It has become increasingly evident that the Elitist Media have gone all in on the organized leftwing chaos currently underway in Minnesota, and have devoted themselves to shaping public perception accordingly as opposed to simply reporting the news. No other conclusion could reasonably be reached after a review of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.
There were many dubious questions laced throughout the interview, but this was arguably the worst- whether the death of U.S. citizens is simply the price to pay for immigration enforcement:
WATCH: NBC's Kristen Welker with the most disgusting question of the Minnesota cycle- "Is the death of U.S. citizens a price the Trump administration is willing to pay to carry out its immigration policies?
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) January 25, 2026
(I don't recall hearing this asked of any Biden official RE: the deaths… pic.twitter.com/BOyPPcZhZk
KRISTEN WELKER: But let me ask, just big picture, Mr. Blanche, is the death of U.S. citizens a price the Trump administration is willing to pay to carry out its immigration policies?
TODD BLANCHE: What does that have to do with whether it was a U.S. citizen or not? Any death is wrong.
WELKER: Well, two of the deaths were U.S. citizens --
BLANCHE: Any death should not happen in law enforcement.
WELKER: But two of the people killed were U.S. citizens. President Trump said his goal was to deport the “worst of the worst” people. My question for you is, is this part of the collateral damage, something that the administration is willing to accept as a part of its crackdown on people who are here illegally?
BLANCHE: It shouldn’t be. It should not be. And you don’t see it anywhere in this country. I’m very confused about why the conversation’s about what you’re talking about instead of focusing on what really matters, which is why, in one city, in one place, do we have these problems. We deport ten times the number of illegal aliens out of Texas than we do out of Minneapolis. Why do we hear nothing out of Texas about any of the same problems that we have in Minneapolis? I’ll tell you why. Because in Texas we have the cooperation and support of local law enforcement so that we can do these operations safely, keeping U.S. citizens and others protected and safe. That is not what we have in Minneapolis. And the fact that it’s the administration that’s being blamed for the utter failure of leadership in Minneapolis is not right, it’s not appropriate, and it’s also not true--
WELKER: But are you saying those officers bear responsibility, those federal officers who fired ten shots yesterday bear no responsibility for the death of this 37-year-old ICU nurse?
BLANCHE: I did not say that. Don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t say that. I said there’s an investigation ongoing. But I said that the story and the narrative around this cannot be just those officers that were forced to do what they had to do yesterday to keep the operation going as it should go, without any support. That has to be the narrative, that has to be what we’re talking about. And the fact that the only thing we’re talking about is somehow blaming officers, blaming the federal men that were on the scene that day, and not looking at why it happened, not looking at why it’s only in Minneapolis that we see this violence, we are missing the narrative and missing what we should be talking about.
If ever you needed proof evident of a double standard in news media, this is it. One does not recall anyone, much less Kristen Welker of all people, asking anyone in the Biden administration whether the deaths of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, et. al were the price that the administration was willing to pay to carry out their immigration policy. But, as we often point out: if it weren’t for double standards, there’d be none at all.
This was less an interview than a struggle session which one suspects was always in the books. It is highly likely that Blanche was set to have been grilled about the “detained” five-year-old, but the shooting took precedence. There was always going to be this performance.
At this point there are many legitimate questions about the shooting, which Blanche made abundantly clear is under an ongoing federal investigation. Welker didn’t seem interested in asking any of those, instead choosing to gaslight and launch shaped narratives.
Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned interview as aired on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, January 25th, 2026:
KRISTEN WELKER: And joining me now is Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Mr. Blanche, welcome back to Meet the Press.
TODD BLANCHE: Good morning.
WELKER: Good morning. Thank you for being here. I do want to start by watching one of those videos of the shooting. And again, I do want to warn our viewers, this is disturbing. Take a look.
(Video of the shooting of Alex Pretti)
WELKER: Mr. Blanche, the administration spent all day Saturday arguing that Alex Pretti posed a threat to law enforcement. What exactly do you see in that video that posed a threat to law enforcement?
