Enough With Immigration

By John Podhoretz

Sunday, March 01, 2026

 

‘You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” These immortal words from William Blake’s 1790 prose poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” offer a rueful perspective on the turn in Donald Trump’s fortunes in 2026. It appears his administration did “what is more than enough” in implementing its policies related to illegal aliens inside the United States and, in so doing, turned an unalloyed political and policy triumph into a possible defeat.

 

What was “enough” was stemming the tide at the border in 2025. Last year, the net number of illegal crossings into the United States was zero. All in all, according to the Brookings Institution, “net migration to the U.S. was negative in 2025, a sharp reversal from net inflows exceeding three million in 2023 and two million in 2024.” This came about due to better patrolling, increased apprehensions of those attempting to cross and their subsequent return south of the border, and the general sense among those outside of the United States that the effort to enter under this new administration would be a fool’s errand.

 

That change demonstrates just how out of control the border had become during the feckless Biden years, when the administration adopted a triumphally petulant “whatever the Trump people did, we’re going to do the opposite” attitude. It arguably got Trump elected to his second term as a result. Trump promised to put an end to the Biden approach. And he fulfilled that campaign promise.

 

Polls suggested the public was overwhelmingly supportive of the results. And then Trump did “more than enough.”

 

Throughout 2025, even as the work at the border was uncontroversial in the eyes of the public, the decision to use ICE and the Border Patrol to go in active pursuit of illegals inside the United States proved to be a controversial policy. Closing the border was essentially an act of defense. But conducting raids across the United States to capture and deport illegals—some of them criminal actors but others simply people gathered in one place to seek temporary day jobs in parking lots—was more akin to a war of choice. It did not come in response to an immediate existential threat—unless, that is, you are single-mindedly focused on the idea that the presence of illegals among us constitutes a fast-acting social poison that we must flush out of our system without delay.

 

It’s true that Trump promised to conduct “mass deportations” in his second term, but he never offered a clear definition of what that meant or how it would be done. And while 6 in 10 Americans said they were in favor of deportations in 2024, the visible effort to pursue them in 2025 seemed to make Americans queasy. Nate Silver’s poll average calculates that overall public support for Trump on immigration turned negative in June 2025 and has stayed that way since. The news coverage of ICE’s actions in cities, showing masked agents moving aggressively on what appeared to be unthreatening people, surely played a significant role in the shift.

 

Then things took a particularly bad turn for Trump when he made the decision to “surge” forces into Minneapolis in December. This was not a direct reaction to any specific change on the streets there but a naked effort to shine a national light on an important story dating back to 2018: the channeling of public dollars into fraudulent and nonexistent relief organizations run by members of the Somali community in the Twin Cities. The details were so egregious that the state’s sitting governor, 2024 Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz, found it necessary to announce he would not run for another term.

 

The Walz humiliation could have been a Dayenu moment—that’s the word Jews sing on Passover that means “it should have been enough.” The Somali fraud scandal was a slow-acting agent that turned suddenly lethal at the end of 2025 when it came to Walz’s career and offered the promise that all kinds of blue-state coziness between leftist politicians and not-for-profit groups might be exposed and more fraud uncovered. The Somali scandal didn’t need ICE. It was going to ice liberals all on its own.

 

That was not good enough for Trump. No, in the Blakean marriage of heaven and hell that is his administration, Trump evidently needed to learn what was more than enough. He surged ICE. He added Border Patrol agents. The city’s (and the country’s) highly organized network of leftist activists was there and ready for it. They instantly redirected the national spotlight away from Walz and Co. and toward the immigration-enforcement officers. They sought to provoke confrontations and they succeeded. Two activist citizens, both personally imprudent but politically more useful than they could ever have known, were killed by ICE and Border Patrol agents during chaotic scrums lasting fewer than 10 seconds. One was minimally defensible, the other in no way defensible. The whole business of the Minneapolis surge became at best tragically unnecessary—a war of choice gone wrong—and at worst either a sign of an armed agency out of control or of a brilliantly manipulated PR campaign that was turning Trump’s greatest strength into a liability.

 

American attitudes on immigration are incredibly confused and incredibly confusing. We believe immigration is a benefit to the country. At the same time, we do not support illegal immigration and say in large numbers that it should be prevented and that illegal aliens should be deported. There’s something irreconcilable there. And matters become even more knotted due to the influence of a radical vanguard led by White House deputy Stephen Miller that opposes all immigration, illegal and legal, and is actively working to eliminate it. The vanguard is also seeking to end birthright citizenship, which has been accepted as a constitutional right since the passage of the 14th Amendment (and which was implicitly seen as such in the nine decades that followed the inception of the United States in 1776).

 

Miller and others define what is “more than enough.” Trump has largely been walking along the path they laid for him. He is showing signs of stepping off because he sees that the American people do not like how it feels to live in a country whose government acts in the way it has. Mere self-preservation suggests it’s time for him to say enough.

 

 

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.

Eating the Pieces

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, February 12, 2026

 

I’ve been trying for days to find something interesting to say about what’s happening with the Gordie Howe International Bridge. It shouldn’t be hard. The story has everything—corruption, intrigue, three different governments clashing, one comically large and fragile ego at the center of it all.

 

It’s objectively interesting … except to readers of this newsletter, who’ll find the themes familiar to the point of tedium.

 

In brief, the president is mad at Canada for deciding that it would rather do business with China than lick his boots. So on Monday he announced his opposition to the bridge, a joint endeavor between Canada and Michigan to ease congestion in cross-border commerce that’s been in the works for years thanks to, er, the first Trump administration. No more, though: “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given” Canada, the president angrily declared.

 

(We haven’t given the Canadians anything for the bridge, incidentally. They paid for it.)

 

The next day the New York Times revealed that Trump’s post came hours after Matthew Moroun dialed up Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Who’s Matthew Moroun, you ask? Why, he’s the owner of the Ambassador Bridge that for decades has provided the only conduit between Michigan and Canada for commercial trucking. That bridge’s local monopoly on tolls is threatened by the Gordie Howe Bridge so Moroun dialed up the president to ask for a favor, it appears. And of course he got one.

 

This barely qualifies as news in 2026.

 

Everything about the episode is par for the course for Trump 2.0. The rent-seeking by rich cronies. The president’s imperiousness in abusing state power to settle his petty grudges. The economic illiteracy in believing that America gets “absolutely NOTHING,” as he claimed in his statement, from an infrastructure project that will facilitate trade. And of course the usual basketful of lies and nonsense to support his position, punctuated by this head-scratching all-timer: “The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.”

 

What is there to say about this at Boiling Frogs that hasn’t been said a hundred times before?

 

The closest I’ve come to finding a point about it that’s worth drilling down on is this: Messing with the Gordie Howe Bridge is remarkably stupid strategically as a political matter.

