On Sunday evening, Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin published a lengthy report detailing internal dissent among his federal immigration enforcement sources regarding the narrative pushed by Department of Homeland Security leaders after Border Patrol officers gunned down Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who had been videotaping their activities, in Minneapolis on Saturday morning.

Amid the several hundred words describing an internal schism over how DHS is messaging masked agents of the state opening fire on a man who had already been restrained, Melugin slipped in the following statement: “There is no indication Pretti was there to murder law enforcement, as videos appear to show he never drew his holstered firearm.”

Melugin’s stark acknowledgement was whiplash-inducing for anyone who had been following Fox’s on-air coverage of Pretti’s killing up to that point, and it marked the start of a dramatic shift in the network’s treatment of the case.

Fox spent Saturday and much of Sunday blaming the victim and local Democrats for his death while excusing and even valorizing his executioners. In doing so the network was following in the footsteps of the high-ranking administration officials who baselessly argued that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” engaged in “domestic terrorism.” Melugin himself was the vehicle DHS used to launder its excuse that Pretti “was armed.”

And notably, some Fox contributors repeatedly justified Pretti’s killing by going beyond the official comment to allege that he had drawn the gun he was reportedly legally carrying and that he even pointed it at the Border Patrol officers — the very claim Melugin said Sunday night had been disproved by videos.

The fallacy of the DHS smear of Pretti had long been clear to anyone who had reviewed videos of the shooting, triggering widespread outrage over his killing. But Melugin’s admission — and his reporting on a schism within immigration enforcement over the case — apparently provided his colleagues the permission structure they needed to abandon their narrative.

“Tomi, speak plainly with the audience right now,” Fox host Johnny Joey Jones told his co-host Tomi Lahren on Sunday night. “What we're getting from Bill — and as he cited, many of his sources are pro-what's happening as far as enforcing immigration and mass deportation — but what they're concerned with is every video we've seen so far doesn’t show him brandishing a gun, it doesn’t show him — it doesn’t substantiate the idea that he was there to commit a massacre or that he was a domestic terrorist.”

“Usually, when those words are used you usually have more than the fact that he had a gun on him as evidence, and that is what at least some officials are taking issue with,” he added.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade on Monday morning followed the editorial boards of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Wall Street Journal in urging President Donald Trump to change course.

“I would love to see Tom Homan just be asked to go in there and settle things down,” Kilmeade said, referencing his former Fox colleague turned White House border czar, who has stressed the need for “collateral arrests” of immigrants without criminal backgrounds.

“He understands the president’s objective. He could come in with a fresh set of eyes,” Kilmeade added. “For some reason he’s been sidelined of late, and I think we could use someone to come in there and settle everything down from the Trump perspective.”

And Dana Perino, who served as press secretary to President George W. Bush and now anchors Fox’s morning “straight news” hours, stressed the need for the White House to get its facts in order and find a way to make adjustments.

She said that current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt needed to be “very clear to the officials that we have a gigantic problem and, yes, we can say that the media is biased, and we can say that the Democrats are crazy and that they're radical and that they're ginning everything up, but we have a problem and I need better answers for you before we go to the briefing room at 1 o’clock.”

Perino added that Trump should take credit for having “arrested a lot of illegal immigrants” in Minneapolis and then send presidential envoy Steve Witkoff to the city “because I believe they need somebody that can be trusted on both sides to say, I hear you, I hear you, and here's where we're going.”

Co-host Griff Jenkins noted in response that Trump, who regularly watches Fox & Friends and often implements ideas he sees on it, had just announced that he was sending Homan to Minneapolis that night.

Perino praised Trump’s “good decision,” adding that the president understood “it’s unsustainable.” Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who came to that conclusion.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters