Thin ICE

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

 

In the span of 12 hours yesterday, the president yanked control of immigration operations in Minneapolis away from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, chatted productively with Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Minneapolis’ Democratic mayor about improving cooperation, and sent boorish Border Patrol goblin Greg Bovino into early retirement.

 

To all appearances, Donald Trump … de-escalated. It was shocking and unsurprising, a familiar paradox with this administration.

 

As a matter of conventional politics, de-escalation was a no-brainer. Something had to give in Minneapolis because the public backlash to ICE’s tactics, driven by two U.S. citizens being shot dead on camera, has turned Trump’s best issue into an albatross. A recent Associated Press poll placed his approval rating on immigration (38-61) lower than his overall job approval. Another survey found nearly 2 in 3 independents now view ICE unfavorably, while a separate New York Times poll saw 61 percent say that the agency’s tactics have gone too far. The White House’s own internal numbers reportedly indicate that 58 percent of undecided voters believe the president is “too focused” on deporting illegal immigrants.

 

All four surveys were conducted before Alex Pretti was killed Saturday. The internal poll was conducted before Renee Good was killed earlier this month. Imagine what the next round of data will look like.

 

Even friendly voices have begun nudging the president to shake things up. Yesterday Sean Hannity told his radio audience that raiding Home Depot to round up nonviolent illegals is a bad look. (If you think that’s out of character, remember how Hannity reacted to Mitt Romney getting trounced by Hispanics in the 2012 election.) A handful of congressional Republicans have lobbied Trump to dial things down as well, although the cowardly majority are following their usual M.O. of lying low and hoping for the best. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who’d gone to bat previously for the president and his immigration goon squad, felt moved to issue a statement this morning calling for Noem’s head to roll.

 

And perhaps it will. Trump met with her for two hours Tuesday evening after spending the last several weeks hearing from allies about cutting her loose. Stay tuned.

 

He was shedding popular support over his approach in Minneapolis, so, reasonably enough, he’s changing that approach. That’s how things are supposed to work in America. Given the incentives created by conventional democratic politics, there’s nothing the least bit surprising about it.

 

But given the incentives created by unconventional anti-democratic Trumpist politics? It’s arguably the most shocking development of his second term, and there have been a lot of shocking developments in his second term.

 

Why did the right’s ultimate “fighter” retreat?

 

The ‘Flight 93’ crackdown.

 

A glib answer to that question might be, “Why wouldn’t he retreat? Trump doesn’t care about the substance of most of his policies. Certainly, he doesn’t care as much as he cares about being popular.”

 

Sure, but this isn’t any ol’ policy, like abortion or Obamacare subsidies. This is immigration, the bête noire of right-wing nationalism. And while the president isn’t above wobbling on aspects of that issue either, the dynamic in Minneapolis seemed lab-designed to bring out his worst escalatory impulses. Locals turning out en masse in a Democratic city to harass ICE agents wasn’t merely an “immigration” issue, it was a basic test of wills to see whether an authoritarian strongman would allow popular resistance to deter him from ridding the country of undesirables.

 

I assumed Trump would consider it his highest priority to pass that test, by any means necessary. I think his fans did too.

 

Shortly before yesterday’s climbdown, the Washington Examiner’s Byron York framed the stakes of the standoff as nothing less than a gut check on whether America has “the resolve” to deport illegal immigrants. Manly man podcaster Matt Walsh went further, as he tends to do: “Any resolution to the Minnesota situation that does not include mass arrests of the leftist agitators and mass deportations of the illegals will be a total failure for the Trump Administration and only guarantee more and worse chaos in the future.” For MAGA, immigration had become a secondary issue in Minneapolis; the main issue was whether the Trump White House understood “what time it is” and was willing to act accordingly.

 

That’s why the fact that Minnesota has a smaller percentage of illegal immigrants than America as a whole, and a far smaller percentage than states like Texas and Florida, hasn’t bothered the right throughout this ordeal. This operation isn’t about finding and detaining the maximum number of illegals. It’s about asserting postliberal dominance over a liberal stronghold.

 

All right-wing defenses of ICE rest on the fallacy that immigration law simply cannot be enforced effectively unless the agency behaves precisely as brutally and lawlessly as it believes it needs to (i.e., as it wants to). Baked into that fallacy is the belief that the sort of citywide leftist backlash we’ve seen in Minneapolis would have happened no matter how ICE behaved even though no such mega-backlashes occurred during Trump’s far less brutal first term. The protesters, not the tactics, must be to blame for the crisis—and so the protesters, not the tactics, must be made to yield.