 

We’re nine months out from a national election. Michigan, famously, is a closely run swing state. Nearly every major office there will be on the ballot this fall—governor, a Senate seat, 13 House seats. And Trump has somehow decided that this is the moment to lob a grenade at the state’s economy, knowing full well that Republican candidates there will have little choice but to take his side.

 

It’s insane. It reminds me of a notorious quote from his first term, when BuzzFeed asked an unidentified former White House official what the president’s strategy was in pardoning sleazy sycophants who’d been convicted of federal crimes. There’s no strategy, the official replied.

 

Trump’s supporters like to believe that he’s playing three-dimensional chess, he continued, but “more often than not he's just eating the pieces."

 

Trying to tank the Gordie Howe Bridge is another case of Trump eating the pieces. As was his immigration crackdown on Minneapolis, which we learned this morning is finally coming to an end.

 

Backlash.

 

On February 4 the Department of Homeland Security announced that more than 4,000 illegal immigrants had been arrested so far under “Operation Metro Surge” since it began in Minnesota on November 29.

 

That’s slightly north of 60 people per day. Not all were violent criminals, surely; probably very few were, in fact, given the national trendlines. Not all who were detained have been deported either. “Arrested” doesn’t mean “removed.”

 

Sixty arrests a day—for an operation that eventually involved 3,000 immigration agents. That’s one arrest daily on average per every 50 officers deployed.

 

Another way to look at it: The total number of arrests in Operation Metro Surge over the course of two months represents barely more than one day’s worth of the national target that Stephen Miller has been pressuring ICE to hit since last year.

 

What did the White House get in return for that measly number? Nothing more or less, I think, than the near-total destruction of its credibility on immigration outside of the core Republican base. And even parts of the core seem a little shaky lately.

 

The president’s job approval today in the RealClearPolitics average is 42.1 percent, a new low for his second term. Four of the last nine polls tracked by RCP have him below 40 percent, a floor he seldom crashed through in polling over the past year until recently. Yesterday an NBC News survey found his approval on “border security and immigration,” traditionally his strongest issue, at 40-60. When respondents were asked whom they trusted to provide the most accurate information about immigration arrests and related civil unrest in Minnesota, just 9 percent said “the federal government.”

 

I wonder why.

 

The Associated Press piled on with a new poll this morning that captured how poisonous Operation Metro Surge has become. Sixty-two percent believe the deployment of federal immigration agents into U.S. cities has gone too far, and 60 percent hold an unfavorable view of ICE. That tracks with the NBC News data, which found no less than three-quarters of Americans want the agency to be reformed or abolished entirely.

 

Last month, after an ICE officer killed Renee Good but before Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, I warned that the crackdown in Minneapolis was discrediting immigration enforcement. Now here we are. Dissatisfaction with the president is so high that he’s begun to get the short end of the stick in polling on whether his term so far has been worse than—deep breath—Joe Biden’s.

 

Four thousand arrests, not all of which will end in deportation, at the cost of crushing one of the GOP’s most consequential policy advantages over the left. The U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis—which was overseeing the prosecution of suspects in the big Somali fraud scandal—has also been wrecked in the process. How does that grab you as a return on a political investment?

 

That’s what eating the pieces looks like.

 

Beyond strategy.

 

Here’s a question that citizens in a democracy don’t often need to consider: How many policies has the president championed over the past 13 months that he had a reasonable expectation would be popular?

 

Securing the border is an obvious one. So are the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, although the bill writ large is not so popular. Beyond that, though?

 

Disruptive, overweening immigration dragnets aren’t popular, as we’ve just seen. Tariffs, Trump’s signature economic policy, aren’t either. Strong-arming nations like Venezuela with military muscle? Not popular. The big Greenland acquisition? Not popular. Racing away from NATO? Also not popular.

 

His Caesarist passion projects, like knocking down part of the White House to build a ballroom and renaming the Kennedy Center after himself? The less said, the better.

 

In every case, he’s eating the pieces instead of playing the sort of political chess that might plausibly improve his party’s chances in a difficult electoral environment. Which might be defensible if he were burning political capital to achieve some important policy goal, like Democrats did in 2010 when they successfully enacted Obamacare at the cost of obliteration in that fall’s midterms.

 

But Trump usually doesn’t get anything meaningful for the political hits he takes. His tariffs are likely to be nuked by the Supreme Court. Nations like Canada and Denmark that he’s tried to muscle are standing firm and forming new alliances. Immigration crackdowns like Operation Metro Surge have done little to shrink the enormous population of illegal immigrants in the U.S. As bad as 2010 was for the left—the GOP picked up 63 House seats, six Senate seats, and flipped 20 state legislative chambers—imagine how much more dismal it would have been if Obamacare had also collapsed in Congress before passage. That’s the trajectory the GOP appears to be on.

 

There are two possible explanations for why the president keeps eating the pieces. One is that he can’t resist trying to bully opponents even when he has reason to know that doing so will backfire.

 

Practically every unpopular policy I named earlier has come packaged with off-putting insults aimed at its target and heavy-handed threats to make that target suffer for refusing to give Trump what he wants. That matters. One high-level European official recently told Politico that the president’s domineering approach has caused a “violent” change of heart among his colleagues about the U.S. government while another complained of the “lack of respect for Europe” that the administration routinely, and gratuitously, communicates.

 

The Gordie Howe Bridge episode came after a year of Trump foolishly taunting Canada about making it the 51^st state, and the crackdown in Minneapolis involved two separate attempts by the administration to smear Americans shot to death by federal agents as domestic terrorists. The boorishness with which America’s leader conducts business ends up alienating everyone outside his own churlish base, hardening the resistance of opponents whose pride he’s offended and alienating voters who might have been receptive to his ends but don’t want to associate themselves with the means. Not so strategic.

 

He can’t help it, though. The ethics of postliberalism plus his own domineering nature mean intimidation and compulsion will always be his One Neat Trick on policy. He didn’t set immigration agents loose on Minneapolis as part of some master strategic plan to boost the GOP’s popularity before the midterms, he did it because authoritarians don’t know how else to solve problems. He cares about public opinion, sure, but you know how it goes with snakes.

 

The second explanation is simpler: The president does not actually care about public opinion. Maybe he used to, but he’s now chest-deep in an autocratic reverie in which he gets to do whatever he wants and Americans will just have to deal with it until January 2029. He wanted a big fascist pageant in Minnesota carried out by his secret police force and that’s what he got. It’s a fantasy, a folie à deux that he and Stephen Miller are sharing in the West Wing.

 

Political strategy has nothing to do with it.

 

Under this theory, he might not even understand that his policies are unpopular. (Remember, there are people around him whose entire job is to deliver good news.) When you hear him boast in an interview about how great his numbers supposedly are or how much voters love his economy, it’s tempting to think that he’s trying to gaslight viewers. More likely, though, is that he’s gaslit himself and is earnestly convinced that Americans love tariffs, never mind what the fake-news polls say. He’ll continue to carry out his agenda because the people are begging for more.