BLANCHE: Well, I’ll tell you what I don’t see. And I don’t see protesting happening. And this narrative that what was happening on that yesterday morning was protesting interrupted by ICE is not what we see. I also do not see a single state and local law enforcement officer there to help. And that should be the narrative that we’re talking about, is that what we have is ICE doing isolated operations to get criminals off the street, with zero cooperation from the governor, from leadership in Congress, or from the mayor. And so when you see what we just observed, was that peaceful protesting? Of course not. That was a very violent occurrence because ICE cannot do their job effectively when law enforcement — local law enforcement refuses to help. And that is what is so tragic about what happened yesterday and what’s been happening in Minneapolis for the past several weeks, is that ICE is doing all of this work, doing their jobs, and local law enforcement are not being allowed to do a single thing to help. And that is dangerous, as we saw yesterday morning.
WELKER: Mr. Blanche, respectfully, there are only 600 police officers in Minneapolis. There are 3,000 ICE agents. Local officials there say it strains credulity to think that they can back up every ICE official. But I want to stick to the video and what happened yesterday, the specifics of it. What exactly threatened those law enforcement officials? Did at any point Mr. Pretti brandish a gun?
BLANCHE: I can see the same video that everybody else can see. It’s been analyzed up and down for the past 24 hours. But there’s obviously an investigation that’s ongoing. Secretary Noem talked about that yesterday, which is what we would expect anytime a tragedy like this occurs. But I disagree with you when you say, “What was there that looked as if there was a confrontation that was –” We don’t know what happened in the minutes leading up to what we just watched. We don’t know what ICE saw, what ICE heard. That’s part of the investigation that’s going to be happening. But what we did not see, again, and we cannot avoid this conversation. What we did not see is a single cop helping with that isolated, targeted effort by ICE to arrest a criminal.
WELKER: Did –
BLANCHE: And you’re right, there are three — go ahead, sorry.
WELKER: Did you see him at any point brandish a gun? Have you been told by law enforcement there on the ground that at any point he brandished a gun, that he threatened them with a gun? The video shows he’s holding up a cell phone.
BLANCHE: No, you can’t see everything that’s happening. I mean, what you do see is you see several ICE officers surrounding him. You see a violent interaction with the man who was shot. And so we don’t know. The video — no matter how many times you look at it, no matter how many different angles that we see, there’s a lot that we don’t see. And that’s exactly why you have to have an investigation, which is exactly what DHS is doing, and exactly what we would hope that they would do. But you can’t tell exactly what happened. It was a very instant, violent — law enforcement, ICE has a very tough job. It is very hard when they’re walking, trying to do their job, and there are agitators and rioters everywhere. These men and women are not protesting. They are not peacefully protesting. They are trying to impede and obstruct ICE, and it makes the job that our men and women have to do virtually impossible to do without interactions like that. And yes, yesterday’s shooting was a tragedy, and yes, we feel a ton of sympathy for the family and friends of the deceased. But make no mistake about it, this was entirely avoidable if we had a governor, if we had a mayor, if we had leadership in Washington and over in Minnesota that actually cared about their citizens.
WELKER: Mr. Blanche –
BLANCHE: This should never have happened because there would be law enforcement on the streets helping ICE.
WELKER: Mr. Blanche, I just want to stay on this. The local officials do say Alex Pretti was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry. The video seems to show at one moment an officer removing a gun in the seconds before Mr. Pretti was shot. Was he disarmed before those shots were fired?
BLANCHE: I do not know, and nobody else knows, either. That’s why we’re doing an investigation. It does appear that he was armed. I have heard the same thing you have, that he was lawfully armed, and that’s something that’s important in this country, and there’s nothing wrong with anybody lawfully carrying firearms. But whether he was disarmed, or whether he pulled the gun on law enforcement, whether law enforcement saw him go for the gun, what they have to do is they have to protect themselves. They have to protect the public around them, and we’ll see what happens. But just make no mistake about it, this was an incredibly split-second decision that had to be made by ICE officers confronting a very complicated, violent situation with not a single local law enforcement officer in sight.
WELKER: Well, Alex Pretti, I mean, he is a member of the public. He’s a resident there. I mean, this is an American citizen. He’s an ICU nurse at a VA hospital. He appears to be shot some ten times. There are a group of law enforcement officials who pummel him, who spray tear gas at him, pepper spray. Why shouldn’t every American be bothered by what they see in this video, Mr. Blanche? Are you bothered by what you see in this video?