 

All of this is downstream of the right’s poisonous conviction that modern America faces an existential struggle so dire that conventional constitutional liberalism is unequal to the task of solving it. Only ruthless norm-breaking stands a chance. Michael Anton’s loathsome 2016 essay about the “Flight 93” election is the ur-text for that form of fascist catastrophism; 10 years later, virtually every problem that Trump and his movement face is reflexively transformed into an “emergency” that conveniently requires the White House and its goons to enjoy total impunity in how they respond to it.

 

That’s what I assumed Minneapolis would be—the “Flight 93” crackdown, the proving ground for postliberals to show how far they must and will go to rid America of foreigners and of citizens who believe there are moral limits to how order should be kept. I also assumed Trump was game for it: Remember, the last time he faced major protests, he was allegedly prepared to shoot protesters. The sane people around him at the time who stopped him are long gone now.

 

But here he is, de-escalating anyway.

 

De-escalation is surprising in another way. From the start, the president and his henchmen have treated his victory in 2024 as a comprehensive mandate to do anything they like. Polls routinely show that most Americans dislike his tariffs, for instance, yet Trump is always quick to justify them by noting that he campaigned on the issue. We “signed up” for the tariffs when we reelected him, you see. By the same token, we might reason, Americans “signed up” for a quasi-military occupation of Democratic cities by masked goons in the name of immigration enforcement. (A Fox News guest said so explicitly a few days ago.) Nothing was more predictable than that he’d behave ruthlessly in a second term toward illegals and their leftist defenders, and America gave him a second term anyway. Why shouldn’t he carry out that “mandate” in Minneapolis?

 

To put it another way, if it’s true that Americans elected fascists in 2024 to enforce borders because liberals were unwilling to do so, by what logic should fascists refrain from acting like fascists in doing the job voters hired them to do? Yet Trump does now seem more inclined to refrain from it in Minnesota going forward. Huh.

 

Beyond all of that, de-escalation is wildly out of character for an administration that abhors contrition in principle. Trump 2.0 has a “no scalps policy,” Steve Bannon told Semafor last year, by which he meant that it would rather keep unfit officials in positions of influence than validate the opposition’s criticism of those officials by firing them. Usually, in fact, the more spiteful a Trump deputy is toward the left, the safer he is from being dumped. That alone probably explains why Pete Hegseth still has a job.

 

Yet here we are, suddenly watching the president serve up Bovino’s scalp on a silver platter and maybe preparing to serve Noem’s next. Apart from Stephen Miller, no one in the administration has been more antagonistic toward critics of the administration’s immigration policies than those two have. If being a malevolent authoritarian troll no longer guarantees job security, no one in the administration is safe. Watch your back, Pete!

 

All things considered, it’s deeply strange under these circumstances that Trump would retreat. But maybe he took a hard look at how things are about to play out in Congress and concluded, to borrow a phrase, that he didn’t have the cards.

 

The ICE shutdown.

 

Tell me if this sounds familiar. A government shutdown is imminent, Democrats appear gung ho to pull the trigger, and there’s every reason to believe the public will side with them decisively in the standoff that follows.

 

That was the same situation Trump and Republicans faced last fall. Chuck Schumer and his caucus wanted to draw the public’s attention to the fact that federal subsidies for Obamacare consumers were about to expire and gambled that shutting down the government to protest it would do that. It did: Voters ended up blaming Republicans for the crisis and Democratic candidates, running on “affordability,” cleaned up in November’s elections. The president was so shaken by that result that he acknowledged publicly that the shutdown had hurt his party.

 

Now he’s staring at a sequel. Except this time voters are already angry about the issue that Democrats are zeroing in on and already favor Democrats’ position on that issue lopsidedly.

 

Before Alex Pretti was killed on Saturday, Senate Democrats were poised to grudgingly support a package of six agency funding bills that were recently approved by the House. One of those agencies is DHS. Schumer’s members didn’t want to rubber-stamp more money for Homeland Security in this political climate, but they also didn’t want to cause another shutdown so soon after the last, so they prepared to bite the bullet—until Pretti was shot, which made the prospect of supporting the DHS bill as-is unthinkable.

 

Democrats now won’t let any new money for the agency through until Republicans agree to include certain as-yet-unspecified reforms to how DHS enforces immigration law. That means the entire package will be filibustered, triggering a shutdown this weekend.

 

“Can’t the Senate split the DHS bill off from the other five, pass those five, and then have a mini-shutdown over DHS funding?” you might ask. It can, but the House would need to re-pass that five-bill package, and it’s not scheduled to be back in session until next week, after the shutdown would begin. And that’s the easy part: According to Punchbowl News, a new DHS bill written to incorporate Democratic reforms to ICE will be the heaviest of lifts in the House.

 

Here’s the concern gripping the top levels of the Trump administration—the House simply can’t pass another DHS funding bill under any circumstances.