 

It’s hard to reconcile this explanation with his decision to withdraw from Minneapolis, admittedly. Maybe his Republican allies in Congress, who are more in touch with reality, prevailed upon him to do them a favor by ending it. Or maybe the polling on ICE is so heinous that not even the president’s unreality bubble could withstand being punctured by it.

 

Whichever explanation you favor, strategy isn’t what’s driving his decisions.

 

The next fiasco.

 

That tees us up nicely for the immense strategic fiasco to come this fall, when Trump sends ICE into Democratic strongholds in hopes of frightening nonwhite voters into staying away from the polls on Election Day.

 

A shocking number of Americans (including me) already expects it. According to a poll taken earlier this month by Data for Progress, 64 percent agreed when asked if they believe the president “will attempt to deploy immigration enforcement agents to prevent participation in the 2026 midterms.” Don’t accuse them/us of Trump Derangement Syndrome: Steve Bannon, who knew in advance how Trump would react to losing in 2020, promised the MAGA faithful recently that ICE will “surround the polls” in November to prevent another election from being stolen.

 

Under either theory of Trump’s behavior that I’ve offered, it’s a fait accompli. The president will deploy ICE because there’s no way an authoritarian knows how to solve a problem like a looming midterm wipeout other than with intimidation and threats. Or the president will deploy ICE because it pleases him to imagine voters who are hostile to him having to run a terrifying gauntlet past masked goons who might detain them if they try to cast a ballot.

 

He might even persuade himself that Americans like the idea of armed federal agents trying to scare citizens out of voting.

 

In reality, the deployment would be an unholy political debacle for him and the GOP.

 

To begin with, I doubt it would deter many from turning out. The opposite, more likely—Latinos might take offense at the White House’s blatantly sinister attempt to keep them from exercising their rights and show up in numbers to signal their defiance. And if they do, we can guess which party most will be voting for.

 

Having ICE out in force will also complicate the sore-loser right’s sacred obligation to screech about cheating afterward. If Democrats win a majority of the House or Senate with immigration officers watching the polls, what will be left of the GOP’s inevitable claim that that victory was due to illegal immigrants voting unlawfully en masse? If anything, deploying ICE would hand the left a pretext to scream “fraud” in case Republicans end up overperforming on Election Day. We would have won, they’ll say, if not for Trump resorting to Putinist tactics to keep our voters from turning out.

 

But the stupidest part of ordering a big national ICE operation on Election Day is that it would double as a campaign commercial for Democrats, bought and paid for by our Republican president and playing out in front of Americans moments before they vote. The agency is wildly politically radioactive, per the polling I noted earlier; I can’t imagine a surer way to motivate the average joe to vote against the GOP than by reminding them in a starkly vivid way that a Republican win means two more years of a despised, lawless paramilitary force operating unchecked in America.

 

Well, I suppose handing voters a receipt as they enter their polling precinct showing them how much they’ve paid in tariffs over the last year (hint: a lot!) might be slightly surer. But apart from that, a show of force by ICE around the election is the closest thing I can think of to Trump waving a red cape before a bull that’s already preparing to charge.

 

Even a novice chess player wouldn’t make a strategic mistake that egregious. It would be less a matter of eating the pieces than eating the whole board—but it’s going to happen, with near-total certainty. Bon appétit, Mr. President.

Lefty Kooks 1, Trump Gun Thugs 0

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 13, 2026

 

The Trump administration has announced that it is abandoning its “surge”—you’ll remember that term from the Iraq War—in Minneapolis. Other than two dead Americans, millions and millions of dollars in economic losses, and the further erosion of trust in armed federal agencies, what exactly has been accomplished?

 

“As a result of our efforts here, Minnesota is now less of a sanctuary state for criminals,” said border czar Tom Homan, who remains on the job because he is dumb enough to get recorded taking a $50,000 bribe but is still somehow not quite as dumb as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

 

Like most of what one hears from senior figures in the Trump administration, that statement is a lie and is, in fact, something closer to the opposite of the truth: The policy result of Donald Trump’s imbecilic decision to respond to a Medicaid fraud case in Minnesota with the Border Patrol and ICE will be that Minnesota and Minneapolis are left with a deepened commitment to their sanctuary policies, convinced—as many other states and cities surely will be—that the price of active cooperation with the black-masked goon squads, thugs, bullies, incompetents, and Wehrmacht Generalfeldmarschall Rommel cosplay dorks entrusted with enforcing our immigration law is just too high.

 

And at least one observer who had been very skeptical about the wisdom of so-called sanctuary city policies is now a little more sympathetic to those arrangements—and surely I am not the only one. In Virginia—a state in which the 11-member House delegation is split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats, a state that was happy to elect Glenn Youngkin but that has rejected Donald Trump three times in a row—lawmakers are considering new rules that would restrict federal immigration enforcement there, limiting where arrests can be made, for example, and putting restrictions on the wearing of masks. Virginia is not alone: New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and New Mexico are all looking at putting new restrictions on cooperation with federal immigration enforcers. Even in Texas, where sanctuary policies are (pending a final court ruling) forbidden by state law, cities such as San Antonio have made it clear that they will offer only the minimum level of cooperation required under law.

 

The Trump administration not only has made sanctuary policies more popular—the administration has, through its abuse of power, made those policies better policies. A world in which federal immigration law is enforced judiciously and thoroughly by properly trained professionals is a world in which it makes a great deal of sense for mayors and governors to make it easy for federal authorities to pick up illegal-alien felons being discharged from prison, to deport validated gang members illegally present in the United States, etc. But we live in a world in which thousands of masked gunmen were deployed by the president and his sycophantic DHS secretary as a punitive act of partisan political theater: Minnesota has a relatively small population of illegals, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the population, and the fraud scandal that preceded the surge had nothing to do with illegals—but it did happen in a state in which the feckless governor was Kamala Harris’s VP nominee and where there are a lot of black people with Muslim names. Donald Trump is no respecter of the truth in general, but that is doubly so when it comes to black people with Muslim-sounding names: Ask Barack Obama. J.D. Vance is no respecter of the truth in general but doubly so when it comes to black people with any kind of names: Ask Springfield, Ohio.

 

(No, I do not think J.D. Vance is a racist—he is a moral coward who knows that Haitian refugees in Ohio have no political power in spite of their being present in the country lawfully.)

 

Trump probably will use his pardon powers to prevent federal cases against Jonathan Ross (who killed Renee Good) and Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez (who killed Alex Pretti), but Trump cannot prevent state-level cases against those men from proceeding eventually, and he may not be able (or may not judge it to be in his self-interest) to prevent all federal action against them, or to protect those who have lied about—or, possibly, have altered or destroyed evidence in—those cases. Ross, Ochoa, and Gutierrez are very possibly headed to prison at some point and, while it may not yet be top of mind, they may find themselves in the not-too-distant future considering how they want that to go. Those men all have stories to tell. One suspects that none of those stories will fortify public trust in federal authority or in Donald Trump and his grotesque little junta.

