Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Samuel Corum
Topics: Donald Trump, Minnesota, US News
Callum Jones
Topics: Donald Trump, Minnesota, US News
Donald Trump has made a decision regarding the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.
Earlier this month, Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis after dropping her kids off at school on January 7.
While the Trump administration dubbed her as a 'domestic terrorist', Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, pleaded for ICE officers to be withdrawn from Minnesota.
More recently, on January 24, ICU nurse Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal agents amid protests in Minneapolis.
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Such fatal incidents have heightened tensions in the US, with the president now saying his government is going to 'de-escalate' operations in Minnesota.
Speaking with Fox News, Trump said: "We're going to de-escalate a little bit," before adding that it was not a 'pullback'.
"Bottom line, it was terrible. Both of them were terrible."
Trump spoke about the terrible incidents, starting with the more recent one involving Pretti.
"I think the whole thing is terrible," he said. "I don't like the fact that he was carrying a gun, that was fully loaded, and he had two magazines with him.
"It's pretty unusual. But nobody knows when they saw the gun, how they saw the gun. Bottom line is that it was terrible."
Video footage has suggested that there's no evidence Pretti had any intent on causing harm to officers with the firearm he was permitted to hold.
In the Fox News interview, Trump went on to address Good's death, while bizarrely speaking about her and Pretti's parents.
"Both of them were terrible. The other was terrible too. I'm not sure about his parents, but I know her parents were big Trump fans," the POTUS went on.
Trump continued: "Makes me feel bad anyway, but I guess you could say even worse - they were tremendous Trump people, Trump fans. And their daughter was, I don't know if you can say radicalized, maybe radicalized, maybe not, I don't know.
"But I hate to see it, I hate to see it."
A new pool has looked into what Americans think of ICE following recent events. Half of respondents felt that Pretti's death was not justified, while just 20 percent believed it was.
Over three quarters of Democrat voters in the poll stated they want ICE abolished all together. But on the other hand, 21 percent of Republicans felt ICE officers were not being forceful enough.