Border czar Tom Homan has announced that the Trump administration will immediately reduce the number of federal immigration agents in Minnesota by roughly 26%, citing “unprecedented cooperation” from local officials.
Homan held a press conference in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning to provide an update on Operation Metro Surge, which has been met with unrest from some community members, leading to numerous anti-immigration enforcement protests.
'President Trump fully intends to achieve mass deportations during this administration, and immigration enforcement actions will continue every day throughout this country.'
Homan explained that President Donald Trump had asked him to go to Minnesota to “help de-escalate” the situation and further streamline the targeted operation. He pleaded with critics of the enforcement activities to stop the “hateful, extreme rhetoric” against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
He said that he warned in March that if the rhetoric did not stop, he was “afraid there would be bloodshed.”
“And there has been,” Homan remarked, presumably referring to the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
After “productive discussions” with local leaders, including Gov. Tim Walz (DFL) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (DFL), the administration decided to immediately withdraw 700 federal immigration agents, Homan declared. He cited increased cooperation that has allowed ICE agents to enter the jails and transfer illegal aliens to federal custody more safely.
He also noted the operation's target list of criminal illegal aliens has decreased due to the successful arrest of many high-risk individuals.
RELATED: Majority of Americans approve of Trump's response to anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis: Harvard poll
Homan stated that about 2,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers will remain in Minnesota for the time being. However, the administration aims to end the operation and withdraw agents as quickly as possible, returning the local field office to the pre-operation level of roughly 150 agents. He stated that the speed of the complete withdrawal will depend entirely on the cooperation of local officials and whether the threats and disruptions caused by protesters cease.
He also stated that the Department of Homeland Security has implemented a “unified chain of command” as part of the ongoing enforcement operation, at his recommendation.
RELATED: Memo to Trump: Stop negotiating and ramp up deportations
Homan rejected rumors that the Trump administration was abandoning its immigration enforcement goals. He described the changes as “smarter enforcement” and “not less enforcement.”
“President Trump fully intends to achieve mass deportations during this administration, and immigration enforcement actions will continue every day throughout this country. President Trump made a promise, and we have not directed otherwise. I heard rumors we have: untrue,” he remarked. “We’re not surrendering our mission.”
He announced that Operation Metro Surge has led to the arrest of 14 individuals with homicide convictions, 139 with assault convictions, 87 with sexual offense convictions, and 28 gang members.
“We’re taking a lot of bad people off the street. Everybody should be grateful for that,” Homan stated. “Everyone has a constitutional right to peacefully protest. President Trump and I, we completely support that. At the same time, professional law enforcement officers should, and need to be able to, perform their sworn duties without being harassed, impeded, or assaulted.”
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CNN recently held a town hall where members of the community could express their concerns to Minneapolis officials like Mayor Jacob Frey (D) — but with a little digging, it was revealed that all the randomly selected citizens happened to be Democrat activists.
“President Trump’s comms director, Steven Cheung, did some digging. … Turns out they’ve all donated to ActBlue. Isn’t that incredible?” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”
“ActBlue, the same Democrat PAC that tried to profit off of Alex Pretti’s death,” Gonzales says, reading a text message Americans received from the Democrat platform: “Alex Pretti is the limit. Gov Walz: END THE OPERATION. Stand with us! Donate $50 for 200% MATCH.”
“They’ve never met a terrible tragedy that they have not wanted to profit off of. That’s the ActBlue that we’re talking about. I’m sure it was total coincidence. I’m sure it was a total coincidence that all of these people just happened to be Democrat activists,” she comments.
“These outlets are so irredeemable. They’re actually, like, they’re paying other people to come on the air and spew wild conspiracies. They call us the conspiracy theorists, by the way," she says.
And in one recent segment on CNN, ex-MSNBC host Tiffany Cross argued that the reason there has been less coverage of the Proud Boys is because all of the Proud Boys went to join ICE.
“There’s a reason why we have not seen a resurgence of the Proud Boys, and that is because I believe a lot of them are likely made ICE officers. Again, I’ve said this on the show before. I’ve not seen any deep-dive reporting into who these people are, but they certainly adopt a lot of the ideology, a lot of the tactics, a lot of the violent tactics, a lot of the wearing masks,” Cross said.
