federal agents,” Miller fired back at Murphy, “and this is your response.”
Vance reposted Miller’s attack from his personal account, where it remains online despite video showing that Pretti was disarmed before he was shot.
On Jan. 27, Trump declined to endorse Miller’s description of Pretti, telling reporters as he left the White House: “I haven’t heard that. But he shouldn’t have been carrying a gun.”
“Bottom line, everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident, OK?” the president added. “Everyone, unless you’re a stupid person. Very, very unfortunate … 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.”
Since the killing, Trump has dispatched border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis to try and calm tensions there, while the agents who carried out the shooting have been placed on administrative leave and the Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether Pretti’s civil rights were violated.
“Let’s do the investigation,” Vance reiterated Tuesday. “Let’s figure out, did these officers have a reasonable fear of Alex Pretti given what happened? Did they engage in lawful conduct or unlawful conduct? Let’s let the investigation determine those things.”
