Trump Throws In the Towel on Minneapolis Surge

National Review Online

Sunday, February 15, 2026

 

President Trump sent Tom Homan to Minneapolis to declare victory and go home, and so he has.

 

Trump’s border czar announced the end of the ICE surge that had roiled the city and our national politics. Homan says ICE is getting more cooperation from county jails in handing over incarcerated illegal aliens, and immigration authorities have detained many of the illegal immigrants they had been targeting. It’s not clear how extensive the supposed new cooperation is, but Homan certainly forged a better relationship with state and city officials.

 

The big story here is that semiorganized resistance on the streets, with the support of the elected leadership in Minnesota and Minneapolis, made the aggressive federal enforcement too painful to continue. Usually, in sheer political terms, when mobs are arrayed against law enforcement, law enforcement prevails. In Minneapolis, though, the public considered the DHS operation arbitrary and heavy-handed, and the officers in camouflage lost the image battle to the agitators. Trump, who is attuned to optics and willing to shift gears at a moment’s notice, realized it and stood down.

 

This is a bad precedent, but immigration enforcement doesn’t rise and fall exclusively based on what happens in Minneapolis. Trump began Operation Metro Surge as a headline-chasing reaction to all the attention around the Minneapolis fraud scandal.

 

The level of theft in the Twin Cities has indeed been stunning, but the U.S. attorney’s office there had been prosecuting cases for years, and putting thousands of DHS agents on the streets was not the way to root out fraudulent billing practices.

 

On top of this, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol honcho Gregory Bovino wanted the operation, in accord with Trump’s wishes, to be as visible and muscular as possible to project an image of toughness. The theory was that would send a message to illegal immigrants around the country and convince them to self-deport. The political problem was that a broader audience, not just illegal immigrants, watched what was happening in Minneapolis.

 

Where to go from here? First, Homan, a no-nonsense professional, should be given de facto responsibility for immigration enforcement, which may already have happened. Noem is an incompetent publicity hound who, if she’s going to stay at DHS, should have as little responsibility as possible.

 

There’s been tension in the administration between going after “the worst of the worst” and casting a wider net for immigration arrests. While no illegal immigrant should be immune from detention and deportation, it makes sense to focus resources on targeted arrests of illegal aliens who have committed non-immigration offenses or identity theft against citizens and those who have final orders of removal. There is also a stronger case for removing recent arrivals in order to roll back the Biden-era flood. These priorities should be coupled with much more vigorous worksite enforcement, both raids and the bureaucratic work necessary to squeeze employers who are systematically employing illegal labor. An enforcement regime along these lines would be more politically palatable and effective over time.

 

Ultimately, the battle is not over Minneapolis but whether our immigration laws can be enforced such that the population of illegal immigrants significantly declines.