BLANCHE: Absolutely. Every American should be bothered. But what should they be bothered by? They should be bothered that ICE is going on an isolated arrest to arrest a criminal, and they have zero support from law enforcement. The narrative here cannot --
WELKER: But shouldn’t they be able to make decisions on their own, Mr. Blanche?
BLANCHE: What happened yesterday --
WELKER: You’re talking about state and local officials, and that is a debate worth having. What, if any, support are they getting? But in that instance, should they be able to make a decision about how to respond on their own? And if they can’t, should they not be in that position in the first place?
BLANCHE: They make decisions all day, every day. There are 3,000 ICE officers in one city. We have tens of thousands of ICE officers all over the country. They make very difficult decisions all day, every day, trying to protect the American people. And what we see all over the country — save a few sanctuary cities like Minneapolis — is we see cooperation and support. And so the reason why we don’t see this violence all over the country is because in every single jurisdiction — save a few, like Minneapolis — there is cooperation. You work together with local law enforcement. Police are there to assist with crowd control, and rioters, and the violent acts that we see happening. And again, this is not a peaceful protest. He was not protesting peacefully. He was interrupting an ICE operation –
WELKER: Please finish.
BLANCHE: He was interrupting an ICE operation, and that led to a very tragic occurrence that every single person in this country hoped did not happen. But make no mistake about it, you cannot look at a ten-second video and judge what happened. You have to look at it from a full, full situation of what’s been happening in Minneapolis for the past several weeks, which is a simple fact. One city in this country do we have these problems. One city, and that’s Minneapolis.
WELKER: But Mr. Blanche, you’re --
BLANCHE: That’s not a reflection of ICE, that’s a reflection of that city.
WELKER: You’re saying he wasn’t protesting peacefully, and yet the video before shows him holding up a cell phone, directing traffic. The video after shows him being pummeled by these law enforcement. Everyone has now seen this video across the country, with this man holding up a cell phone. And part of the outrage that people are expressing is that they feel as though the federal government is asking them to believe something that they don’t see with their own two eyes. Is that what the administration is asking of the American people, to believe that he was violent when the video, based on what everyone has seen so far, does not show that?
BLANCHE: Well, first of all, I did not say he was violent. I said he was not protesting peacefully. And you just described what every American has seen, which is video, shortly ahead of the incident, where he was screaming in the face of ICE. He had a phone up right into ICE’s face. You tell me, is that protesting peacefully? I mean, we all see the same thing. I mean, you shouldn’t try to gaslight the administration about what happened. That was not a peaceful protest. And yes, what happened afterwards is tragic. It is horrible. It is heartbreaking. But make no mistake about it, that would’ve never happened, that would’ve never happened — and it doesn’t happen in cities around this country every single day — but for the complete failure, the complete failure by the mayor and by the governor to do anything — to do anything to protect their citizens. They park their officers blocks and blocks away while they just let ICE go, and they let citizens just come and do whatever they want to try to torment and to try to agitate officers doing their job.
WELKER: Mr. Blanche, this shooting happened Saturday morning. Mere hours later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and others labeled Mr. Pretti a domestic terrorist. His family released a statement that reads in part, quote, “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand, and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed.” What is your response to his family?
BLANCHE: My response is that we are — we have nothing but sympathy for the family of him. We do. But make no mistake, this is an investigation that’s ongoing. And long before Secretary Noem took the stage yesterday, the mayor and the governor took their own narrative and said a bunch of things that were just as false, just as misleading, and just as horrible as anything that we’ve heard over the past month. And so we will do everything that we need to do to protect the men and women of ICE when the state and local government refuse to do so. And so yes, we are sympathetic, President Trump is sympathetic, the attorney general is sympathetic, ICE is sympathetic. Nobody wants any lives to be taken. But we are doing very important work in very difficult circumstances to make this country safe. There was an isolated arrest effort yesterday to arrest somebody that did not belong in this country, he’s here illegally, and he’s a convicted felon. They should be able to — ICE should be able to do that with cooperation and support, not with what we saw happening yesterday.
WELKER: But let me ask, just big picture, Mr. Blanche, is the death of U.S. citizens a price the Trump administration is willing to pay to carry out its immigration policies?
BLANCHE: What does that have to do with whether it was a U.S. citizen or not? Any death is wrong.
