“Domestic Terrorists” | Thin I.C.E. Part 2

You heard him explicitly say in that video, do something B-word. All right, it's time to get aggressive and get the f**k out. All right, we're fine, man. All right, out of the car. Be advised, we've been struck, we've been struck. Get out. A judge ordered the release of evidence in the Marimar Martinez shooting. She was, she had already hit my vehicle. He knew we just shot a woman, we need to justify that shooting. We got out to defend, she came forward and that's when I opened up on her. The agents were lying. Called her some type of a domestic terrorist. Any of you guys got cameras on? Go away please. No one had body cameras or nothing else? No, not at that point. Camera on or no? Yeah, I think you had a lot of people in Chicago looking over their shoulders and seeing what was happening in Minneapolis, seeing a little bit of a deja vu. Renee had the right to speak. She had the right to express herself. She had the right to assemble, she had the right to observe what Operation Metro Surge was doing. You shoot a woman and the first thing out of your mouth is the word bitch. They took a mother away from her children. I don't get that. They know that and they will carry it. Forever. The video shows federal agents wrestling with 37-year-old Alex Preddy. They sprayed him with a chemical agent without just cause whatsoever. They savagely beat him, and then they shot him again and again and again. This looks like a situation. Where an individual wanted to do maximum damage. An attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents. And massacre law enforcement. Committed an act of domestic terrorism. That's the facts. The idea that these people could be called domestic terrorists, it is baffling. Good evening everyone thank you for being here tonight. I want to start out by addressing the loss of life that we saw here in Minneapolis today. Any loss of life is a tragedy and I think all of us can agree that in this situation it was preventable. The whole world had to watch as our entire universe was destroyed. The deep distress The stress our family feels because of Nae's loss is in such a violent and unnecessary way. is complicated by feelings of disbelief, distress, And desperation for change. It was within an hour or two of her death that they had already spun up some narrative of what happened. I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it's a tragedy of her own making. And this administration will continue to stand wholeheartedly by the brave men and women of ICE, including that officer in Minneapolis who was absolutely justified in using self-defense against a lunatic. You knew definitely at that time you're You're dealing with a different beast. I've spoken to the president today on the situation here on the ground. I also just got off the phone a little while ago with Governor Walz and spoke to him as well. The thing that I remember most about that conversation on that day that Renee Goode was killed and the conversation with Kristi Noem was just how cold it felt. And I, at the end, said, well, I hope you sleep well tonight, and she said, I will. And that's how we ended. I have not spoken to her since. Regardless of who your mayor or who your governor is, President Trump promised every single American that he would make America safe again. One of the first press conferences where we had learned that Renee Good was killed. Minutes before I went out there for the presser, I saw the video of what took place, which was horrific. Seconds before I went out there, I learned about a head official from the federal administration identifying the... ICE agent is purely operating in self-defense. ICE officers and agents approached the vehicle of the individual in question who was blocking the officers in with her vehicle and she had been stalking and impeding their work all throughout the day. That is bullshit. The car began to back up. And then pull forward at maybe two miles an hour. She was attempting to drive slowly away. You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. The narrative that was coming out of Washington wasn't aligned with what we were seeing with our own eyes. Our family took some consolation, thinking that perhaps Nae's death would bring about change in our country. And it is not. ICE agents repeatedly ordered her to get out of the car and to stop obstructing law enforcement, but she refused to obey their commands. Renee posed no such threat to Ross or anyone else. He was out of the vehicle's path when he fired the shot. He was not in the vehicle's path when he fired the second shot or third shots. And then not long later, they were designating Renee Good as a domestic terrorist. This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism. That should piss you off not because you're a Democrat. That should piss you off because you're an American and you care about people in this country. And I have a message for ICE. Get the out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. And so, yeah, I was angry. The F-bomb that I dropped was not in my talking points, but it also didn't just