Trump Border Czar Says ICE Will Leave Minnesota if People Give In

The state-sponsored violence in Minnesota will not stop until citizens desist from protesting it, according to Trump officials.

Border czar Tom Homan revealed Wednesday that the administration’s strategy is not to comply with local demands—which have included calls from both politicians and residents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to leave Minnesota altogether—in order to quell the civil unrest.

Instead, under the guise of closing the agencies’ bloody Minnesota chapter, Homan demanded that Minnesotans stop fighting back under their First Amendment rights so that the Trump administration could continue its mass deportation agenda unfettered by public opposition.

“My goal, with the support of President [Donald] Trump, is to achieve a complete draw down and end this surge as soon as we can,” Homan said during a press conference in the state. “But that is largely contingent upon the end of the illegal and threatening activities against ICE and its federal partners that we’re seeing in the community.

“We will not draw down on personnel providing security for our officers. I will not let our officers be put at risk,” Homan continued. “So we will not draw down on personnel providing security and responding to hostile incidents until we see a change in what’s happening with the lawlessness, with the impeding and interfering and assaulting ICE and border patrol officers.”

Later in the presser, Homan declined to confirm that the agencies would not stop random citizenship checks and racial profiling during their operations.

Federal agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis last month: ICU nurse Alex Pretti and award-winning poet Renee Nicole Good. Meanwhile, zero ICE agents have died during immigration enforcement operations since the agency was founded in 2003. Almost all protesters arrested and accused of assaulting ICE officers have seen their charges dropped.

Pretti’s and Good’s deaths—and the Trump administration’s ensuing smear campaign to frame the duo as “domestic terrorists”—were not received well by the American public. Instead, protests ensued across the country, demanding an immediate end to ICE’s brutality. People of all stripes flooded town halls for Republicans and Democrats alike to vent their frustrations, booing lawmakers’ support for a recent Homeland Security funding package that provided ongoing support for ICE.

The Washington Post made massive layoffs Wednesday, cutting one-third of its total staff, its sports and books sections entirely, and downsizing its international and local Metro sections.

The cuts were announced in a video message to staff, without any comments from the newspaper’s owner, billionaire founder of Amazon.com Jeff Bezos, who has been criticized for cozying up to President Trump in his second term and shifting the newspaper’s opinion section rightward towards “personal liberties and free markets.”

“The actions we are taking include a broad strategic reset with a significant staff reduction,” the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, said on the call.

Bezos’s silence on the cuts follows his silence last month after the FBI raided the home of a Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, who covers the White House’s efforts to cut the federal workforce. One staffer at the time said it was “nauseating and irresponsible to have our owner remain silent given this unprecedented event.”

Now, Bezos is silently presiding over cuts to the once venerable Post, which has lost thousands of subscribers due to its owner’s decision to court the Trumpian right. One of the laid-off staffers also happens to be Amazon beat reporter Caroline O’Donovan, which isn’t suspicious at all.

Remaining staff are obviously not happy with the move, with the Post’s unionized staff issuing a statement calling out the billionaire: “If Jeff Bezos is no longer willing to invest in the mission that defined this paper for generations and serve the millions who depend on Post journalism, The Post deserves a steward that will.”

Likewise, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild also issued a statement:

This story has been updated.

Last month, President Trump told The New York Post he’d be skipping this year’s Super Bowl—in Califorinia—because it was “just too far.” New reporting from Zeteo found that to be a lie, and a pitiful one at that.

The real reason the president is skipping the Super Bowl is because he knows he’d be drowned in a sea of 69,000 boos. Advisers privately warned him that the chances he’d be jeered were high, making lots of fodder for viral clips, according to four sources familiar with the conversations.

The Trump team likely came to this realization thanks to the president’s horrendous approval ratings, following the fatal federal government shootings of Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.

Trump took the easy way out here. But perhaps being forced to skip the country’s premier sporting event out of fear of public opinion will shock Trump into realizing how unpopular he is.

Ex-Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, brother of King Charles, was forced to flee his decades-long home in the dead of night following revelations in the newest release of documents about Jeffrey Epstein.

Mountbatten-Windsor was suddenly moved Tuesday night from Royal Lodge to live in a cottage in Sandringham, the king’s Norfolk estate, a royal source told Reuters.

