The D Brief: Feds kill again in Minnesota; National Defense Strategy drops; New USAF deployment concept; Space Force wants more troops; And a bit more.

Minnesota authorities have activated the state National Guard at the request of the Hennepin County sheriff, Gov. Tim Walz announced Saturday. 

The soldiers were issued reflective vests so they would not be mistaken for federal agents. They were filmed Sunday at a federal building passing out donuts, coffee, and hot chocolate to citizens protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations throughout Minneapolis. Walt activated the Guard after the sheriff cited “the potential for continuing and growing conflict” following the second fatal shooting of an American citizen by federal agents in Minneapolis in just over two weeks.  

Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care-unit nurse with the Veterans Affairs Department, was killed Saturday after filming federal agents during an arrest Saturday in Minnesota. 

Pretti held a phone in his right hand as the confrontation began when he was shoved by an immigration agent, then pepper-sprayed and tackled to the ground by other agents as they struck him with a spray can. The immigration officials then spotted an undrawn handgun on Pretti’s waistline and removed it before shooting him to death with 10 shots in the span of about six seconds. 

Observers filmed the shooting from multiple angles, which have been closely analyzed by visual forensics teams from several major news outlets, including the New York Times, Bellingcat, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Reuters.  

Pretti was a legal gun owner with a permit to carry; at no time did video show that he had drawn his weapon. Instead, he is shown with a phone in his right hand, with his left hand open to defend against the pepper spray before the federal agents pulled him to the ground. The Times reports Pretti appeared to physically resist as the agents worked to pin him as another agent struck him repeatedly. That’s when they spotted his gun, removed it from his waist, and shot him to death. 

The encounter lasted 25 seconds from the moment he was sprayed to the sound of the first shots. The agents then walked away, abandoning Pretti’s body and the scene of the crime. Bystanders then took it upon themselves to secure the site, cordoning off the bloody space with several large trash cans nearby. 

“If an 18-year-old Marine did that in the middle of a war zone, he would be court-martialed, because it is murder,” said former Marine and Iraq-war veteran Rep. Seth Moulton in a video posted Saturday. “It looked like an execution,” observed historian Heather Cox Richardson. 

• By the way: Homeland Security officials have shot 12 people during immigration enforcement operations since September, NBC News reported Sunday, with a list of the names. 

The Trump administration quickly began denigrating Pretti, and released “a torrent of claims that are either contradicted by video footage or unsupported by any evidence presented so far,” as CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale reported Sunday. Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, was particularly aggressive—referring to Pretti as “an assassin” and a “domestic terrorist [who] tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino claimed Pretti “assaulted federal officers,” and “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel alleged Pretti “attacked” officers. 

Noem also claimed Pretti was “brandishing” a gun, though he is not seen doing so at any point during the roughly 30-second encounter. However, “I don’t have any evidence that I’ve seen that suggests that the weapon was brandished,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told CBS on Sunday. 

FBI Director Patel also claimed, “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want,” and, “No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines.” Online observers found this to be puzzling if not disingenuous, as Sarah Longwell of the conservative news site The Bulwark noted while sharing at least 10 instances of Trump supporters appearing to do precisely what Patel was talking about at protests around the country going back to 2017.

The National Rifle Association even pushed back on that sentiment, writing on social media Saturday, “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth weighed in, tweeting, “Thank God for the patriots of @ICEgov — we have your back 100%. Shame on the leadership of Minnesota — and the lunatics in the street. ICE > MN”. Responded Tom Nichols of The Atlantic: “Hegseth’s apparent desire to get involved in the Minnesota debacle is dangerous not only to the lives of innocent Americans, but to American democracy itself. The military should not be involved in domestic policing. Cops and border agents and soldiers are different from one another, and they are kept separate in a democracy for good reason. And most important, the Pentagon’s top official should not use his office to identify elected leaders who disagree with the president as enemies who will destroy the nation.” 

President Trump blamed Pretti’s death on “Democrat run Sanctuary Cities and States” that he said “are REFUSING to cooperate with ICE, and they are actually encouraging Leftwing Agitators to unlawfully obstruct their operations to arrest the Worst of the Worst People!” he said in a social media post Sunday afternoon. “Tragically, two American Citizens have lost their lives as a result of this Democrat ensued chaos,” Trump claimed. 

Worth noting: The raids in Minnesota appear to be more about instilling compliance rather than deporting immigrants. Consider: Texas is reported to have just over 2 million undocumented immigrants, and Florida is believed to have about 1.6 million, according to 2023 data from the Pew Research Center. But Minnesota, which did not vote for Trump in the last three elections, had only about 130,000. Yet it’s Minnesota where DHS sent more than 2,000 federal agents on its aggressive deportation blitz, “Operation Metro Surge” in December 2025.  

And in another move echoing America in the 1850s, Trump called on “Congress to immediately pass Legislation to END Sanctuary Cities, which is the root cause of all of these problems,” he said Sunday. “American Cities should be Safe Sanctuaries for Law Abiding American Citizens ONLY, not Illegal Alien Criminals who broke our Nation’s Laws.”

Protests erupted inside an immigrant detention center in Texas where a five-year-old and his father were sent after being abducted in Minnesota. Families were heard inside shouting “Libertad!” or “Let us go,” according to a video taken Saturday by Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who was there to visit a client at the facility in the town of Dilley. “The message we want to send is for them to treat us with dignity and according to the law. We're immigrants, with children, not criminals,” one immigrant told the Associated Press in a phone interview after the video surfaced.

Monitoring for possible invocation of the Insurrection Act: Despite Trump’s claims last week, demonstrations in Minneapolis after Pretti’s death “still fall far short of the mass violence that has historically justified invoking the Insurrection Act,” writes Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice. “By way of comparison, riots in LA in 1992 killed 63 people and caused $1 billion in property damage, while riots in Detroit in 1967 killed 43 people and destroyed 400 buildings. Nothing that protesters in Minneapolis have done comes close to these examples. And in both LA and Detroit, the governors requested federal military assistance.” 

“If Trump were to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minneapolis, it would undoubtedly be to enable ICE’s brutal operation, which is leaving a wake of destruction and death and poses an ongoing threat to public safety,” she says. “Far from keeping the peace, such a deployment would be sure to inflame tensions, leading to more protests—and thus more ICE violence. It would escalate rather than defuse the situation in Minneapolis.” 

Can observing ICE agents land you on the Trump administration’s “domestic terrorist” list? One agent in Maine seemed to allege as much. He was recently asked why he was photographing a legal observer's car when he replied, “Because we have a nice little database and now you're considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.” (Hat tip to Ken Klippenstein)

Developing: Pretti’s death could have further implications for federal employees, raising the chances of a government shutdown by Friday. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in response to the shooting that his party would not agree to a six-bill funding package next week if it contains DHS appropriations. 

Half of the 12-annual must pass spending bills for fiscal 2026 have already cleared Congress, but the remaining six are still pending before the Senate, as Eric Katz of Government Executive reports. The House already approved them. In addition to DHS, those measures would fund the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury, as well as other related agencies. They are currently operating under a stopgap continuing resolution that is set to expire Jan. 30. Lawmakers could opt to fund just those agencies and negotiate separately over DHS, though such an approach would require new votes in both the House and Senate.

Additional reading: 

• “Republicans Struggle to Respond to Shooting, Reflecting Political Peril,” the New York Times reported Sunday; 
• “Two women, detained by ICE, say they helped agent having seizure,” the Minnesota Star Tribune reported Friday; 
• “ICE detains family seeking emergency care for child at Portland hospital,” the Oregonian reported Friday;
• “State Terror Has Arrived,” Soviet-born M. Gessen wrote Saturday for the New York Times;
• “Yes, It’s Fascism,” says Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution, writing Sunday in The Atlantic;
• And “Trump Administration Workers Seen Ripping Slavery Exhibit Off Walls at Historic Pennsylvania Site,” People magazine reported Friday.  

Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1942, elements of the Army’s 133rd Infantry Regiment landed at Belfast Harbor in Northern Ireland—the first U.S. troops to deploy for the defense of Europe during World War II.

Around the Defense Department

The Pentagon dropped the National Defense Strategy late on Friday, a time usually reserved for news that an organization wants to keep quiet. The 34-page document follows the release of a classified interim NDS rushed out last March, some two months after the new administration was sworn in. Work on the formal NDS began last May.

Like the interim version, the new one reflects a huge shift from previous administrations’ strategies, which focused on Mideast-based terrorist groups, loosely organized authoritarian states, and peer competitors, particularly China. Instead, the NDS focuses on homeland defense and Western Hemisphere. And while the interim one appeared to drop focus entirely on Russia, according to Hegseth’s early-2025 testimony, Russia returns in the new version. Read the NDS here; and coverage of it from, e.g., WSJ, Politico, and Associated Press.

Also on Friday: Air Force officials announced the revival of a deployment scheme abandoned three years ago. While the original Air Expeditionary Wing concept quickly assembled airmen and aircraft from across the service to deploy for conflicts, AEW 2.0 aims to give the team up to 18 months to train together, according to officials and a news release. The move is the latest Trump-administration shift away from Biden-era efforts to orient the force to confront China. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports, here.

Space Force probably needs twice as many guardians, vice chief says. The service’s budget and the number of operational U.S. military satellites have doubled since its founding, Gen. Shawn Bratton noted. The Space Force, which consists of about 10,000 guardians and 5,000 civilians, is adding about 500 troops a year—but that’s not enough. “We’ve got to pick up the pace. We need to grow on the military side, probably around 1,000 a year, something like that, for the next decade,” Bratton said. “I think we really need to double the size.” Novelly has more, here.

In case you missed it, Trump launched his “board of peace” club last week on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum. Representatives from 23 nations stood beside him during the “signing ceremony” Thursday in Davos, Switzerland. (We listed the participants in our Friday newsletter.) 

However, “nearly half of the countries on it are banned from entering the US under his travel ban,” the UK’s Independent reported Friday. 

Another detail we missed last week: Trump on Thursday floated invoking NATO’s Article 5 for the U.S. border to “free up” CBP agents for more crackdowns elsewhere stateside. The president reposted that threat over the weekend in the wake of Alex Pretti’s death. 

Expert reax: “In watching Trump over the past year, I’ve come to realize that the usual tools international observers bring to foreign policy analysis—political science, economics, sociology, and the like—are not nearly as important as psychology, both individual and social,” American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote Saturday in an essay on Substack entitled, “After Davos.” 

“I would liken Donald Trump to a ten-year-old boy who has discovered a flame thrower in his parents’ backyard, and has come to realize that he can burn up anything he wants with it. He’s now actively looking for other things he can set on fire.” Trump, Fukuyama said, “is a destroyer of institutions who wants to replace them with his own preferences, which inevitably benefit him personally.”

“There is one big problem with this psychological evolution,” he cautions. “Trump has consistently overestimated the power of the United States relative to other countries,” Fukuyama writes. “His overestimation of American power may continue as he tries to run Venezuela by remote control and extract oil from it. What is not clear is how he would use the military against a big player like China.”

Fukuyama adds: “Trump’s enduring legacy is not an institutional structure, but rather a highly toxic culture that has been adopted by many of the president’s followers and will live on after he is gone.” His advice? “In the wake of Davos, Europeans need to move in the opposite direction. They need to strengthen the European Union if it is to be taken seriously by the United States, China, Russia, or any other power. This will require two things.” Read on, here.