Bill Clinton says Americans might “never” win back their freedoms if the Trump administration’s “increasingly aggressive” federal raids are allowed to go unchecked after the fatal shooting of an ICU nurse.
The former president was moved to comment by the fatal Border Patrol shooting of VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Saturday.
Clinton, 79, wrote in a statement shared on social media that “we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come.”
The Pretti shooting, he warned, “is one of them.”
“In recent weeks, we’ve watched horrible scenes play out in Minneapolis and other communities that I never thought would take place in America,” he wrote.
Both adults and children have been “seized from their homes, workplaces, and the street by masked federal agents,” he said, while peaceful observers were “arrested, beaten, teargassed,” and protesters such as Renee Nicole Good and Pretti, both 37, were “shot and killed” by them.
Clinton did not name President Donald Trump, 79, or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, 54, as being responsible.
But he accused “the people in charge” of lying to the public, telling Americans not to trust what they saw with their own eyes and using “increasingly aggressive and antagonistic tactics,” including efforts to block local investigations.
“All of this is unacceptable and should have been avoided,” he added.
The statement ended with a plea to those who “believe in the promise of American democracy to stand up, speak out,” and prove the country still belongs to “We the People.”
“If we give our freedoms away after 250 years, we might never get them back,” Clinton wrote.
The blistering critique comes as Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tries to fend off outrage over the killings of Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 and Pretti two weeks later—shootings that unfolded against the backdrop of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Under Trump and Noem, DHS has embraced heavy-handed immigration enforcement tactics that they claim is aimed at the “worst of the worst.” But the focus on immigration, The Washington Post noted on Sunday, is a “marked departure” from the department’s origins.
DHS was created by the Homeland Security Act signed on Nov. 25, 2002, in the wake of 9/11, merging 22 federal entities into a single super-agency focused on preventing terrorist attacks and coordinating disaster response.
Since then, its remit has sprawled from aviation security and coastal patrols to immigration detention, cyber security, and natural disaster relief, becoming one of the largest Cabinet departments, with about 240,000 employees.
Critics cited by the Post say that breadth has made DHS uniquely vulnerable to mission creep and political pressure—especially around immigration. A 2021 review by the Brookings Institution noted that while DHS had helped close critical gaps exposed by 9/11, it also faced persistent concerns about civil liberties, oversight, and effectiveness.
Those worries exploded during Trump’s first term when the department deployed camouflaged federal teams to Portland, Oregon, to confront racial-justice protests.
DHS intelligence officials compiled “open source intelligence reports” on journalists who published leaked documents about the operation, prompting an internal investigation, the Post reported. TIME documented how federal officers in unmarked vehicles snatched protesters off Portland streets and hustled them into vans, feeding fears of a secret police force.
In Trump’s second term, those tools have become even more visible. As the Post reported this weekend, Noem’s DHS is now “almost exclusively focused” on rounding up undocumented migrants, with ICE and Border Patrol teams pushed into city neighborhoods, storming homes, and firing tear gas into crowds.
“DHS has now become an immigration department, and that’s not what it was founded for,” a former senior DHS official who worked with Noem told the Post.
This, the official said, was a concern even to some conservatives who have “seen this buildup and this shift in priorities in ways that are almost prophetic for what people were concerned about back when DHS was first established.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Clinton’s office, the White House, DHS, and ICE for comment.