A friend of Mountbatten-Windsor told The Sun that the decision had been prompted by new revelations in the U.S. Department of Justice’s latest release of more than three million pages of Epstein-related documents.

“With the latest batch of Epstein files it was made clear to him that it was time to go,” the friend told the tabloid. “Leaving was so humiliating for him that he chose to do it under the cover of darkness.”

The newest trove of documents included emails suggesting that Mountbatten-Windsor had regularly kept in touch with Epstein for years after the New York financier was found guilty of child sex crimes. The dump also included never-before-seen images of Mountbatten-Windsor crouching over a woman whose face was redacted by federal investigators.

King Charles stripped Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal title in November, citing “serious lapses in judgement” following releases from the DOJ’s Epstein files.

In November, Epstein’s general ledger revealed that he had paid $200 each for two massages for “Andrew” in the year 2000, once in February 11 and again May 16. A flight log showed that Mountbatten-Windsor flew with Epstein, and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, from New Jersey to Palm Beach on May 12, 2000.

Virgina Giuffre alleged that she had been sexually exploited by Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein’s other “adult male peers, including royalty, politicians, academicians, businessmen, and/or other professional and personal acquaintances.” The erstwhile Duke of York denied the accusation, and the suit was settled in 2022.

The ongoing drama surrounding the Epstein files is really starting to get under the president’s skin.

Donald Trump skewered CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins Tuesday afternoon after she inquired about the child sex trafficker’s myriad victims.

“But what would you say to people who feel like they haven’t gotten justice?” asked Collins.

“You are so bad,” Trump said. “You are the worst reporter. No wonder CNN has no ratings, because of people like you.”

“You know she’s a young woman, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile,” Trump continued. “I’ve known you for 10 years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face.

“You know why you’re not smiling?” he added. “Because you know you’re not telling the truth.”

Earlier this week, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News that pretty much all of the rich and powerful people who partied with the “pedophile island” operator were off the hook as the administration had not found sufficient evidence to prosecute Epstein’s connections.

That included the president. On Sunday, Blanche told CNN’s State of the Union that the DOJ reviewed the files last summer but did not find credible evidence against Trump warranting further investigation.

Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files, according to a New York Times review of the DOJ’s Friday document dump, which consisted of some three million previously unseen pages.

All in all, Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache, according to the Times.

But it’s far from the first time that Trump has turned to misogyny in order to shut down reporting on the Epstein files. In November, Trump ended a line of questioning on the topic by a Bloomberg News reporter by barking at her, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

It’s rough working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota these days. Many of the office’s lawyers and staff have quit over the Justice Department’s handling of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state, specifically the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

In federal court Tuesday, the stress apparently got to a lawyer volunteering to help the short-staffed office. 

Attorney Julie Le was representing the government at a hearing over ICE’s failure to follow court orders and immediately release people that it had wrongfully detained. When Judge Jerry Blackwell asked why the agency is not complying, Le said that the government was “overwhelmed” by the legal challenges to Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, and that trying to get ICE to comply with court orders has required nonstop work for an office depleted by resignations. 

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.” 

Blackwell said that he called the hearing to stress that ICE and other government agencies are not above the law.

“Some of this is of your own making because of non-compliance with orders,” Blackwell said.

Le normally doesn’t work for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She used to work as an attorney for ICE in immigration court, and last month volunteered to help prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office deal with the many habeas petitions from immigrants in ICE detention seeking their release. But Le admitted to Blackwell that ICE is out of its depth, and was not prepared to argue cases in federal court. 

“We have no guidance or direction on what we need to do,” Le said.  

President Trump’s Minnesota crackdown has proceeded with little regard for the law, drawing a backlash from local residents who have scrambled to protest against the massive deployment of federal agents and their violent tactics. Since the deaths of Good and Pretti, those protests have only intensified, and Trump’s response has been to double down. The U.S. attorneys who haven’t quit in protest now have to deal with the legal fallout. 

A federal agent used his cell phone to take a picture of Marimar Martinez after she was shot five times by Border Patrol in Chicago—a chilling image that haunts her to this day.

Martinez testified in Congress Tuesday about how she was shot after she followed an agent’s car in Chicago while trying to warn her neighbors. DHS initially claimed that when the officers exited their vehicle, Martinez tried to run them over, “forcing the officers to fire defensively.” She was charged with felony assault of a federal officer despite ending up in the hospital herself.