“Did you just say ICE officers are militia?” CNN’s Kevin O’Leary asked, shocked.
“I think you’re stretching a little bit,” he added while she doubled down.
“It’s just something she just concocted,” Gonzales comments, laughing, “in her tiny little mind.”
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Amid the escalating anti-ICE protests raging through the Twin Cities, President Trump announced on Monday that he was immediately dispatching border czar Tom Homan to oversee and manage ICE operations on the ground in Minnesota.
The announcement came shortly before another Truth Social post in which Trump revealed that he had spoken with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) about working toward a solution to quell the escalating protests, noting that Homan would be a key figure in the process.
But BlazeTV host Steve Deace can’t imagine a situation where Tom Homan — “the crown prince of the entire [Trump] regime,” he calls him — de-escalates a raging left-wing movement.
It won’t be enough, Deace argues, for Homan to deliver messaging that counters that of Walz and Frey. “That's a good start, but that's not going to quell the level of [violence we have seen],” he says.
Unlike most people on the right, who “won't do bold stuff because they don't want to get in the way of their comfort,” left-wing activists, like Renee Good, says Deace, are willing to risk their lives for a cause. They don’t seem to be motivated by protecting their comforts in the same way conservatives are.
That said, he “[doesn’t] believe there's a single protester right now who's going to tune in to Tom Homan's … superior messaging to Tim Walz and Jacob Frey.”
It’s delusional to think these protesters, who are often willing to break the law and put themselves in danger, will hear a Homan sound bite and suddenly say, “Well, by golly, you know, I was going to listen to my 45,000 TikTok followers telling me that I'm a hero to sacred democracy if I go out there and and give my life for the cause. But now, you know, that was just a great 60-second quip by Tom Homan,” Deace mocks.
If the Trump administration is serious about squashing this anti-ICE movement in Minnesota, it’s going to “take more commitment than that,” he declares.
Right now, “blue city-states” within red states, like Austin, Texas, are watching how Homan and the Trump administration handle Minnesota, says Deace. If a strict precedent isn’t set, he fears that similar anti-ICE protest movements will sprout up across the country.
Deace explains Homan’s role in Minnesota using the analogy of President Abraham Lincoln sending Union General William T. Sherman to capture the key Confederate city of Atlanta during the Civil War. The campaign involved heavy fighting, destruction of supplies and railroads, and a lot of hardship for people in the area, but it was necessary to win the war.
“This is Lincoln calling Sherman in and saying, ‘Atlanta's a problem; go and solve it,’ all right? And I'm all for that, but we need to understand, then, sometimes you have to solve things the way that Sherman did. Sometimes the solutions are not easy,” says Deace.
“We have to understand now: We are never quelling their desire. We have to defeat it.”
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President Donald Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, pledged to stay and clean up Minneapolis until justice is served.
Homan traveled to Minneapolis this week in the aftermath of a second fatal shooting of an anti-ICE agitator. Despite new footage apparently showing Alex Pretti, the radical killed over the weekend, spitting on federal agents and kicking out a tail light, violent activists are continuing to ravage Minneapolis.
'They'll be held accountable.'
"The reason for the massive deployment is because of the threats, because of the violence," Homan said during a Thursday press conference. "... We brought extra resources in to provide that security."
"When the violence decreases, we can draw down those resources."
RELATED: Alex Pretti broke a rib in a previous altercation with feds a week before he died: CNN
Homan suggested that many of these violent mobs are not organic, but rather organized and well-funded groups of agitators motivated by ideology. Although he didn't specify the approach, Homan committed to holding these agitators accountable.
"About the organization and the funding of the attacks on ICE," Homan said. "I'm not going to answer a lot about that, because I'm not going to show our hand, but they'll be held accountable. Justice is coming."
Homan said a lot of progress has been made since he arrived in Minneapolis on Monday, claiming Minnesota has agreed to allow county jails to notify federal agencies like ICE when illegal aliens are released so they can be taken into custody. Although Homan acknowledged that this is a step in the right direction, he is committed to staying in Minnesota until the work is done.
Blaze News has reached out to Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison for comment.
"I'm staying until the problem is gone," Homan said.