slip out. It wasn't an accident. I meant to say it. We realized nothing good was going to come out of any of those statements. We're sending more officers today and tomorrow. They'll arrive. There'll be hundreds more. He was spinning up on the Insurrection Act. But if I needed it, I'd use it. It's very powerful. We did discuss the Insurrection Act. He certainly has the constitutional authority to utilize that. We cannot let Minnesota be the reason why the Insurrection Act would be implemented. There were 1,800 militarized troops that were located in Alaska ready to be deployed at any given moment. I was incredibly concerned that the president had been building up to, had been marshalling the forces both in North Carolina and Alaska to invoke the Insurrection Act. You were calling for it to be invoked. So, um... At what point did you think it should have been invoked? Probably. Right off the bat, behind the scenes, the language I was using was very specifically aimed at trying to prevent the invoking of the Insurrection Act and what I think would have been a catastrophic situation on the streets and been very difficult to contain. Not just ICE, not just Border Patrol, militarized troops coming into the city. How the hell do you deal with that? A mayor of a major American city saying that federal authority doesn't matter. That's the statutory definition of insurrection in federal code. The Department of Justice was being weaponized to come after local elected officials, including myself, criminally. Was there ever a moment where you did think you could be arrested by federal authorities? Yeah. Yeah. We made plans for succession. When you're out there in a position of public trust saying that a legitimate authority is It is... delegitimized, that it doesn't have authority, that it's acting improperly, then that provides a permission structure for people to take to the streets and commit federal crimes and engage in interference with federal law enforcement operations. When do you think it crosses the line into interference? When you Certainly when you physically interject yourself into a law enforcement operation. It's very clear that this individual was harassing and impeding law enforcement operations. The messages that were coming from the Trump administration here in Minneapolis, we've heard them before. Breaking news from Fox 32. I'm Dane Placco. It has been another chaotic day around Chicago. And it all started with federal officers shooting a protester they say rammed their vehicle. We are boxing. A Customs and Border Protection agent shot Marimar Martinez. We've been struck. We've been struck. So I was shot in my arm right here. Right here and then right here on the side of my chest I have a wound also on my right thigh. I have an entry and exit wound. Then that one traveled to my left leg right here at the bottom. I have seven holes in my body. They arrested her in the hospital before they did any investigation, relying solely on the statements of these out-of-town Border Patrol agents. Charged with forcibly assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law enforcement officer. I was watching the news, and I seen that I was getting charged for impeding, interfering. They also called her some type of a domestic terrorist. Labeled as a domestic terrorist. Yeah, I think you had a lot of people in Chicago seeing what was happening in Minneapolis. Seeing a little bit of a deja vu. There were some discrepancies right away. Right, the agent's story was that they were boxed in. They're trying to box us in. That they couldn't move their vehicle. We're going to make contact, and we're boxed in. We are boxed in. And so they had to get out, and then they had to shoot Marimar. All right, we're sorry, ma'am. All right, out of the car. Be advised, we've been struck, we've been struck. Get out! Protesters tell a very different story. They say after an ICE vehicle collided with a car driven by a civilian, agents fired five shots. He said that he shot her five times through the front windshield. I was passing him. I'm telling you, like, he shot, like, in under two seconds. That's a great story if it actually happened, right? But the problem when you tell a lie is you have to keep lying and eventually it catches up with you and you can't explain objective evidence. And I just heard the shots pop out. There's three shots to the windshield as she's driving around him. His fourth shot hit the back rear passenger window, and his fifth shot went from the back of the car to the front of the car. That is objective evidence that his statement that she was driving directly at him is not true. Her attorneys accused the Trump administration of mishandling the investigation and spreading lies. A judge ordered the release of evidence in the Marimar Martinez shooting. The next court appearance is when we actually heard from the Border Patrol agent Charles Exum. who we later found out was bragging about the shooting. Text messages reveal a secret border patrol text group and the agent's mindset after the shooting. When they showed the first text message, It was almost like a