Donald Trump on Immigration Policy

The reference point is whether the ICE officer was justified in shooting the man in the car. Trump calls the officers heroes who apprehended a very dangerous man and says ICE was scorned instead of praised, which treats the officers' actions that day as deserving praise, so we labeled it Defended or excused. He did not name the man or mention the shooting in this passage; Newsweek and Newsday report it as his comment on the Marble Hill shooting. The closest competing label is Challenged the characterization, because he disputes how critics describe the operation; he goes on to praise the officers, so it loses.

Trump directly answers 'no' when asked whether the shootings were justified and says they should not have happened, which is not a defense of the agents' conduct. But earlier in the same interview he says of Pretti and Good that 'he was not an angel and she was not an angel' and continues to back the underlying enforcement operation. The statement mixes acknowledgment that the outcome was wrong with conditional language about the victims' own conduct, rather than offering a clean condemnation of the agents' use of force.