 

After the excesses of the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd riots and suffocating political environment that came out of that upheaval, the perennial-protest left was on its back foot. No more: Trump has saved the left-wing piqueteros from their own worst tendencies, emboldened and empowered them, and—critically—handed them a political victory. Expect to see the Minneapolis model adopted in cities across the country as this panicky and incompetent clutch of fools lurches from crisis to crisis to midterms to 2028. Minneapolis has shown the left what works, seeing off Trump & Co. with very little more than a bunch of whistles, some worn-out protest chants, and just enough political discipline to keep downtown businesses from having to put plywood on their windows. Not since Trump saved Mark Carney and the Canadian Liberals from all but certain electoral defeat have we seen such an own goal from the retired game show host and quondam pornographer who serves, incredibly enough, as president of these United States of America.

 

All that drama, and we still don’t have basic immigration stuff like mandatory E-Verify. Kind of makes you wonder what it was all about, doesn’t it?

Five Basic Truths About America’s Most Polarizing Policy Debate

By Conor Friedersdorf

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

“If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”

 

So warned my colleague David Frum in the headline of an April 2019 article about America’s failure to control mass immigration. “Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address,” he wrote. “If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones.”

 

That thesis looked shaky in 2020. Voters declined to reelect Donald Trump; for the first time in more than 50 years, Gallup found that Americans who wanted immigration to increase outnumbered those who wanted it to decrease––a seeming rebuke of Trump’s cruel family-separation policy and attacks on Mexicans and Muslims––and that 77 percent said immigration is a good thing for the United States. Then Joe Biden failed to control the southern border and presided over record surges in unlawful entries. By 2024, a majority wanted less immigration, Trump won the presidency while promising the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history, and an analysis of why voters rejected Kamala Harris found that “too many immigrants crossed the border” was nearly tied for the top reason.

 

Today, Frum’s warning seems prescient: The Trump administration has deployed a force of aggressive masked officers onto American streets while promising “retribution.” They’ve detained, pepper-sprayed, assaulted, shot, and killed Americans. And high-ranking officials have repeatedly gotten caught lying about events captured by citizen video footage.

 

A majority now disapproves of Trump’s handling of immigration. Perhaps Democrats will prevail in their current efforts to force ICE officers to take off their masks and get warrants, or even win back Congress as a result––the MAGA coalition is no less vulnerable than the left to voter backlash. But a Democratic victory in 2026 is not likely to end this cycle, in which majorities hate how both parties handle immigration and ping-pong unhappily between them.

 

I have covered immigration politics and policy for 25 years; here’s my sense of five basic truths that lawmakers need to acknowledge if they want to implement immigration policy that is both popular and in the nation’s best interest.

 

1. Even many of those Americans who say that they want to deport all immigrants who are here illegally would likely not stand by that position in practice.

Lots of MAGA supporters insist that deporting all immigrants in the U.S. illegally is a prudent goal. Some argue that conserving the rule of law requires doing so. “I don’t care if it’s a grandma who’s been here for 23 years and sits quietly on her porch all day long,” the populist-right pundit Walter Curt wrote. “We either have laws or we don’t, we either have borders or we don’t, there is no middle ground.”

Although superficially seductive, that logic is monomaniacal. In the real world, federal laws are enforced by presidents in a manner that predictably fails to catch anything close to 100 percent of lawbreakers, because resources are scarce, trade-offs are real, and maximalist outcomes are simply incompatible with limited government.

 

Consider the example of tax law. Most Americans abhor tax cheats. But they, and especially most conservatives, would oppose deploying thousands of masked, armed IRS agents into whatever American neighborhoods the president fancies and allowing them to search houses, workplaces, and private papers to catch all the tax cheats.

 

Yes, lots of Americans tell pollsters that they want every immigrant who came here illegally deported, but how many would stick to that position if told that it would require house-to-house raids, or that the federal government must choose between spending limited funds on apprehending undocumented grandmothers who stayed after their work visas and spending on other societal needs, such as finding a cure for cancer or paying down the national debt?

 

2. A majority of Americans support some level of immigration enforcement, particularly for unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crimes.

 

If excessive immigration enforcement is incompatible with liberty, insufficient immigration enforcement is incompatible with representative democracy––Republicans are correct that our immigration laws were duly enacted, and every plausible read of election results and polling data confirms that Americans favor some meaningful level of immigration enforcement.

 

Americans’ preferences are clearest on the question of immigrants in the country illegally who have been convicted of violent crimes: According to an Associated Press poll, 83 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat favor deporting them, a position that is also held by 79 percent of Democrats. The persistence of contrary policies in some Democrat-controlled jurisdictions is harmful to public safety and the political interests of that coalition.

 

I support sanctuary cities insofar as that means that local police don’t enforce immigration law, because they want residents to cooperate with law enforcement. But it doesn’t follow that jailers should refuse all cooperation with deportations. If you favor any immigration enforcement at all, who better to focus on than incarcerated bad actors, who can be found without spending any money on searches or deploying federal officers among the public?

3. Refugee crises will happen––and every response likely to satisfy the public requires prior planning.

 

Perhaps the most difficult challenge on immigration is what to do with large, sudden surges of people. The future will bring wars, natural disasters, regime collapses, famines, and more. Barring entry to desperate refugees seems cruel, but letting in large, unanticipated flows of foreigners can cause voters in democracies to feel overwhelmed and empower authoritarians. Escaping this dysfunctional cycle is in the interests of restrictionists and inclusionists alike. All potential solutions come with challenges, but none is more formidable than the status quo. The future will confront us with many such crises. We need a plan.

 

4. Even many Americans who argue for a stricter immigration policy find the demonization of immigrants concerning.

 

It is one thing to deport people and another thing to vilify them while doing so. In my youth, the Republican Party was explicit about the goodness and humanity of most immigrants––see, for example, the way that Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush talked about the issue in 1980. Bush noted that “honorable, decent, family-loving people” were in violation of the law.

Today, in an America where there are many more immigrants, lawful and not, and where violent crime is lower than it was for the entire 1980s and ’90s, data suggest that unauthorized immigrants commit felonies at lower rates than U.S. citizens and immigrants who are authorized to be here. Obviously, some do commit murders and other serious crimes, but it is misleading and incendiary to talk about the entire class as if a large share are violent criminals, or to treat particular ethnic groups as scapegoats for citizens’ financial struggles. Many Americans find such talk unnerving and distasteful.

 

That is not mere political correctness. It is rooted in the fact that U.S. history is rife with examples of the demonization of ethnic-minority groups preceding mob violence against them. I hope America is beyond atrocities like the Los Angeles Chinese massacre, the World War I–era lynching of ethnic Germans, and the Zoot Suit Riots. But humans today are no more evolved than the perpetrators of those atrocities. Insofar as we’re less likely to participate in mob attacks, it’s because of the existence of cultural guardrails—the very ones that the MAGA coalition is dismantling.

