Two are dead in Minneapolis. Trump is to blame | Kenneth Roth

As public outrage grows over the killing of two protesters by Donald Trump’s deportation agents in Minneapolis, the White House is going into damage-control mode. It has its work cut out for it. Trump didn’t pull the triggers that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but he bears political responsibility for having greenlighted the agents’ regularly lawless conduct.

Good and Pretti should not have been killed. As far as can be seen in the ample video evidence that has emerged, neither posed a threat to the agents at the scene or anyone else. Their sole “offense” was to take a stand against the deportation raids. Yet trigger-happy agents needlessly shot them – Good as she was turning her car away from the agents, Pretti while he was restrained by agents on the ground. There was no plausible self-defense to justify these killings.

Yet the Trump administration has been reflexively defending deportation agents whenever they use lethal force. In each of the 16 times since July that they have fired shots, either while detaining people or at protesters, Trump officials have declared their actions justified without waiting for investigations to be completed, sometimes in blatant contradiction of video evidence.

The killing of Pretti is illustrative. Stephen Miller, the deputy national security adviser who is directing the deportation sweeps from the White House, pronounced Pretti a “domestic terrorist”. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary who oversees the raids, said Pretti was responsible for “domestic terrorism”. Yet video analysis shows that Pretti posed no danger to the officers who killed him. These senior Trump officials blamed the victim for his death.

Sensing public hostility, Trump has now removed Gregory Bovino, the border patrol commander who had been directing the deportation operations in Minneapolis. But Trump still has not repudiated the statements of Miller and Noem. He should fire them both for encouraging such lawlessness by defending the indefensible.

Trump himself has been no better. His initial response to the killing of Pretti was to castigate Democrats for creating “chaos” by refusing to cooperate with the deportation sweeps. Yet the video evidence shows that it was federal agents who needlessly escalated the situation, “shoving bystanders”, “showering them with pepper spray at close range”, giving “muddled” directives and passing up opportunities to de-escalate, as the New York Times reported.

To make matters worse, the Trump administration has avoided trying to initiate a criminal investigation. So far, it is conducting only a “use of force” “review” of Pretti’s killing rather than a criminal investigation into whether he was murdered. Similarly, the FBI supervisor in Minneapolis who tried to investigate the killing of Good resigned after her superiors in Washington pressed her to discontinue the inquiry. Again, the signal from senior Trump officials is that even the unjustified use of lethal force will be treated with kid gloves.

Trump’s supporters have been no better. Fox News blamed Pretti for his own death because if he hadn’t shown up to protest, he wouldn’t have been killed. “He should not have been there,” said Fox & Friends co-host Charlie Hurt on the network’s flagship show. So much for the first amendment right to protest!

Others have noted that Pretti was lawfully carrying a gun, as if that might justify his killing, even though the video evidence shows he never drew it or removed it from his holster, and it appears to show agents taking it from him before shooting him as he lay restrained and helpless on the cold ground. This blame-the-victim argument has even outraged Trump’s second amendment supporters. Since when does lawfully carrying a gun – never brandishing it, never using it in a threatening manner – permit federal agents to summarily shoot you?

The real “weapon” that Pretti held that seemed to outrage Trump’s agents – the same tool being used by Good’s wife at the time of her killing – was a mobile phone camera. Opponents of Trump’s raids have regularly used their phones, as the first amendment permits, to film agents in action to document any misconduct. That is largely how we know that Trump officials’ cover stories for the killings of Good and Pretti were fictitious.

We will never know precisely what went through the minds of the federal agents who needlessly shot Good and Pretti to death, but it is hard to discount the role of their frustration at the video recordings that stood between their apparent tough-guy instincts and their quest for impunity.

Back when he still lived in Trump Tower in New York City, Trump liked to say that his supporters were so loyal that he could descend to Fifth Avenue and shoot someone without losing any votes. There has been a disturbing degree of truth to that observation, because so many of his supporters seem to admire his willingness to buck the system, even when that involves crossing legal lines.

But most Americans don’t like a police state, which is what Trump seems to be trying to impose on Democratic-run cities. The raids are bad enough. But if Trump’s deportation agents can kill with impunity, if the instincts of Trump and his senior officials are to exculpate lawlessness rather than to hold officials to the law, then Trump deserves the plummeting polls that now face him. Let’s hope that for the safety of US city dwellers, his notorious quest for public approval leads to a change of direction.

• Kenneth Roth is a Guardian US columnist and visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, and former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments