This story was updated on Wednesday, Jan. 28, at 4:20 p.m. to add Carter’s introduction of a House resolution condemning anti-ICE protests at a St. Paul church earlier this month.
A growing number of Republicans are distancing themselves from federal immigration operations following the fatal weekend shooting of a 37-year-old nurse by border patrol officers in Minneapolis.
Coastal Georgia’s Congressman Buddy Carter isn’t one of them.
After the officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen, during an operation to detain an alleged illegal criminal alien, Carter defended U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Trump administration’s surge of some 3,000 immigration agents to Minnesota.
“ICE has every right to defend itself,” Carter told a Savannah television station after an anti-ICE protest in Savannah on Saturday. A Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Jon Ossoff, he laid responsibility for Pretti’s death directly at the feet of politicians like Ossoff who, he said, “demonize” ICE agents for “doing their job to keep our cities safe.”
Ossoff, for his part, condemned the killing, describing the federal immigration forces in Minneapolis as “massively deployed and ill-trained” who are “violating civil liberties with impunity and showing reckless disregard for life and property.”
On Tuesday, candidate Carter sought to further capitalize on the strife in Minnesota.
He introduced a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives condemning demonstrators who interrupted worship services at a church in neighboring St. Paul on Jan. 18 to protest ICE’s operations in the Twin Cities and the shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent nearly two weeks earlier.
The church, affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, reportedly listed as one of its pastors a local ICE official.
“I want to see these insurrectionists in handcuffs,” Carter said in a news release announcing the legislation.
In his statement following Saturday’s protest in Savannah, Carter, a five-term congressman from St. Simons, didn’t indicate how federal immigration officers were defending themselves when Pretti, filming the scene with a mobile phone, interjected himself between agents and two civilians they’d pushed to the ground, according to video footage.
Within 20 seconds, Pretti was pepper-sprayed, surrounded by seven immigration agents, wrestled to the ground, and shot at least 10 times while on his knees and restrained — and after a gun he was licensed to carry was removed from his pocket.
Within hours, federal officials described Pretti as a “would-be assassin” and “domestic terrorist” who wanted to “massacre law enforcement.” They provided no evidence except the confiscated gun.
Former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene pointed out the irony of other members of the 2nd Amendment-championing Republican Party citing Pretti’s possession of a gun as a justification for his death.
“Legally carrying a firearm is not the same as brandishing a firearm,” she wrote Sunday. “There is nothing wrong with legally peacefully protesting and videoing.”
‘God bless ICE’
Besides defending ICE’s actions in Minneapolis on his social media platform Truth Social (“If they [“illegal criminal aliens”] were still there, you would see something far worse than you are witnessing today!”), President Trump spent part of Saturday issuing endorsements for his preferred candidates in this year’s midterm elections.
In Georgia, they included Carter’s Republican colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives — Brian Jack (Peachtree City), Rich McCormick (Suwanee), Austin Scott (Tifton) and Rick Allen (Augusta).
Carter, of course, covets such an endorsement in his Senate primary against Derek Dooley and Rep. Mike Collins. He’s seeking to boost his name recognition beyond Coastal Georgia and chasing primary votes among the Georgia Republican Party’s MAGA base.
That’s why he’s unlikely to moderate his message on immigration in the face of mounting criticism of federal immigration operations.
Indeed, a day before Pretti’s death, in the opinion pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Carter called for the federal government to carry out an immigration sweep in Atlanta, similar to “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis, a city of some 735,000 people. He urged a surge of federal immigration forces in Georgia’s capital and largest city to get undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes “off our streets for good.”
Without indicating how large a force he was recommending, he cited the “success of federal intervention” in Minneapolis and other “Democratic-run cities.”
In an accompanying post on social media, Carter wrote: “God bless ICE for taking these murderers, pedophiles, gang members, terrorists, drug traffickers, rapists, and other violent criminals off our streets. We won’t stop until every last one is ARRESTED & DEPORTED!”
On Monday, his rhetoric escalated, as he blamed “Democrats like” Ossoff for the immigration crisis.
“The worst of the worst criminal illegals are in Atlanta,” he said on the social media site X. “It’s time to send ICE to Atlanta so we can get these criminals off our streets. Arrest them. Deport them. Enforce the law.”
‘Held accountable’
In his news release on Tuesday, Carter described the roughly three dozen demonstrators at the Cities Church in St. Paul as “insurrectionists” as well as a “mob” that acted “in defense of pedophiles, murderers, and rapists.”
He went on to accuse Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, of “radicalizing” the protesters and singled out former CNN anchor Don Lemon as one of the “raving lunatics” who should be “held accountable” for “inciting violence.”
A federal judge dismissed attempts by the U.S. Justice Department to charge Lemon in connection with the protest. He said he attended the protest as a journalist.