WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump on Monday appeared to start taking steps to lower the temperature caused by his siege of Minneapolis ― following days and weeks of actively inciting tensions between immigration agents and locals to the boiling point, and demonizing two residents killed by federal forces.
The substance of the apparent pivot, highlighted by the forthcoming exit of an aggressive Border Patrol commander from the city, is limited. Trump’s Justice Department is still fighting a state lawsuit trying to expel immigration agents from the city, while Trump’s agencies have shown zero interest in seriously investigating the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
Trump announced he was sending White House aide Tom Homan to the city to control the activities of thousands of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, whose presence there has led to the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens thus far this month.
“I am sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight. He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there. Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me,” Trump posted on his social media platform Monday morning.
Three hours later, Trump praised Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whom he has been constantly insulting for months, for calling him. “It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” Trump posted.
The change would make Homan, who is Trump’s “border czar” but has no formal leadership role at either immigration agency, the public face of the Minnesota deployment, superseding Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino, whose command has been linked to violent incidents in both Minneapolis and Chicago. Both gave public statements after Saturday morning’s killing of ICU nurse Pretti in Minneapolis that were quickly proven false.
Monday afternoon, CNN reported Bovino and some of his agents were set to leave the city.
Republican allies lauded Trump for helping to calm things down. New York Rep. Mike Lawler told Politico that putting Homan in charge was “a positive step to get the situation under control.”
That praise, though, neglects to point out that it was Trump himself who, along with his top aide Stephen Miller, set the fire in Minneapolis with their incendiary comments in the first place.
“Kristi Noem didn’t come up with the idea of calling protesters terrorists. Trump did,” said Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP Senate aide and now a researcher with the nonprofit group Protect Democracy.
Trump has for months been accusing Minneapolis and Minnesota more broadly of harboring thousands of violent criminal undocumented immigrants ― the “worst of the worst” ― an assertion that has often proven false in specific cases that have been reviewed by federal judges.
After the killing of 37-year-old Good on Jan. 7, Trump falsely claimed that she had run over the ICE officer who shot her three times. “She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over,” Trump told The New York Times later that same day.
Adam Gray via Associated Press
On Saturday, after one or more Border Patrol agents shot and killed Pretti, 37, after confiscating the pistol he was legally allowed to carry, Miller labeled him a “domestic terrorist” while Trump quickly posted a photo of a gun. “This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go – What is that all about?” Trump wrote.
“Trump owns the unlawful ICE operations,” said Carpenter, who was among many democracy advocates and authoritarian experts who warned that Trump would rule as an autocrat if returned to power. “He can move around and replace people in charge, but he is the one putting masked federal agents in the streets, issuing orders wrongly characterizing those who challenge his policies as domestic terrorists, and leading these authoritarian policies.”
Trump’s decision to put Homan in charge continued signals that began late Sunday that he was looking for a way out of a crisis for which public opinion was getting progressively worse for him and his party.
White House officials leaked to Fox News that Trump was not happy about how Noem and other officials had made the administration look by immediately lying about Pretti’s shooting and labeling him a “terrorist.”
Trump did a phone interview with The Wall Street Journal, also owned by Rupert Murdoch, in which he said the administration was “reviewing everything,” a vow that appears to contradict earlier statements from officials that the new shooting would only be investigated by DHS, not by the Department of Justice, as has been common practice for decades prior to the start of Trump’s second term.
Later Sunday evening, the White House called influential conservative talk show host Erick Erickson, who earlier in the day had recommended Trump replace Noem and Bovino with Homan, whose decades with ICE would give him the credibility that the others do not have.
“Let Homan take the lead and send Bovino elsewhere,” Erickson wrote at 11:45 a.m.
On Monday, Erickson told HuffPost he knows that his idea was relayed to the White House by a friend, which led to a phone call from a senior aide.
“My sense of things from my call last night is the president knows changes have to happen, and Miller thinks they should double down, but that is probably not going to be what happens. Homan reasserting himself and able to bypass Miller is a sign Miller is losing the fight,” Erickson said. “I know (Trump has) heard from a lot of the outside people he listens to that Noem et cetera handled it badly.”
Miller did not respond to a HuffPost query.
Trump, meanwhile, continued to muddle his claims that his deportation policy is designed to remove dangerous criminal undocumented immigrants, with wildly exaggerated and false allegations that the protests against ICE are somehow connected to investigations started under Democrat Joe Biden’s administration into fraud in social service programs, particularly by Somali-American immigrants.
“AMONG OTHER THINGS, THIS IS A ‘COVER UP’ FOR THE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS THAT HAVE BEEN STOLEN FROM THE ONCE GREAT STATE (BUT SOON TO BE GREAT AGAIN!) OF MINNESOTA!” Trump wrote just six minutes after his first post about Pretti’s killing.
Trump has also been lying in recent weeks that he won Minnesota in all three of his presidential elections. “I feel that I won Minnesota all three times. I won Minnesota three times,” he said on Jan. 9 as justification for why the FBI would not share information about Good’s shooting with local authorities.
In reality, he lost each time to the Democratic candidate ― but the false claim may explain a demand from his attorney general, Pam Bondi, that Minnesota turn over its voter data to the Department of Justice as one of the conditions for Trump to end his deployment of immigration agents.
“Fulfilling this common-sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law,” she wrote in a Saturday letter.