Tom Homan—the Trump administration “Border Czar” who thinks undocumented immigrants should be looking “over their shoulder,” that the mayors of sanctuary cities should be locked up, and who is perhaps best known for accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives last year—is headed to Minneapolis. And Greg Bovino, the pint-sized fascist who has overseen much of the Border Patrol’s operations in the city, is reportedly leaving—and will reportedly be retiring soon.
These twin developments could be interpreted—as many in the media have—as a sign that the president is trying to walk back a monthlong occupation during which immigration agents murdered two civilians. (Renee Nicole Good was killed by an ICE officer, and Alex Pretti by a CBP officer. Those two deaths account for two-thirds of the murders committed in Minneapolis in 2026.) It certainly seems that the administration is trying to find a way to retreat.
But Homan’s deployment is perhaps more telling in what it reveals about how the administration approaches retreat itself. They know that the Minneapolis operation is a disaster, that it has left two innocent people dead and turned much of the country against them. It has been such a disaster inside Minneapolis that the Republican Party’s leading candidate for governor, Chris Madel, dropped out of the race on Monday, seeming to cut ties with his party in the process. “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so,” Madel said in a video posted on X.
Replacing Bovino with Homan is a sign that the administration knows that something needs to change. But it’s also a sign of where its priorities lie. They are presiding over a murderous disaster in Minneapolis. They know it is failing to achieve both its stated “aim” of ridding the city of criminal undocumented immigrants and its unstated goal of cowing the populace into submission. They know it will likely lead to more deaths. But they cannot retreat or admit defeat—so all we’re getting is a different corrupt person in charge, just one they hope is less murderous.
When Vice President JD Vance was in Minneapolis last week, as part of the Trump administration’s attempt at damage control over Good’s killing, he heard a “crazy story.” Some “ICE and CBP officers” were eating dinner at a restaurant in the city at some point during the nearly month-long federal occupation when, all of a sudden, a group of unruly protesters descended. Restaurant staff locked the doors. They were stuck there for a period of time—Vance didn’t say how long—until other federal officers arrived and dispersed the protesters. Four days after Vance heard that story, Border Patrol agents murdered Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was documenting their operations in the city and who was shot several times in the head while trying to assist a woman they were manhandling.
When I was in Minneapolis, I heard a number of crazy stories. But near the top of the list:
— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 25, 2026
A couple of off duty ICE and CBP officers were going to dinner in Minneapolis. They were doxed and their location revealed, and the restaurant was then mobbed. The officers were locked in…
Still, Vance’s “crazy” story captures an administration that’s struggling to respond both to the horrific events it has unleashed and to the public’s response to them. The point of his story is ostensibly that the ICE and CBP officers who are terrorizing Minnesotans are actually the ones under siege—that it is they, not immigrant communities or their advocates, who are actually in danger in Minnesota. The subtext is that these officers are right to feel threatened at all times and that anything they do is justified because, well, they get yelled at when they go out to eat sometimes.
It’s a pathetic narrative and one whose implications are straightforwardly fascistic. The administration’s goons have the right to impunity. They have the right to do whatever they like, whenever they like. If anyone tries to stop them, they are “domestic terrorists”—the preposterous term that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has used to describe Good and Pretti.
They are obviously lying. Vance’s story is, in some way, an acknowledgment of that. Pretti was legally carrying a gun but had been disarmed and was restrained when he was shot repeatedly. Good was driving away from officers when she was shot in the face. The best they can do to concoct an explanation is that officers are being terrorized and, as a result, are prone to lash out. That is obviously a horrible defense of state violence or for violence in general.
Public opinion has shifted dramatically on the administration’s approach to immigration: His approval rating on the issue is, per a New York Times/Siena poll that dropped last week, twenty points underwater. Normally, in these situations, you recalibrate. Normally, you retreat. Instead, the administration is sending in Homan and hoping for the best.
It may be recalibrating, though. On Monday evening, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey posted that he had spoken to President Trump who “agreed the present situation can’t continue” and said he would be pulling out some agents from the city. It’s not clear what that means precisely but it is somewhat hopeful. Still, the general dynamic is that the president is unwilling to do anything that appears to admit defeat or even to change course. Doing so would, of course, undermine the entire premise of his political project: That the American people would welcome a country cleansed of immigrants and they would celebrate as his jack-booted thugs cleared the nation’s filthy city streets.
Homan is supposedly less inclined toward showy uses of force designed to cow the public than Bovino or Noem are. But only somewhat. The operations in Minneapolis to go after undocumented immigrants with criminal records will continue, and they will continue to sweep up U.S. citizens and children. There will still be protests and there is absolutely no reason to believe that anyone in Minneapolis, whatever their citizenship status, is any safer today than they were over the weekend. Another innocent person may well be shot dead by masked agents within a week or two.
This is barely a pivot, in other words. You can change the face of the fascist administration on the ground in Minneapolis, but it remains fascist all the same.
