Trump Sends Tom Homan to Minneapolis

President Trump is upset over the appalling performance of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in Minneapolis and is sending his immigration enforcement “czar,” Tom Homan, to take over federal operations there. I suspect this was a condition of the breaking news that President Trump and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz had a productive conversation about the way forward.

The news of Homan’s assignment comes in the wake of news about internal government dissension, which was reported last night by Fox News’s Bill Melugin. Based on conversations with unidentified senior officials and other knowledgeable insiders, Bill related:

I’m told there is extreme frustration with DHS officials going on TV and putting out statements claiming that Alex Pretti was intending to conduct a “massacre” of federal agents or wanted to carry out “maximum damage,” even after numerous videos appeared to show those claims were inaccurate. While they say it was a terrible decision to show up with a gun and inject himself into a federal law enforcement operation, there is no indication Pretti was there to murder law enforcement, as videos appear to show he never drew his holstered firearm.

These sources say this messaging from DHS officials has been catastrophic from a PR and morale perspective, as it is eroding trust and credibility -- comparing it to when Democrats falsely claimed the border was closed or that Haitians were being whipped at the border.

Homan is an experienced, highly competent law enforcement pro. He has his problems, and – in the fashion Trump requires of his people -- he is sometimes over-the-top combative with the media and Congress. But he knows the law, and he knows what he’s doing, particularly in comparison with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisers.

Homan is cognizant of both the significant limitations of immigration-enforcement resources (such as agents, detention space, adjudicators -- the limitations discussed in my weekend column) and the need for public support of enforcement operations. Consequently, he wanted to prioritize arrests and deportations of serious criminals, which would be a great deal of work in and of itself with the illegal-immigrant population potentially topping 20 million and the notoriety of gang activity in many areas.

Noem, by contrast, wanted a dragnet in which every person illegally in the country was ferreted out and deported. To be fair to Noem, this is what her boss has signaled that he wants, elucidated by the public rhetoric of Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff. That this has been the administration’s position is also manifest from the FBI’s shift away from its traditional investigations of major interstate crime to immigration enforcement (which has never been the bureau’s focus). A New York Times deep dive into the first year of Director Kash Patel’s tenure reports that 20 percent of FBI resources have been devoted to immigration enforcement. One unidentified bureau supervisor told the Times:

I am a conservative. I believe in tightening our borders. I just had an issue with the execution of it. My counterparts at DHS were constantly getting yelled at, being threatened and fearing for their jobs. That’s not the way to work. They literally had quotas. Each region had to have a certain amount of arrests every single day. It was completely asinine.

To repeat the thrust of what I argued Saturday:

The public wants the border to be secure and the alien population reduced to the point that illegal immigration can be controlled by normal policing. Americans do not expect the illegal population to be reduced to zero; no one would want done what would have to be done to reduce it to zero (which would be impossible even if it weren’t undesirable).

I believe that Homan knows this. But don’t get carried away: He’s known it all along. It’s obvious that he was marginalized because the administration wanted the Noem approach. The president is upset now because of the optics, not because he realizes Homan was right all along.

It is not an endorsement of street agitation against the enforcement of federal law to observe -- as I do after reviewing scores of videos -- that Alex Pretti was not an aggressor. He was approached by an overzealous agent of the Border Patrol, an agency whose training is confronting non-Americans trying to enter the country, often abetted by violent gangs. Border Patrol agents generally are not trained in policing American cities where people have free-expression rights and may not be presumed guilty by government operatives. Pretti did not attack the agent and never unholstered the gun he legally possessed.

To the extent that Pretti got into a physical altercation with agents, it was because they threw another protester, a woman, to the ground, and he tried to come to her aid. Even then, though, he did not attack the Border Patrol agents. They pepper-sprayed him and tackled him to the ground. To my eyes, his shooting death appears to be a tragic case of a panicked agent’s reaction to the inadvertent discharge of Pretti’s weapon by another agent, who had disarmed him.

Maybe you think Pretti should not have been out protesting and monitoring federal agents, notwithstanding his First Amendment right to do. Maybe you rationalize that, if the Biden Justice Department could criminalize hundreds of J6 protesters who did no harm, and if it investigated parents incensed by woke indoctrination in the classroom, then the president’s supporters needn’t abide progressive agitation. Maybe you buy the strange position of the purportedly Second Amendment–supportive Trump administration that one must not be armed with a legal weapon at an event where federal agents will be present. Even if that’s where you’re coming from, we should still be able to agree that a person who took the actions Pretti took on Saturday morning should not be dead at the hand of federal agents.

Let’s say the agents had managed to tackle him without fatally wounding him. Having been a federal prosecutor for a long time, I wouldn’t even approve his arrest, never mind indictment. Did he technically commit acts that could give rise to the offense of interfering with a federal officer? Maybe, given the very low bar for that crime, which I explained in connection with the Renee Good case. Yet, understanding that any such charge would lead to a jury trial, at which it would be proven that the agents were the aggressors, an experienced prosecutor would exercise discretion against filing charges (and the Border Patrol would be tacitly grateful to avoid the spectacle of court proceedings).

That is why, as RealClearPolitics’s Tom Bevan noted on X today, outlets as philosophically diverse as the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Post have all called for a pause in ICE’s Minneapolis dragnet. And that is why Trump, who prioritizes optics even more than most politicians, has acted, swapping out Noem for Homan.

In assessing the state of affairs after Pretti’s death, our editors write:

We share the administration’s impulse not to let agitators chase federal law enforcement agents from the streets, in a triumph of lawlessness. The administration should be aware, though, that there is a political and social cost to the highly intrusive enforcement operations that it is undertaking, and to its decision not simply to target illegal aliens who have violent criminal records.

It looks like our mercurial president sees it the same way, at least for the moment. Dispatching Tom Homan to Minneapolis is, it appears, an attempt to dial down tension and reset the mission, rather than pull out and encourage the organized resistance to federal law enforcement.

I hope it works.