 

5. Every high-immigration country has citizens who fear immigration and immigrants. They are least likely to sow dysfunction when their predispositions are understood and to some degree accommodated.

 

The United States has no choice but to tolerate people who fear immigration and immigrants. Although many humans enjoy diversity, a percentage of people in all countries and racial and demographic groups are psychologically uncomfortable with difference. Their discomfort may be to some degree innate, and they are either unable or unwilling to change.

 

America should never allow its xenophobes to persecute immigrants or violate their rights. But people who hold anti-immigrant views are fellow citizens who influence our culture, politics, and public policy––and we can influence whether they do so in ways that are better or worse for immigrants.

 

In The Authoritarian Dynamic, the social psychologist Karen Stenner explains how people with a latent predisposition to authoritarianism get triggered, and how best to respond to preserve a pluralistic society. Her work suggests that liberals should stop framing immigration as a celebration of multicultural difference and instead emphasize ways in which immigrants are just like the rest of us: people who seek safety, opportunity, and a better future for their family. These framings can better assuage the fears of those with xenophobic tendencies, she argues. Stenner suggests that countries implement practical assimilationist policies, such as encouraging and assisting with English fluency. She argues that immigration is most sustainable—and backlash against it least likely to succeed—when inflows of new immigrants are controlled, and subject to known limits rather than unlimited in a way that feels unpredictable.

 

As she puts it in her book, insisting on unconstrained diversity “pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.” And once a society’s authoritarians are activated, the outcome depends in part on how its conservatives react. If they side with authoritarians, repressive policies follow. But under the right conditions, conservatives can be counted on to rally behind pluralism and tolerance. One condition is that they feel reassured “regarding established brakes on the pace of change, and the settled rules of the game,” Stenner writes.

 

If Democrats or Republicans hope to create sustainable immigration policy, that policy must roughly reflect the public will. Instead of efforts to alter public opinion through persuasion, we’ve seen a succession of fringe factions forcing extremist positions on majorities that hate them. Politicians from both parties should moderate according to what voters actually want. Otherwise, endless political failures risk causing many to lose faith in all politics––which is an existential danger to our democracy.

 

 

Our Roy Cohn

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, February 05, 2026

 

A recurring challenge when writing about the president’s advisers is resisting the “good czar, bad boyars” fallacy.

 

If you don’t know the term, you certainly know the phenomenon. Republicans in Washington have supplied daily examples of it for the past 10 years. It’s the idea that, in a monarchy, all credit for good developments is properly due to His Majesty while all blame for bad developments devolves to his deputies for having failed him.

 

It’s nonsense. But when your professional stature and possibly your personal safety depend on not offending the czar, it’s irresistible nonsense—especially after you’ve gotten used to it. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, for instance, still routinely resorts to “good czar, bad boyars” logic when criticizing the White House despite the fact that he’ll be out of politics in less than a year. For the GOP establishment, scapegoating Donald Trump’s aides for his mistakes long ago ceased being a matter of strategy. At this stage of their traumatic hostage ordeal, it’s Pavlovian.

 

And so, before we contemplate the influence of an unusually bad boyar like deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, we should pause to remind ourselves that no one is worse than the czar himself. If you doubt it, go watch this clip of Republican Rep. Ben Cline at this morning’s National Prayer Breakfast.

 

“We are reminded that leadership is not only about policy and power, but about character, conscience, and the recognition that all authority is ultimately accountable to God,” Cline said with a straight face to an audience of Christian Trump supporters—before welcoming El Salvadoran dictator and gulag operator Nayib Bukele to the stage. Bukele was an honored guest because he’s one of the president’s most dependable international cronies; when Trump took to the podium later, he made a point of praising the “very strong prisons” that El Salvador runs.

 

We will debate forever to what extent the total corruption of Christian conservatism was a top-down matter of Trump seducing a coalition of Pharisees to adopt an alternate morality or a bottom-up case of pre-existing moral rot within the movement surfacing as norms of political propriety dissolved. (Some of both, surely.) Wherever you land on that, though, there’s no blaming Stephen Miller for it. It’s the czar himself who’s bad. And many more of his subjects than any of us would have guessed a decade ago are pretty bad as well.

 

Still, advisers do matter.

 

It’s not “good czar, bad boyars” logic to note that the president’s second term has been more oppressive than his first, partly because he’s surrounded himself this time with deputies who won’t restrain him. The majority are yes-men who feel a duty to indulge his worst impulses, but a few, most notably Miller, are actually generating some of those impulses. And they are very clearly wrecking Trump’s popularity in the process.

 

A bad czar has become more despised than he otherwise might have been because one very, very bad boyar is giving him terrible advice, and there’s evidence that the czar has started to realize it. What will Trump do about his Stephen Miller problem?

 

Out of touch.

 

The “Stephen Miller problem” is actually three problems. (Well, four.)

 

Miller is the White House’s chief proponent for mass deportation, reportedly hellbent on removing 1 million illegal immigrants per year. Everything we’ve seen from the administration over the last six months flows from that—workplace raids aimed at rounding up illegals with no criminal record, legal impunity granted to immigration agents to encourage them to execute their mandate aggressively, and huge federal shows of force like the one playing out in Minneapolis to signal how important the issue is to Trump and his team.

 

That’s all Miller. Americans hate it.

 

A Quinnipiac poll published yesterday found 60 percent believe the administration is treating immigrants too harshly, while a nearly identical percentage said they favor giving most illegals a pathway to legal status. Trump’s job approval on immigration in the same poll dropped from 44 percent in December to 38 percent now, a trend replicated in other surveys. Nate Silver’s tracker had the president at -3.8 points in net immigration approval as recently as December 10, but today he’s all the way down to -11.1. Americans don’t like Miller’s deport-everyone priorities.

 

They don’t like the way immigration enforcement officers do business either. Last month, after Renee Good was shot but before Alex Pretti was killed, a New York Times poll found 61 percent of respondents believed Immigration and Customs Enforcement had gone “too far” with its tactics and another 63 percent disapproved of how it’s handling its job. This week’s Quinnipiac survey replicated that 63 percent figure, fueled by a remarkable 47 percent who said they personally know someone who’s living in fear of Trump’s deportation policies. A majority of 51 percent assessed that those policies—the linchpin of the right’s law-and-order message—are making the country less safe.

 

The true dagger for the czar and his bad boyar, though, is how their obsession with immigration has distracted them from Americans’ exasperation with the cost of living. Check any national poll and you’ll find evidence that voters are furious with the White House for not focusing on the economy. Yet instead of executive action on affordability, they’ve spent the last month drowning in dystopian scenes of an ICE crackdown in Minnesota that’s killed two American citizens.

