President Donald Trump blamed Democrats for escalating violence after federal agents enforcing his immigration agenda killed another protester on Saturday, which has further fueled rising concern about the direction of the country under Trump.

Alex Pretti, 37, was shot dead by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis, amid protests against federal immigration operations in the state that had ramped up since the killing of 37-year-old Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent just weeks earlier. 

The Trump Administration has framed Pretti’s shooting as an act of self-defense. The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Pretti “approached” federal officers with a handgun and “violently resisted” their attempts to restrain and disarm him, while White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on X called Pretti a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement.” But videos circulating online, which were also analyzed by news outlets, contradicted the Administration’s claims and showed Pretti was holding a phone in his hand before the fatal confrontation. 

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal on Sunday amid public backlash about the killing and the federal government’s response, Trump said that his Administration is “reviewing everything” regarding the incident.

Then he took to his social media site, Truth Social, to assail Democrats for the violence.

“Tragically, two American Citizens have lost their lives as a result of this Democrat ensued chaos,” he posted Sunday. The President zoomed in on “Democrat run” sanctuary jurisdictions—which limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement—for  “REFUSING to cooperate with ICE” and for “encouraging Leftwing Agitators to unlawfully obstruct their operations to arrest the Worst of the Worst People.”

In a separate Truth Social post, Trump also called on the GOP-led Congress to “immediately” pass legislation that would end sanctuary jurisdiction policies, which he claimed “is the root cause of all of these problems.” He also called on Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis’ Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey, and all Democratic mayors and governors across the country “to formally cooperate with the Trump Administration to enforce our Nation’s Laws, rather than resist and stoke the flames of Division, Chaos, and Violence.”

Trump specifically asked Walz and Frey in his post to turn over to federal authorities the unauthorized immigrants in their state prisons and jails, and those with active warrants or known criminal histories, for immediate deportation.

Ex-Presidents speak out

In the wake of Pretti’s shooting, several high-profile Democrats have doubled down on their criticism of the Trump Administration. 

Former President Barack Obama, whom Trump succeeded in 2017, called Pretti’s killing a “heartbreaking tragedy.” In a statement with his wife Michelle posted on X on Sunday, Obama claimed that Trump and officials in his Administration “seem eager to escalate the situation” instead of “trying to impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they’ve deployed.”

“This has to stop,” Obama said. “I would hope that after this most recent tragedy, Administration officials will reconsider their approach.” 

Former President Bill Clinton, another Democrat, also said in a Sunday statement on social media that the events in Minnesota were “unacceptable and should have been avoided,” adding that “the people in charge have lied to us, told us not to believe what we’ve seen with our own eyes, and pushed increasingly aggressive and antagonistic tactics.”

“Over the course of a lifetime, we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come,” Clinton posted. “This is one of them.”

Donald Trump suggested putting the world’s strongest military alliance “to the test” in his latest social media posting that could have grave consequences.

The U.S. President has long criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which also includes 30 European allies and Canada, over his belief that other members don’t pay their fair share.

“Maybe we should have put NATO to the test: Invoked Article 5, and forced NATO to come here and protect our Southern Border from further Invasions of Illegal Immigrants, thus freeing up large numbers of Border Patrol Agents for other tasks,” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday night.

Article 5 refers to NATO’s mutual defense clause, which states that an “armed attack” on one member is considered an attack on all 32 member-states. 

NATO says it assesses on a case-by-case basis what triggers Article 5—such as the “invasion by one state of the territory of another state”—but clarifies that “events that lack an international element, such as purely domestic acts of terrorism, do not trigger” the mutual defense clause, even though member states may choose to assist.

In the alliance’s nearly-80-year history, the mutual defense clause has only been invoked once: on the day after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and the U.S.’s NATO allies then backed the American response in Afghanistan, where more than 1,000 non-American NATO soldiers were ultimately killed.

Trump’s latest Truth Social post comes amid his ongoing threat to pull the U.S. out of the alliance. 

“We’ve never needed them—we have never really asked anything of them,” the President told Fox Business on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Thursday. “You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that, and they did: they stayed a little back, little off the front lines.”

The day before, Trump, in his meandering speech in Davos, blasted NATO’s seeming unreliability: “I know them all very well. I’m not sure that they’d be there. I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they’d be there for us.”

Trump particularly criticized NATO ally Denmark, as he campaigns to bring Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, under U.S. control. He called the Nordic country “ungrateful” after falsely claiming that the U.S. “gave” Greenland back to Denmark after American forces defended it during World War II. 

But Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, pushed back Wednesday to assert that NATO did help the U.S. in Afghanistan. 