In her testimony, Martinez revealed a new detail about what happened after she was shot.

“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave. I told him I did not consent … but he did not care. It still haunts me that this agent has my photo on his phone. Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for him?”

Why did a federal agent keep coming into Martinez’s room while she lay in her hospital bed? And why did he have to take her picture if she had already been arrested, if not to keep a “trophy” for himself as Martinez suggested? Recall that Charles Exum, the agent who shot Martinez, bragged in text messages afterward, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”

While ICE has reportedly been scanning protesters’ faces, this instance feels much more personal.

Renee Good’s brother hoped her senseless killing at the hands of a federal agent would have brought an end to Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration enforcement crackdown. Instead, he hasn’t seen any change.

Addressing a public congressional meeting Tuesday to examine the violent tactics of Department of Homeland Security immigration enforcement agents, Luke Ganger spoke about his sister, who was the first U.S. citizen to be shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis last month.

“In the last few weeks, our family took some consolation thinking that perhaps Nee’s death would bring about change in our country, and it has not,” he said.

“The completely surreal scenes taking place on the streets of Minneapolis are beyond explanation. This is not just a bad day or a rough week or isolated incidents. These encounters with federal agents are changing the community, and changing many lives, including ours, forever,” he said. “I still don’t know how to explain to my four-year-old what these agents are doing when we pass by.”

Ganger said his four-year-old daughter “knows that her aunt died and that somebody caused it to happen.”

“She told me that there are no bad people and that everyone makes mistakes. She has Nee’s spirit,” he said. His sister, he said, “carried peace, patience, and love for others wherever she went.”

“Our family is a very American blend,” Ganger continued. “We vote differently, and we rarely completely agree on the finer details of what it means to be a citizen of this country. We attend various churches, and some not at all. And despite those differences, we have always treated each other with love and respect. And we’ve gotten even closer during this very divided time in our country. And we hope that our family can be even a small example to others not to let political ideals divide us, to be good like Renee.

“But the most important thing we can do today is to help this panel and our country understand who Nee is, and what a beautiful American we have lost. A sister, a daughter, a mother, a partner, and a friend.”

Ganger’s call for unity bears repeating. Not a single Republican congressperson—the very same people who want you to believe that Good deserved to die—bothered to attend Tuesday’s forum.

Also testifying were Brent Ganger, another brother of Good; Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by federal agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.

The White House may have pulled the plug on U.S. participation in the World Health Organization, but that doesn’t mean that Americans have to.

The Illinois Department of Public Health sidestepped the federal government this week by independently joining the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday. It is the second state to do so, after California joined the network last month.

Illinois officials said the decision was made in part to keep the state informed on the latest global health data.

“We knew this created serious concerns, really, in our effort as a big state in the United States to keep our awareness and [stay] alert about potential global outbreaks and how they could impact the residents here in the state of Illinois,” said Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, during a press conference. “Part of that was the fear that we would lose access to the WHO’s global surveillance system, which would really let us know about early warnings of outbreaks.”

Vohra underscored that it was critical that Illinois remain up-to-date with accurate information about surging health threats around the world, citing the Marburg virus outbreak that appeared in Ethiopia last week.

“This provides the real-time information to us,” Vohra said of GOARN. “Instead of waiting for the federal government to relay that, if and when that might happen, we’ll get direct access to that network of information.”

The Trump administration completed the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO on January 22. In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed that the global public health entity had failed not only in its efforts to address the Covid-19 pandemic but also to reform itself in the years since.

Not a single Republican member of Congress showed up to the public forum held by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Robert Garcia on the violence inflicted by federal immigration agents, featuring testimony from the brothers of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last month.

“With us in spirit are also Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. In spirit. They should be here in person, but they were murdered. They were murdered by their own government. They were killed in cold blood,” Blumenthal said to open up the forum on Tuesday, before turning to Good’s brothers. “I can only imagine how painful it must be for you to see that image of your sister. Which speaks to your courage. Your guts. Your grit and determination to be here today.”

Also testifying were Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by customs agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.

Other Democrats who joined the hearing included Senators Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, Adam Schiff, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representatives Yassamin Ansari, Shontel Brown, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, Emily Randall, Melanie Stansbury, Suhas Subramanyam, and Rashida Tlaib.

This story has been updated.