 

Last month, by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, respondents in a CNN survey rated the economy as the most important issue facing the United States. The same poll found just 36 percent of Americans believe the president has the right policy priorities, though, and an even smaller share agreed when asked if they thought he cares about people like them. That was the worst number of his five years in office.

 

Ditto for last month’s Times poll: “Overall, 57 percent of voters thought Mr. Trump was focused on the wrong issues—including a whopping 69 percent of voters under 30, more than any other age group.” Unsurprisingly, those who named immigration as their top issue did think Trump had the right priorities. Too bad for him and Miller that those people are a small-ish minority.

 

The extreme disillusionment that the Times found among young adults also turned up in a Wall Street Journal survey. Among nine issues tested, Trump’s single worst rating in the 18- to 29-year-old cohort came with respect to “having the right priorities,” on which he was 36 points underwater. “A lot of people expected him to address economic issues first,” one College Republican from Ohio told the paper, worrying that the president has spent too much time on immigration.

 

Trump and Miller have lost touch with the country, sidetracked by their fantasy of purifying the national “blood” by purging undesirables, and the public’s reaction is turning ugly. Fifty-eight percent in the CNN poll (conducted before Pretti’s death) called the president’s first year a failure. Forty-nine percent in the Times survey believe America is worse off now than it was a year ago, compared to 32 percent who believe it’s better off. New polling data from Harvard-Harris this week found 51 percent overall said Trump is doing a worse job than Joe Biden. Among independents, 56 percent said so.

 

The cherry on top of this widening political disaster is that it was Stephen Miller who reportedly seized the initiative to defame Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and would-be “assassin” in the hours after he lay dead on the pavement. Not content to spearhead an agenda that Americans dislike and to carry it out in ways they despise, Miller cemented the White House’s role as villain in Minneapolis by smearing an innocent victim of state violence as the aggressor.

 

That’s the fourth “Stephen Miller problem” I mentioned earlier: his inability to restrain his impulses toward viciousness even when doing so would benefit him and his boss. The thought of making common cause with him will grow increasingly repulsive to all but the most fanatic and/or dissolute border hawks.

 

As the saying goes: The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Donald Trump might be nearing the point of admitting he has a problem with Stephen Miller.

 

Miller time.

 

According to the Wall Street Journal, the czar isn’t altogether happy with his most notorious boyar.

 

Cracks have appeared even in the Oval Office. The president, aware of polls showing that much of his immigration agenda isn’t popular, has told advisers he wasn’t comfortable with how far Miller has gone on some fronts, according to people who have spoken with Trump. The president has said that business officials are calling and complaining to him about longtime workers being thrown out of the country.

 

…

 

Miller pushed for sweeps at Home Depot and other spots where day workers gather, though Trump has at times been asked to temper raids at businesses. Following immigration arrests in September by federal agents at a Hyundai Motor factory in Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp called the president and asked for the release of 300 South Korean workers, according to administration officials. The president publicly said he opposed the raid and told Kemp privately that he didn’t know it was happening. He told aides repeatedly that he didn’t want any more sweeps at factories or farms, the officials said.

 

That’s not all. Trump also reportedly raised an eyebrow when Miller began giving television interviews on subjects beyond his portfolio, like the White House’s designs on Venezuela and Greenland. (“He doesn’t do foreign policy,” the president is said to have complained to an aide.) Ask Steve Bannon what happens when an adviser gets too big for his britches and starts crowding into a media spotlight that rightly belongs to one, and only one, man.

 

Seems like we have a solution in search of a problem, then. Fire Stephen Miller, pivot to a “deport the criminals first” strategy on immigration and a much lower profile for ICE, and spend the next eight months laser-focused on reducing the cost of living. That might not be enough to prevent a Democratic House takeover in November, but it could hold down losses, preventing a blue wave and potentially saving the Senate.

 

One Dispatch colleague even suggested to me that Trump could “declare victory” on immigration as a pretext for abandoning Miller’s deport-everyone strategy and pulling out of Minnesota. Why not? Crusty hardline nationalists like Bannon might object, but 90 percent of Trump’s supporters will believe anything he tells them. If he says it’s time to work on other things because the immigration problem has been solved, then the immigration problem has been solved.

 

And yes, I realize it’s almost unheard of in Trump 2.0 for an aide to perform so horribly that he ends up being axed for it, but it does happen. It’s a penalty reserved for the worst of the worst, it seems. Stephen Miller certainly qualifies.

 

In fact, at the risk of veering too close to “good czar, bad boyars” logic, it’s fair to say that in some ways the deputy is a more sinister figure than his boss. Trump is a fascist by instinct, but Miller is a fascist in full. According to the Journal, it’s Miller who’s been behind the most hair-raisingly lawless gambits of Trump’s second term, from shipping detainees to Bukele’s gulag without due process to blowing up suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean without authorization from Congress to the ICE rampage in Minneapolis that’s brought the judicial system to its knees.

 

Miller and his master share the goal of consolidating power in an autocrat but are driven to it by meaningfully different desires, I sense. Trump wants to be Caesar because he luxuriates in the grandeur of the role. Miller wants Trump to be Caesar because postliberalism needs that degree of unchallenged power in order to effectively subjugate its enemies. My guess is that he, more so than even Trump, would enthusiastically support overturning adverse election results this fall or in 2028 in the name of “saving the country.”

 

A Trump administration without Miller would be ruthless but less ruthless than an administration with Miller would be. And inevitably, I think, it would govern in ways that would improve its popularity. For all his mania, the president yearns to be loved and admired. He cares about winning elections, if only for narcissistic reasons. Miller, the ideologue, plainly doesn’t give a rip and possibly revels in being hated.

 

So you would think Trump would be willing to send him packing. But … it’s awfully hard to imagine, isn’t it?

 

‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’

 

For one thing, it’s hard to imagine how a Trump administration without Miller would operate. The Journal claims that Miller has either drafted or edited every executive order the president has signed in his second term. I repeat what I said last week: He’s “a sort of human operating system for Trumpism” whose dismissal would “amount to uninstalling the postliberal ideological software on which the entire administration runs.”

 

But Miller’s presence is existential for the White House in another way. What was the point of reelecting Donald Trump, and the point of postliberalism writ large, if not to empower authoritarian cretins like Stephen Miller and unleash them on the American people?

 

What would be left of this second term as a culture-war project without him? Would Republicans consider it a triumph if the president ditched his most ideologically committed aides, pivoted to a conventional Republican agenda over his last three years, and finished his term with a respectable-ish 46 percent approval rating without further meaningful achievements? Sure, some would (the immigration problem has been solved), but postliberals would be crushed. They would accuse Trump of having squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform American political culture durably into the sort of garbage third-world friends/enemies system they fantasize about.

 

This isn’t politics as usual. So why would personnel decisions about unpopular aides and their unpopular programs be made based on the usual political incentives?

