As the head of the St. Paul police union explained yesterday, the math gets pretty simple. If state and local authorities coordinate with federal law enforcement, agencies like ICE and Border Patrol will only send as many agents as necessary for the tasks at hand. If, however, those same authorities refuse to cooperate, the federal government will send as many people as needed to ensure the protection of agents necessary to complete their missions.
The top-line takeaway for media outlets today may well be that Tom Homan announced drawdowns of ICE and Border Patrol personnel from Minneapolis in a presser this morning. However, Homan made that conditional on the math as explained by Mark Ross, because the Trump administration plans on completing its mission in Minnesota one way or the other:
Tom Homan, the White House border czar who was dispatched to Minneapolis to reset the Trump administration’s mission there, announced Thursday he was working on a plan to begin drawing down the federal presence.
Homan said that he felt that increased cooperation from state and local officials would allow for a smaller presence in the city.
“I have staff from CBP and from ICE working on a draw down plan,” Homan said, referring to the Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He said that drawdown would depend on the ability to work more closely with local authorities. Since arriving in the state, Homan had met with officials including Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
In exchange, Homan said, he will change the focus of those efforts with more precision targeting for criminal illegal aliens. “We’re not surrendering our mission at all,” Homan emphasized, “we’re just doing it smarter.” This is a concession to Tim Walz and Jacob Frey, who had complained about the “large groups of roving patrols, sweeping streets looking for people to arrest,” as the WSJ describes earlier operations. Those tactics gave rise to the characterizations of ICE agents acting like the Gestapo, demanding “papers” from people on the street, which helped fuel the radical reactions to ICE operations.
For that concession, however, Homan wants real cooperation from Walz, Frey, and the local police departments. He also wants de-escalation from everyone involved, but the subtext here is clearly aimed at elected officials in Minnesota. The rhetoric from Walz and Frey created the chaotic situation that required more personnel to protect operations, a point that Homan emphasized he’d repeatedly warned would escalate into needless violence:
@RealTomHoman: “You have the right to protest. I’m just asking you keep it peaceful… You interfere, impede, assault I.C.E. officers, you will be arrested.” pic.twitter.com/pnsK05ue7N
— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) January 29, 2026
Nevertheless, Homan declared, these operations intend to make America safer by getting criminal illegal aliens off the streets, especially those belonging to transnational crime syndicates like MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and traffickers of drugs and human beings. When CNN asked “why are we here,” Homan quietly demolished the question by reminding reporters that the same people who are screaming about enforcement now spent the four years of the Biden Regency lying about border security and the tsunami of illegal immigrants that came into the country unchecked. The question isn’t “why are we here,” Homan said, it’s “where are they?”
Border Czar Tom Homan calls out Democrats for ignoring the Biden-Harris border crisis:
“The question from CNN, ‘Why are we here?’ What started this?…Four years we were told, ‘The border is secure.’ And we all knew it wasn’t…The politicians attacking us, where were they for… pic.twitter.com/gJAlhwhj4Q
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) January 29, 2026
The refusal to recognize this as the consequence of disastrous open-borders practices by Democrats tells us all we need to know about their desire to return to those same practices if they win another presidential election. They want to delegitimize immigration enforcement, and have gone so far toward insurrection in doing so that the differences have all but disappeared. This is not about making communities safer – it is about undermining American sovereignty and replaying secession movements from the 1850s-1860s for the same basic purpose of exploiting cheap labor and maintaining a cultural elite.
Homan wants to dial down the rhetoric and the temperature. Armchair revolutionaries like Walz and Frey probably want to back down a bit now that the violence has become real, and now that it has become apparent that they can’t throw tantrums to get their way. Let’s see if the radicals with whom they’ve allied themselves are willing to dial anything down.
Addendum: Credit where due – the Associated Press reported on Homan’s point pretty accurately:
President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Thursday that the number of immigration enforcement officers in Minnesota will be reduced only after cooperation from state officials, and that he has “zero tolerance” for protesters who assault his officers or impede their work. …
Homan doubled down on the need for local jails to alert Immigration and Customs Enforcement to people in their custody whom ICE can remove from the country, and that transferring immigrants to ICE while they’re still in jail is safer for the officers and means they aren’t out on the streets. Homan said that would mean fewer officers have to actually be out on the streets looking for immigrants in the country illegally.
Bottom line: Want fewer ICE and CBP agents in Minneapolis? Don’t obstruct us in ways that force us to deploy more agents. Pretty simple math … so simple that nearly every other jurisdiction in the US has already done it.
I am horrified. I cannot believe it.
I analyzed public databases and media reporting on violent confrontations with ICE over the past year.
Just 9 counties accounted for TWO-THIRDS of violent confrontations with ICE in America.
This is twice all violent confrontations in the… pic.twitter.com/PuQuntgtGF
— Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) January 26, 2026
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
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