“For every two Americans who paid the ultimate price,” Rutte said, “there was one soldier from another NATO country who did not come back to his family—from the Netherlands, from Denmark, particularly from other countries.”

Denmark actually suffered the highest per capita deaths among the military coalition members in the Afghanistan conflict: military casualty tracker iCasualties.org lists 43 Danish soldiers killed.

“You are not absolutely sure that the Europeans would come to the rescue of the U.S. if you will be attacked,” Rutte told Trump. “Let me tell you, they will.”

The offer “may not last long,” the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday as it announced that a more than doubling of the stipend for those who choose to “self-deport” from $1,000 to $2,600 in honor of President Donald Trump hitting the one-year mark of his second term. But the offer also may not be legitimate at all, advocates say. 

“Illegal aliens should take advantage of this gift and self-deport,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in the announcement. “Because if they don’t, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will never return.”

It’s part of Trump’s “Project Homecoming,” which was launched in May to encourage unauthorized immigrants to leave the U.S. voluntarily. DHS first offered a $1,000 stipend and travel assistance to those who returned to their home country through the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Home mobile application. During the holidays, the offer was raised to $3,000, with DHS saying it was “generously TRIPLING” the stipend for the Christmas season for those who register on the app by the end of 2025. 

The program, which is funded by $250 million that was originally meant for helping to resettle refugees, is meant to reduce deportation costs. According to the latest DHS announcement, a single enforced deportation costs over $18,000, while the $2,600 stipend as well as other costs including comped airfare for those who “self-deport” through the CBP Home app comes out to just over $5,000.

But while Noem says that 2.2 million people have voluntarily “self-deported” since last January, including “tens of thousands” who used the CBP Home app, the Atlantic reported in December that the overall figure, which is not backed by verifiable data, is implausible and would have had noticeable effects on the labor market. Moreover, the Atlantic calculated that the true cost of each of some 35,000 “self-deportations,” when factoring in a $200-million advertising campaign for the program, was about $7,500.

ProPublica also reported in October that of some 25,000 immigrants who had departed through the CBP Home app by then, many did not receive assistance from DHS.

And the Guardian reported in December that while some who “self-deported” received a $1,000 stipend, others either never did or encountered significant delays and difficulties. Others claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials dangled the stipend to deceive them, even though they were not eligible for the program, into leaving the U.S. without any benefits or into giving up their location, which could be used to detain and deport them. And while the program makes out that those who participate may be eligible to return to the U.S. under legal pathways, that also hasn’t been true for some, who have found themselves facing yearslong or even lifetime bans from reentry.

These mirror critics’ earlier warnings about the program. When the program incentivizing “self-deportation” came out last year, the American Immigration Lawyers Association called it a “deeply misleading and unethical trick,” adding that the government’s offer “is not as simple—or as safe—as it sounds.”

“Offering undocumented migrants a cash stipend to leave the country is neither sound policy nor smart politics,” attorney Raul Reyes wrote for the Hill last year. “And with this Administration’s antipathy toward migrants, it could well be a trap with life-altering consequences.”

Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President J.D. Vance, has already made history in a few ways: she’s the first person of color to become Second Lady and the youngest Second Lady since the Truman Administration. She may also soon be the first sitting Second Lady in modern history to bear a child in over 150 years.

“We’re very excited to share the news that Usha is pregnant with our fourth child, a boy,” the Vice President shared on social media Tuesday. “Usha and the baby are doing well, and we are all looking forward to welcoming him in late July.”

In the message, the Vice President thanked military doctors for “[taking] excellent care of our family” and staff members “who do so much to ensure that we can serve the country while enjoying a wonderful life with our children.”

J.D., 41, and Usha, 40, met at Yale University and married in 2014. They have three kids: Ewan, 8; Vivek, 5; and Mirabel Rose, 4.

Before Usha Vance, the only sitting Second Lady in modern history to give birth was President Ulysses S. Grant’s Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s wife Ellen, who had a son in 1870; birth records before then are unclear.

The Trump White House extended its congratulatory message to the Vances, and in a post on X, called itself “The most pro-family administration in history!”

Vance, in particular, is an outspoken pro-natalist. He has sounded the alarm on declining birthrates, branded Democrats as “childless cat ladies” and “anti-family and anti-child,” and called Americans’ lack of desire to have children as a “civilizational crisis.”

“I want more babies in the United States of America,” Vance said at a March for Life rally last year. “I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”

Correction:
The original version of this story mischaracterized the historic nature of Usha Vance’s pregnancy. She would be the first sitting Second Lady to bear a child in over 150 years, not ever.