 

Years ago, during his first term, in a fit of anger over the Justice Department’s investigation into his relationship with Russia, Trump reportedly exclaimed to aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Cohn was an amoral lawyer and “fixer” with the distinction of having worked for the two most infamous demagogues in American history, red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy and, later in life, a young Donald Trump. In asking “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”, the president was scolding the attorneys who worked for his administration for not being cutthroat enough about shielding him from the Russia probe. He needed aides who would behave ruthlessly, without apology, in the name of winning.

 

Stephen Miller is his Roy Cohn. Miller may not be a lawyer, but he’s the near-Platonic ideal of the sort of character whom Trump and his movement extol as a “fighter”—blindly loyal, untroubled by laws or ethics, glowering with hubristic contempt for political enemies and palpably delighting in using power to impose his will on them. It took Trump nearly a decade to reach a place where he could install someone like that to run his government without meaningful political interference, but he finally reached it.

 

And now we expect him to change his mind?

 

I’ll believe it when I see it. The president has his Roy Cohn at last, and so the rest of us are stuck with him too. That’s worth a 37 percent approval rating to Trump all day long.

The Egregious Haitian-Immigration Decision

National Review Online

Thursday, February 05, 2026

 

Judge Ana C. Reyes, of the U.S. District Court for D.C., has apparently decided that she would very much like to be the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. In a long and hyperbolic decision, written more for those in the cheap seats than to be taken seriously at the Supreme Court, Reyes ruled that the Trump administration may not, for now, terminate Haiti’s long-held temporary protected status. Judge Reyes based this decision on two far-fetched determinations: first, that DHS’s recission violated the procedural requirements of the statute; second, that the manner in which the decision was made violated the Fifth Amendment. Neither of these conclusions passes the smell test.

 

Notably, the statute in question sets a high bar for judicial review. Not only does it make clear that temporary protected status is a discretionary act of clemency that, as its name implies, is supposed to be “temporary,” but it explicitly forbids the judiciary from weighing in on the substantive matters at hand. “There is no judicial review,” the law confirms, “of any determination of the Attorney General with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation.” That being so, the only question that can be assessed by a judge is whether the Ts were crossed and the Is were dotted. That is almost certainly why the Supreme Court last May stayed the similar order of a district judge in San Francisco, who sought to enjoin DHS Secretary Kristi Noem from stripping the TPS granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans by the Biden administration; the justices’ reasoning was not explained in their one-line order, but they did curtly reaffirm the stay in October after the judge defiantly sought to reinstate the Venezuelans’ TPS.

 

According to the statute’s plain terms, the executive is obliged to render its decision legally effective by publishing a “notice in the Federal Register of the determination” and waiting “60 days after the date the notice is published” before it begins executing the new rule.

 

Annoyingly for Judge Reyes, the Trump administration did just that. Indeed, as Reyes notes in her opinion, “Secretary Noem then issued a decision, published on November 28, 2025, to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation as of February 3, 2026. See 90 Fed. Reg. at 54733.” Legally, this should have been the end of the story. As the law required, the executive had made its nonjusticiable determination, and it had complied with the niceties of contemporary administrative law.

 

But Judge Reyes had a clever trick up her sleeve: namely, the reclassification of policy objections as procedural inadequacies. All told, Reyes offers five such objections. She claims that, because the Trump administration’s DHS has rescinded a TPS each time it has looked into it, its conclusion was preordained. (One wonders whether Reyes would apply this logic to her own, unidirectional rulings.) She proposes that the DHS secretary did not spend enough time consulting other agencies before she made her decision. She disagrees with DHS’s characterization of the conditions in Haiti as “concerning” and provides her own descriptions in lieu. She dissents from DHS’s evaluation of the “national interest” issues at stake. And she argues that DHS’s assessment of the economic questions is wrong, because Haitians here under TPS pay taxes. Naturally, all five of these critiques are substantive, not procedural, and are thus not within Reyes’s rightful remit under the law.

 

On a roll, Reyes then shows off her mind-reading abilities, contending that the Trump administration is guilty of violating the Fifth Amendment because it has an ugly heart. The “plaintiffs charge that Secretary Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants,” she writes. “This seems substantially likely.” She therefore decides that DHS’s decision must be stayed pending appeal. Like many rulings that turn on motivations rather than powers, this is a one-way ratchet designed to disempower Republicans without limiting the use of the same powers by Democrats, especially given that nobody would have legal standing to challenge a DHS secretary who preordained all extension decisions out of a solicitude for some shades of immigrant.

 

This, of course, is all rather silly. The unequivocal presumption undergirding the TPS system is that those with temporary status have it temporarily and will be returned home, rather than stay indefinitely. For a judge to decide that the execution of this presumption is arbitrary and capricious defies belief. In effect, Judge Reyes is attempting to recalibrate the system in such a way as to ensure that the federal government may let in anyone it wishes without oversight but only remove those same figures after having run an impossible gauntlet. Until her decision is reversed, she will get away with this ploy, but this is no way to run a republic, and, as the Supreme Court will undoubtedly soon confirm, her outrageous conduct is not synonymous with the majesty of the law.

‘Trust Has Been Breached’

By Toluse Olorunnipa

Saturday, January 31, 2026

 

The state and local officials meeting with Tom Homan, who was put in charge of the federal immigration operation in Minnesota this week, have generally agreed that their encounters have been cordial and productive, a welcome change from the militaristic approach taken by his predecessor. Homan has also cast these discussions in a positive light, expressing optimism Thursday that “commonsense cooperation” on immigration enforcement in Minneapolis will allow him to draw down the thousands of agents that have flooded the city for the past two months.

 

But beyond the pleasantries, Homan is finding little appetite in Minnesota for the kind of targeted, aggressive immigration enforcement he has long sought to enact in Democratic-run cities and states. After the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, there is even less trust among local leaders that the Trump administration can be a reliable partner.

 

Although Homan has acknowledged that the immigration surge in Minnesota has not “been perfect,” his upbeat predictions of a smooth and swift détente seem to underestimate how much ill will the Trump administration’s actions have caused among the state’s politicians, activists, and residents. The killings of Good and Pretti-–each followed by a Trump-administration push to denigrate the victims and box out local investigators-–came against a backdrop of growing mistrust and frustration even among officials who have typically embraced partnership with their federal partners.

 

“One of the things that was exceedingly frustrating was the fact that they were putting out information that was just utterly and completely untrue,” Minnesota Department of Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell told me.

 

Schnell met with Homan this week. The prison-systems leader told me that his agency felt it had no choice but to take the extraordinary step of creating a webpage to fact-check several statements made by the Department of Homeland Security, which claimed that the state was routinely releasing violent criminals onto the street.