WELKER: Well, two of the deaths were U.S. citizens --
BLANCHE: Any death should not happen in law enforcement.
WELKER: But two of the people killed were U.S. citizens. President Trump said his goal was to deport the “worst of the worst” people. My question for you is, is this part of the collateral damage, something that the administration is willing to accept as a part of its crackdown on people who are here illegally?
BLANCHE: It shouldn’t be. It should not be. And you don’t see it anywhere in this country. I’m very confused about why the conversation’s about what you’re talking about instead of focusing on what really matters, which is why, in one city, in one place, do we have these problems. We deport ten times the number of illegal aliens out of Texas than we do out of Minneapolis. Why do we hear nothing out of Texas about any of the same problems that we have in Minneapolis? I’ll tell you why. Because in Texas we have the cooperation and support of local law enforcement so that we can do these operations safely, keeping U.S. citizens and others protected and safe. That is not what we have in Minneapolis. And the fact that it’s the administration that’s being blamed for the utter failure of leadership in Minneapolis is not right, it’s not appropriate, and it’s also not true --
WELKER: But are you saying those officers bear responsibility, those federal officers who fired ten shots yesterday bear no responsibility for the death of this 37-year-old ICU nurse?
BLANCHE: I did not say that. Don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t say that. I said there’s an investigation ongoing. But I said that the story and the narrative around this cannot be just those officers that were forced to do what they had to do yesterday to keep the operation going as it should go, without any support. That has to be the narrative, that has to be what we’re talking about. And the fact that the only thing we’re talking about is somehow blaming officers, blaming the federal men that were on the scene that day, and not looking at why it happened, not looking at why it’s only in Minneapolis that we see this violence, we are missing the narrative and missing what we should be talking about.
WELKER: That’s the broader backdrop debate. But let me talk to you more broadly about the actions of federal agents in Minnesota this week. I want you to look at these pictures, Mr. Blanche: a protester on the ground being pepper-sprayed; a five-year-old being detained; a U.S. citizen being pulled out of his home half-naked, later released upon determination that he was wrongfully detained. Are federal agents acting humanely, Mr. Blanche?
BLANCHE: Yes. Our agents are acting humanely. Their jobs are very, very difficult. It is a very difficult place to be, going out and trying to arrest these violent felons with no support from local law enforcement, with no support from the governor. Remember, there’s a much easier way to do this. When these violent criminals who are here illegally are ready to get out of prison, the mayor could just let us know, we could go get them from prison and deport them. They refuse to do that. And so the result of that is that ICE officers have to go out onto the streets and make arrests, and that is tough work. These are very difficult times. And it is something where you see thousands of arrests, and you’ve identified two or three things that are pointed to as being wrong, or being too aggressive, or not being appropriate. That’s not fair to the men and women that are doing this every day.
WELKER: Again, there are 600 police officers in Minneapolis, compared to 3,000 ICE agents. I do want to shift gears, though. I want to ask you quickly about the Epstein files. When you were here back in December, you said the Justice Department will comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Quote — you said, “Next week and the week after.” DOJ is now 37 days past the statute’s December 19 deadline. Less than 1% of the files have been released. So Mr. Blanche, when will all of the Epstein files be released?
BLANCHE: Look, we’ve been working literally seven days a week to go through all the materials. But there is nothing more important than protecting the victims, and that means that every single page that we’re going to release, we have to lay eyes on and make sure that we’re redacting all appropriate information. We will not rush that process. We will not risk victim information being released. And I would hope that Congress doesn’t want us to do that. And I would expect that they expect us to do our jobs. And so we have over 500 Department of Justice lawyers working on it every day. I expect that we will see — we will see the release of the materials soon.
WELKER: So when will it be released? Soon? How soon?
BLANCHE:
Well, listen, there are millions and millions of pages we’re looking at, and I’m not going to create an artificial deadline that I then miss for our men and women that are working on it. But we’re working on it very hard. And when we know a date of release, we’ll let the public know and let Congress know. But it is soon. It is very soon. We’ve been working on it now for over a month, reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages over the course of every few days. And we’re continuing to do that.
WELKER: All right, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Thank you so much for your time this morning. We really appreciate it.
BLANCHE: Thank you, Kristen.