gasp, like a shock, like 24 hours after the shooting, his first text about the incident said this cool. I'm up for another round of F A F O and L M A O. A lot of expletives here. He had texted F A F O mess around and find out. I don't want to say the expletives following up with this sweet, my 15 minutes of fame. I've never seen anything like it. It has destroyed the trust of the community in federal law enforcement. The number one question the judge had was, where is the Border Patrol agent's car? Where is it? You'll probably get a good ride. If you're saying that you were rammed, if you said that they blocked you in, we need to look at the cars and the damage to see if that matches up. He drove it like a thousand miles back to Maine. He buffed it out. The Border Patrol agent's car was 1,100 miles away in Maine. So there were a lot of things right away that even the judge was like something isn't right here. Several judges in Chicago and Minnesota kind of pointed to the The way that these agents approached those scenarios, where they escalated things instead of de-escalated them. Going from zero to 100 very, very quickly. So this was a drawing that was drawn by one of the agents when they were interviewed by the FBI immediately after. These are people that were never trained to practice law enforcement in an urban environment. I guess they know nothing about Chicago. These are three cars that they drew in there. Those cars don't exist. They weren't there. If they were there, they would have been boxed in. If they were there... They would have been unable to move. I mean, they really came in like an invading force. That's why the agent drew it, right? Because he knew we just shot a woman. We need to justify that shooting. It's clear that it's being coordinated. People are being trained and told how to use their vehicles to impede law enforcement operations. What are we doing here? During an immigration surge in Chicago last fall, agents reported being rammed, quote, every day during the operation. You hit one of the agents. We hit one of the agents while he was taking off. But a federal judge found, quote, this has not been the norm, with agents instead often treating cars that are merely following them, but not driving aggressively as potential threats. If you keep following us, we're going to arrest you. You'll be warned. The judge also reviewed body camera footage that suggests agents brake checked other motorists to force accidents and justify force. We're going to make contact and we're boxed in. They were creating the environment so they could be hit. As a former federal prosecutor, you like to believe that federal agents are truthful. That is not the case, unfortunately, especially in these immigration operations where we've seen videos disprove what agents are telling us. Literally everything that was coming from the government had to be checked. A lot of the times the official narrative that was coming from DHS was directly undercut by the videos that would later come out. Alleged illegal immigrant from Venezuela who was shot in the leg as a non-life-threatening injury. In north Minneapolis there was the second shooting involving federal agents. The federal agent was assaulted by three individuals. At least that is the position of the DHS when this went down. The Department of Homeland Security posted this within hours, claiming its officer had been ambushed and attacked. Last night what we saw was three individuals weaponized shovels and brooms that attack an ICE officer that had to To defend himself. We gave. The government's interpretation of what had happened based on what those agents had told their superiors, which was they were attacked and they fired their weapon in self-defense. But knowing what we knew had happened in Chicago led us to be very skeptical of those statements because they had made claims before and they did not end up being true. They were lying. they were running with a lie. Shortly after ICE agents shot Julio Sosa-Seliz in the leg, they claimed that they had been attacked with a shovel and were firing in self-defense. But new video released by the Minneapolis Police Department doesn't support those claims. It shows Sosa-Seliz toss the shovel to the ground before the agents get to the home. The story as it unfolded and the story as it was told becomes a very different story in the end. They didn't seem to care what the truth was. It didn't seem to bother them that they were Pushing a narrative that could very quickly be disproven by video footage. The Hennepin County Attorney's Office charged Christian Castro with four counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon. Now he's facing federal charges as well for lying about what happened. Christian Castro was at the federal courthouse in Minneapolis today, accused of providing false statements about that shooting that led to protests back in January. He pled not guilty to all six counts. What we do is legal, ethical, and moral. Everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law. Gregory Bovino, for all intents and purposes, was put in charge of these operations. In each city that the Trump administration sent in these immigration agent deployments to, He was in charge. Once Bovino came, it just felt more visceral. I never met the gentleman. He never reached out to me. I would have thought that he would have called the Attorney General and said, what can we do here? Bovino was a breath of fresh air. It did not bode well for us. He brought what was kind of like a folksy... Old-timey, common-sense approach to the enforcement of law. Really implemented a lot of cowboy tactics. And of course we saw plenty of rhetoric along the lines of Nazis and fascists and Gestapo and all of this. I don't think that anything that Bovino was saying or doing We reviewed hours of depositions, body-worn camera footage, and court filings all involving Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino. After reviewing that evidence, a federal judge called Bovino, quote, evasive and And not credible when talking about how agents use force against the public. Were you telling us the truth? That's the question. Can you answer that yes or no? Mr. Brown? Yes or no, I can. Okay. It was pretty remarkable to see a sitting A federal judge also found Bovino was outright lying at times during the more than seven hours he testified under oath. That judge even used the word lie, outright lying. That includes when he was questioned about this video, which shows Bovino using physical A political force against a protester. You got over the barrier, tackled this man to the ground, and arrested him, right? No. Did you not tackle him? No. Do you acknowledge that you're tackling Mr. Blackburn on this video? No. I mean, he is willing to watch a video of himself pushing someone over and then say, I didn't push him like what are you talking about basically like what are you saying you didn't push him obviously push him we all just saw it and we played that clip in our hearing and everyone could see it. There have been many many many lies. People might not like the word lies and I understand that that's hard to accept but the truth of the matter is there were lies. They just had a complete disregard for reality what actually happened the facts. I saved every post I saved. Everything that is ever written, it's my only connection. So for everyone that has anything about Alex, we keep it, we read it, we cherish it. We've received over 2,000 cards and letters. We've read every single word. We've kept every single one of those. Alex Preddy was Michael and Susan's only son. We learned about his death from the media as we saw him being shot repeatedly in the back. And he was gunned down in the middle of the street in broad daylight in front of witnesses, all caught on camera by members, agents of the federal government. The federal government went on TV and lied about Alex. They tried to slander his memory to cover up their crime. I mean, the nature of how Alex Preddy's The killing went down. It was just horrific. It was awful. It was awful to watch. It was tough. He was helping up a woman that they had pushed to the ground. His hands were in the air before he was tackled to the ground. And they savagely bludgeoned him with a canister. Then they disarmed him and then they shot him again and again and again. While he was on the ground. He was face down on the ground when he was executed by ICE agents. That was a Saturday morning and I just happened to be working and got wind of it very quickly. I was taking my daughter, Frida, to dance class. I was doing mom things. I was with my kids. I wasn't there longer than 10 minutes when I got the call from the chief saying that ICE had... killed another person. It was Alex Preddy. I went home and I looked at my husband and I said, it happened again. And he knew instantly what I was talking about. I grabbed a parent that was nearby. I said, hey, I can't believe I have to do this. I'm so sorry, but will you take my kid? And I ran upstairs. I got dressed to go outside in the cold and went to the scene. Hi guys yeah good morning we are here essentially there's two sides of this scene if you will. Security detail came and picked me up and we were off trying to you know. Prevent some of the worst from continuing to happen. This, of course, being, what, the third shooting by agents here in three weeks. I was really afraid. I thought we were going to lose it. I thought we were going to lose each street that day. Chief's probably right. That's probably the closest we got. Oh, they're running. That's somebody running after. Why are they... There we go, right in front of our cameras. And honestly, I don't think it was until hours later that I had a chance to really, really watch the video. Yeah, it was... When those videos were coming out, that was not good. Everyone in this room has seen that video. Millions of people in this country and around the world have seen that video. I think the public and journalists All over the world saw the exact same thing. And that one was really hard to watch. That video haunts our family every day. It runs through our minds. The first time you see the video, the shock of the whole incident just is something that you really take away and it leaves you with just this feeling of sickness. No one from the federal government called us on that horrible day, but they did go on TV to tell lies about Alex. This looks like a situation. where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement. What they said was cruel. It was a lie. They stood up in front of the country and told lies. This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism. That's the facts. Kristi Noem. Got up in front of the microphone, in front of the press corps, and labeled Alex Preddy as a domestic terrorist. They said the same thing against Miss Good, the same thing against Mr. Preddy, and they did it with Marimar. They were labeled as domestic terrorists. Do you agree with that assertion? I don't think it's necessary to categorize them that way. The fact of the matter is, as I see it, they both engaged in crimes defined under the law. They were acting inappropriately. But we do know that he came to that scene and impeded a law enforcement operation. They failed to comply, which escalated the danger which resulted in their deaths. I was listening as they were holding the first press conference and they talked about the gun and they showed the picture of the gun. The agents attempted to disarm the individual. But he violently resisted. Here we had a lawful gun owner lawfully carrying a gun. He was not brandishing a weapon. He was not waving a weapon. Had that gun removed from him and then was shot. Agents took his gun away and then shot him. You cannot bring a firearm. Loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple. You don't have that right to break the law and incite violence. That's the stupidest argument. I don't know, do they have constitutional lawyers that are working with them? I'm, you know. It's not unlawful to be carrying while you're exercising your First Amendment. You don't have to pick between which, you know, which rights you exercise. The gun lobby in Minnesota rushing to the defense of Alex Preddy. It's not a crime to be near police officers. It's not a crime to be in a protest with a firearm. They couldn't believe it, that basically because he had a gun in that situation, it was licensed to shoot him. Do you agree with that legal argument? No, I don't, and that legal argument was pretty well debunked. I mean, it's so nutty and nonsensical that, like, you start to laugh until you realize, hey, we're talking about... The erosion of our Constitution. Agents of our own government could come and gun someone down in the middle of the street. Someone who was there, had every right to be there, had every right to be doing what he was doing. I don't think anybody has yet apologized to those families. We have not heard anything from the federal government. One of the most hurtful things they could ever imagine was said by you about their son. Do you have anything you want to say to Alex Preddy's parents? We were relying in the hours after that incident that was so horrific on information we were getting from the ground from our agents. I just asked if you had anything you wanted to say to the parents or to the family of Renee Good after you called them domestic terrorists. I can't even imagine what they have gone through in the loss of their son, in the loss of their family members. It's absolutely tragic. But how about specifically calling them domestic terrorists without any evidence of that? Sir, ma'am, I did not call him a domestic terrorist. I said it appeared to be an incident of. Is it so hard to say you were wrong? They have not retracted those statements, those lies. No one has recanted those lies, nor has anyone reached out to Susan, Michaela, our daughter, and myself to apologize. And so, if you think it would be impossible to hurt a family, anymore. They found a way to do it. This is not normal. This is not justice. They actually found a way to make it even worse by spreading these horrible, ugly lies that were so quickly disproven and refuted. Do your job and stop shielding Alex's killers. All they do is complain, complain, complain. We definitely know they're going to lie. I'm unsure of what Operation Metro Surge accomplished. There are currently more federal agents in the Twin Cities than there are police officers in Minneapolis and St. Paul combined. They're really coming in hot. They're really coming in aggressive. One had a gun pointed at his head. Why are we doing this? Why are we creating chaos? The question is, when are you investigating as an agent? When the plane was first leaving Texas, that's when I was worried. I was like, man, where am I going? What are they going to do to me? There is an explosion. of cases here. All the rules were being thrown out the window. The system sucks. ICE was trying to rewrite them on the fly. We're not going to be deterred. It's not going away just because you don't see it in viral moments. It's a whole lot of trauma in this city. We will be dealing with this for years. You know, I think this administration thinks this is over. I think people have moved on from Operation Metro Surge. Really, this is only the beginning.