 

Several of the convicted criminals DHS claimed it had “arrested” in Minnesota had actually been in his department’s custody when they were handed over to federal officials, Schnell said. These transfers, which took place without fanfare inside state prisons, belied the administration’s argument that it had sent 3,000 agents into Minnesota to hunt down criminals because it was not receiving cooperation from local officials. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Homan acknowledged that the Department of Corrections had been honoring ICE detainers—requests from the federal government for information about inmates who may be subject to immigration removal proceedings.

 

The broader challenge for the Trump administration is that focusing on the kinds of violent criminals DHS has called “the worst of the worst” won’t produce the mass-deportation numbers that Trump has demanded. Schnell told me that he could find no justification for the administration’s claim that there were more than 1,360 inmates with ICE detainers in Minnesota. He said his office repeatedly sought clarity from DHS about the figure but received no answer, eventually opting to launch the webpage, which is titled “Combatting DHS Misinformation.” Schnell told me that the state prison system has only about 270 noncitizen inmates, or less than 3 percent of its total population of about 8,000. The large deployment of immigration officers to Minneapolis never made sense if the goal was to target violent criminals, he said.

“You’re talking about the worst of the worst; and then you send your 3,000 agents into schools and hospitals and churches and small businesses?” Schnell said. “Is that really where the worst of the worst are at?”

 

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told me the administration’s conversations with local officials were ongoing. “The Trump Administration remains committed to enforcing federal laws and ensuring all Americans feel safe in their communities,” she said by email. “Local leaders should work with us, not against us, to achieve this goal.”

 

***

 

Homan, the administration’s “border czar,” arrived in Minnesota this week and took the reins from Greg Bovino, the ousted Border Patrol commander. He said Thursday that federal immigration agents in the state will prioritize arresting violent criminals, while acknowledging that the operation—which has swept up refugees, children, and U.S. citizens with no criminal records—had “got away from” its core mission.

 

Police in Minnesota have said they support the removal of violent criminals from the community. But the federal government’s actions have soured relations in a way that, for some, makes future coordination on immigration enforcement unlikely, current and former officials told me. In addition to killing two Minnesota residents, masked federal agents have roughed up protesters and created a sense of fear in the community.

 

“Trust has been breached, and I don’t think you can get that back,” Lucy Gerold, who served as a police officer in Minneapolis for more than 30 years, told me. “I think they’ve lost the trust and breached the ability to compromise or coordinate or cooperate.”

 

Gerold said she unwittingly found herself in the midst of a federal immigration operation and was stunned by the lack of protocol and professionalism. Despite having shown up in six unmarked cars to make an arrest, the agents failed to secure the scene and control the flow of traffic. The mix of protesters, moving cars, and armed agents created chaos, she said. Although federal officials have said they want local police to help them perform such tasks more smoothly, the Minneapolis Police Department is reluctant to be associated with an operation that often appears disjointed, unprofessional, and hostile.

 

Days before Pretti was killed, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told me that it’s “potentially damaging to the legitimacy of law enforcement” for his officers to be seen cooperating with a federal operation that many residents view as an invasion. Homan’s desire for more support from local police faces other obstacles. The Minneapolis city council recently updated a rule spelling out the restrictions on how police can interact with federal immigration officers. Known as a “separation ordinance,” it says Minneapolis must “vigorously oppose” any efforts to use its resources to support federal immigration enforcement, asserting that community trust would be “destroyed” if local officials are seen collaborating with Trump’s mass-deportation teams.

 

“Enforcing federal civil immigration laws alongside federal agents who lack clear agency identification and/or who are masked or otherwise concealing their identities or badges would be contrary to the values of the city and harmful to the trust and public safety of city residents,” the ordinance reads.

 

***

 

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz each said they had productive meetings with Homan, and appreciated the opportunity to discuss the situation with him. Still, they seemed more reluctant to cooperate with ICE or otherwise change their policy than Homan had suggested in his press conference.

 

“I’m not sure I can do much more,” the governor told my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker this week, accusing the federal agents of engaging in unconstitutional profiling. Speaking to the U.S. Conference of Mayors on Thursday, Frey described the Trump administration’s actions as “an invasion on our democracy” and reiterated his stance that the federal operation needs to end immediately.

 

Hours after Homan told reporters that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison had “clarified” that county jails can tell the government when violent offenders are scheduled for release, Ellison released a lengthy statement asserting that his priority was bringing the federal surge to an end and investigating the deaths of Good and Pretti.

 

“We will not make any concessions or compromises to undermine our state sovereignty,” he wrote, adding that he “did not make, and could not have made, any agreement” with Homan about how county officials would interact with ICE.

 

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, home to the state’s largest jail system, has a policy of not honoring ICE detainer requests. When I asked if Sheriff Dawanna Witt planned to revise that stance after meeting with Homan this week, the HCSO spokesperson Megan Larson was noncommittal. Jails have limited discretion, she told me, and any changes “must come through clear statewide policy direction and legislation.”

 

In an advisory opinion last year, Ellison wrote that local jails cannot legally hold inmates in custody at ICE’s request if they are otherwise eligible for release. Ellison said this week that he told Homan he stands by that opinion. He said he also reiterated Minnesota state law, which requires state and local authorities to contact ICE whenever a noncitizen is convicted of a felony.

 

Linus Chan, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and an immigration attorney, told me that although he does not know of a time when the state has not complied with that law, DHS is asking for deeper cooperation that would allow its agents to search local jails and deport people who have not been convicted or who are eligible for bail. Agreeing to such a policy would be a major misread of what Minnesotans—many of whom have taken to the streets to protest ICE—expect from their leaders, local activists told me.

 

With Trump’s poll numbers sliding and infighting and dysfunction plaguing the team behind the mass-deportation plan, some Minnesota residents say cutting a deal now would amount to an ill-timed surrender. Others are concerned that despite Homan’s charm offensive and promises to turn down the temperature, federal authorities have continued to comb through Minneapolis looking for people to arrest.

 

“Given how violent things have been and how awful the situation has gotten, people are not going to just immediately want to turn around and trust anything that is said by the federal government right now,” Julia Decker, the policy director for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, told me.

 

The arrests of journalists and protesters this week by federal agents have further inflamed tensions. Meanwhile, local officials have been frustrated by DHS’s unwillingness to cooperate with their investigations into the shootings of Good and Pretti. (The Justice Department announced yesterday that it is opening an investigation into Pretti’s death.)

 

“The only time this situation will de-escalate is when the federal occupying force ends its siege,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said this week in a video message. “They are the escalating factor, and they have been this entire time.”

 

Trump may have the final say on where the federal operation goes from here. A day after saying he planned to “de-escalate a little bit,” Trump on Wednesday attacked Frey for saying the city would not enforce federal immigration law. The mayor, the president posted on social media, was “playing with fire.”

 

And hours after Homan pledged a significant reduction of forces from Minneapolis if local leaders agreed to work with him, Trump appeared to cast doubt on the more cooperative approach. While attending a premiere for First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary film, the president was asked whether he was planning to pull back in Minnesota.

 

“No, no, not at all,” he said.