 

Even if Trump were to cut a deal with Democrats that can get through the Senate, House Republicans believe they can’t round up 218 votes to pass a rule to get it on the House floor. Or alternatively, find 290 lawmakers willing to pass it under suspension of the rules. Republicans just don’t believe there’s a coalition in the House that can pass another DHS bill.

 

That’s why Trump has been focused on “de-escalatory measures,” as one administration official told us, a first step toward placating Democrats.

 

Imagine how all of this might have played out if the White House had stuck with the status quo in Minneapolis. The government would have shut down, and most voters would have backed Democrats’ demand for ICE reforms. Then, even if the White House capitulated and made a deal with Schumer, a critical mass of House Republicans might have blocked the Trump-approved compromise bill for fear of seeming “soft” on immigration to hardline primary voters back home. The GOP could have ended up being blamed by the public twice over, first for the carnage ICE had unleashed and was continuing to unleash and then again for obstructing reforms to limit that carnage.

 

Meanwhile, as the standoff played out, Republicans would be running the risk of new carnage landing in the news that would turn the public further against them.

 

Immigration, already a bleeding wound for the president and his party, was (and still is) poised to create a hemorrhage as the midterms approach. And so yesterday’s de-escalation looks like Trump’s attempt at triage: By handing Democrats Bovino’s scalp and handing Noem's duties in Minneapolis to Tom Homan, he’s offering them DHS “reforms” preemptively in hopes that they’ll change their minds and help pass the six-bill Senate funding package after all, sparing House Republicans from a political nightmare.

 

They won’t, of course. Given how flamboyantly the White House has torched its own credibility in smearing Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats can’t accept any cross-my-heart promises from Trump and ICE that they’ll behave more professionally going forward. Schumer will need to insist that certain reforms be given the force of law—no more masks for agents, body cameras worn at all times, higher recruiting and training standards for new hires, state police being looped in on investigations into the use of force, an end to home invasions without a judicial warrant. (I thought the Fourth Amendment had already taken care of that, but I’ve always been a bad lawyer.)

 

Even if Democrats are destined to play hardball, though, the fact that Trump has now taken a conciliatory posture in Minneapolis might help Republicans in the messaging war over the shutdown to come. “We were already retreating and Democrats insisted on defunding the government anyway,” the White House will say. “Shouldn’t they, not we, be blamed for this standoff?”

 

It might help. It can’t hurt.

 

The next crackdown.

 

Just as I’m skeptical that the White House has truly lost its appetite for Greenland, I’m skeptical that it’s done with staging heavy-handed immigration enforcement pageants in blue cities.

 

Authoritarian chuds like Walsh will insist that it try again. Many MAGA loyalists will dutifully applaud if the president withdraws entirely from Minneapolis, pronouncing “mission accomplished” because that’s the sort of “emperor’s new clothes” prostration this movement requires, but retreat will stick in the craw of hardcore postliberals. Every time leftists come out to protest in numbers henceforth, the worst elements of the right will insist that this wouldn’t be happening if the president had handled the demonstrations in Minnesota Tehran-style.

 

And it will stick in Trump’s craw that his own supporters are needling him for being weak. He resents the “TACO” thing, remember; it’ll bug him even more when it has to do not with tariffs but with his basic authoritarian fortitude in imposing order on “the enemy.”

 

So he’ll try something like Minneapolis again—especially if, God forbid, someone kills an immigration officer. That’s the sort of political posture in which the president might at last feel comfortable invoking the Insurrection Act, as he threatened to do a few weeks ago. It’s hard to get the public excited to crush demonstrations when the cops who are confronting those demonstrators are committing the worst violence. If and when that changes, public attitudes will change too.

 

Frankly, we may have reached the point where the president can’t effectively restrain ICE even if, for political reasons, he wants to. He and Stephen Miller built a force that’s behaving in Minneapolis exactly the way it was designed to behave, in service to a “deport ’em all” agenda that Trump ran and won on. Now that it’s been remade in Miller’s image, the culture of the agency points remorselessly toward further abuse: Officers are reportedly rewarded for the number of arrests they make, not the number of arrestees who are ultimately deported, which incentivizes them to go on conducting the sort of disruptive, haphazard, antagonistic mega-dragnets that have so roiled Minnesotans.

 

To change that culture the White House would need to overhaul ICE from top to bottom, which would amount to repudiating the ethos of postliberalism: Actually, maximum ruthlessness isn’t the secret ingredient for better government. It will not happen. Not willingly, anyway.

 

So maybe the president should regard the coming shutdown less as a crisis and more as an opportunity. If he’s worried about spending his last three years in power having to put out fires started by ICE, he should yield to Schumer’s demands for statutory reforms to bring the agency to heel. “I didn’t want to do it,” the president could tell his fans afterward, “but I had to in order to make sure funding for our wonderful Homeland Security officers continues.” You know him, always looking out for the best interests of others.