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On Monday, January 26, President Trump announced that he had had "very good" and "productive” conversations with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) amid the escalating anti-ICE protests, violence, and backlash over fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
According to statements from all three, their conversations centered on de-escalating tensions from the anti-ICE protests and federal immigration operations in Minnesota, including potential reductions in federal agent numbers, allowing state-led investigations into the recent fatal shootings by agents, cooperation on handing over criminal noncitizens from state custody, reassigning Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, and assigning border czar Tom Homan to oversee matters on the ground.
Many people on the right interpreted this as the Trump administration caving to leftist protesters. Glenn Beck confesses that that was his initial reaction upon hearing the news.
“When I first saw this story yesterday … I thought, is he waving the white flag? What is he doing? ... Is this all about the election and getting re-elected and he's got to make nicey-nice?” he admits.
But deeper scrutiny led Glenn to believe that it is not surrender but rather "counterinsurgency” that we are witnessing in the Twin Cities.
“We're seeing Trump shift the battlefield, not abandon it,” he says, explaining that if Trump were legitimately surrendering, he would “end the enforcement nationwide,” “call off ICE operations,” “publicly repudiate Homan or Miller,” “admit wrongdoing,” and “accept the 'Gestapo snatching people off the streets' narrative.”
But “none of that happened,” says Glenn.
Instead, Trump “narrowed the enforcement criteria. Political pressure is rerouted, optics cooled, legal authority preserved, responsibility transferred back to the states,” he explains. “This is not a surrender. I believe this is a reframing of the fight, and it's really smart.”
From the get-go, Trump was clear about ICE’s objective, says Glenn: “Get the really bad criminals off the streets.”
“So the goal was never ICE agents everywhere all the time. The goal was this: Force blue-state leadership to choose publicly and unmistakably between protecting violent criminals or cooperating with federal law enforcement,” he explains.
Minnesota was sliding into irremediable chaos, which would only benefit the radical left, which is aiming to cultivate a “legitimacy crisis,” he says. Escalation is exactly what the insurrectionists wanted Trump to do.
But he smartly didn’t drop the hammer. Instead, he made some moves in order to win the “optics war” — one of them being relocating Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, whom Glenn calls “a walking headline” and a “symbol” for the left’s anti-ICE movement.
This one move, Glenn says, accomplished a number of things. It weakened the Senate shutdown talks, took the media’s favorite villain out of the story, and moved the fight from “personality back to policy.”
“This is classic Trump,” he says.
“Never die on someone else's hill if it isn't the hill you chose. … Only die on the hill you choose,” he adds, quoting Trump’s iconic 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.”
“So when he talks to Walz and Frey, I don't think this is capitulation. I think these were traps.”
To hear more of Glenn’s analysis, watch the video above.
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Earlier this week, President Trump sent border czar Tom Homan to speak personally with leaders in Minnesota. In the latest update to those exchanges, President Trump called out a top official at the center of the controversy for refusing to cooperate with the administration.
On Wednesday morning, Trump issued a stern warning to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) after Frey indicated on Tuesday afternoon he was not going to enforce federal immigration law.
'He is PLAYING WITH FIRE!'
Frey posted a short thread to X summarizing his position, stating that Minneapolis "will not enforce federal immigration law, and that we will remain focused on keeping our neighbors and streets safe."
Trump noted his surprise at Frey's apparent switchback following a "very good conversation with him": "Could somebody in his inner sanctum please explain that this statement is a very serious violation of the Law, and that he is PLAYING WITH FIRE!"
President Trump sent Homan to Minnesota on Monday to discuss a solution with Mayor Frey and other leaders in the state. As of Monday, Trump said on Truth Social that "lots of progress is being made!"
By Tuesday, Homan likewise believed that he had had a "productive" conversation with Frey and Gov. Tim Walz (D). He said that "we all agree that we need to support our law enforcement officers and get criminals off the streets."
In his message, posted hours before Homan's, Frey emphasized the safety of the community and the strain on local police officers, stating that his "main ask is for Operation Metro Surge to end as quickly as possible."
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Minneapolis is a city seemingly closed off from the rest of the country, whose people are ripping it apart at the seams, and whose out-of-state agitators are providing them with the tools to do it faster, and with zeal.
The GOP is painting the ruling DFL as a party of fraud and lawlessness. If facts matter, Republicans will be back in power in the blue state.
There is no deal to be made with officials who reject the law itself. And there is no obligation for Trump to meet them halfway.
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