President Donald Trump broke from his top aide on Tuesday and said he did not think Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis, was an "assassin."
Trump was speaking with reporters outside the White House before he was headed to Iowa when a reporter asked him if he thought Pretti was an "assassin" — something White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller had claimed after Pretti was killed in an incident captured on video. Trump replied "no" to the question.
Miller came under fire in the hours after the fatal shooting for his unfounded comments.
"A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists," Miller wrote on X, without mentioning that most experts have said Pretti was disarmed by the agents before the shooting.
Miller, the architect of the Trump administration's aggressive immigration policy, was reportedly pushed out of the conversation late Monday on the future of the Department of Homeland Security as Trump and his team consider recalibrating their approach in the wake of Pretti's killing and the fatal shooting of 37-year-old mother Renee Good earlier this month.