On Thursday, the Trump administration abruptly announced that it was ending the monthslong occupation of Minneapolis and St Paul by thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol officers. Donald Trump’s scandal-ridden “border czar,” Tom Homan, said that “a significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue to the next week.”
Some Minnesotans are understandably cautious. The administration’s decisions about any given issue can and do change from day to day and even hour to hour. If Homan does turn out to be true to his word in this case, though, it’s good that the operation that has terrorized the Twin Cities for months is finally coming to an end. It’s just nowhere near good enough.
After everything that’s happened since “Operation Metro Surge” started on December 4, achieving even the bare minimum of justice would mean serious efforts to repair the damage and bring the people who inflicted it to account.
Minnesota is very far from the Mexican border. It was chosen for a theatrical performance of the Trump administration’s anti-migrant fervor in large part because of a welfare fraud scandal that was flatly irrelevant to the stated mission of either ICE or the Border Patrol, since almost everyone involved was a US citizen.
It’s likely that another contributing factor was Trump’s antipathy toward various Minnesota politicians like Governor Tim Walz and Rep. Ilhan Omar. Trump is so obsessed with Omar that he railed against the congresswoman in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. And any doubt that this authoritarian show of force was motivated by considerations unrelated to immigration enforcement was removed by a January 24 letter to Walz from Attorney General Pam Bondi, where she held out the possibility of ending the operation in exchange for unrelated concessions like handing over the state’s voter rolls for federal examination.
Metro Surge involved thousands of agents…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
