Greg Abbott Calls on Trump Admin to ‘Recalibrate’ Immigration Ops Amid Blowback From Alex Pretti Shooting

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) on Monday expressed his belief that the Trump administration should rethink its approach to immigration enforcement in light of the killing of Alex Pretti.

Pretti was killed by Border Patrol agents Saturday in a chaotic scene in Minneapolis. The agency was already dealing with the blowback from the shooting death of Renee Good weeks earlier, but this past weekend only amplified that criticism. Officials within President Donald Trump’s administration quickly defended the agents responsible for Pretti’s death, but the narrative being spun has not matched up with video evidence of the incident.

Largely due to these high-profile killings, public support for ICE — and the Department of Homeland Security in general — has taken a nosedive. CNN’s Harry Enten noted Monday morning that ICE’s net approval rating sank to a whopping -27.

On a recent episode of The Mark Davis Show, Abbott was presented with the fact that support for ICE is tanking. When he asked the governor what he would tell Trump to do to regain public favor, Abbott said:

In general, we need to have respect for law enforcement officers in the country. ICE, they are law enforcement officers. So they, being the White House, need to recalibrate on what needs to be done to make sure that respect is going to be re-instilled. That’s not an easy task, especially under the current circumstances. But I know that they’re working on a game plan to make sure that they’re going to recalibrate, maybe work from a different direction, to ensure that they get back to what they wanted to do to begin with, which is to remove people from the country who are here illegally, who were allowed in by Joe Biden — and especially those who posed the most danger.

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