Homan says ICE surge in Minnesota will end. Can we believe him?

White House "border czar" Tom Homan on Thursday said the Trump administration is ending its lawless, violent, and deadly immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, saying that federal agents have already been exiting Minnesota and will continue to leave through next week.

"I have proposed, and President [Donald] Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude," Homan said at a news conference in Minneapolis. "A significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week."

While a drawdown would be a clear admission that the thuggish crackdown was hurting Trump and his party’s popularity, Homan painted the horrific operation as a “success.”

“I’m not going to sit here and say anybody did anything wrong and that they were unprofessional,” Homan said, even though federal agents executed two U.S. citizens and left many more injured, all while federal judges have condemned the administration’s operation for defying their orders and violating people’s constitutional rights. “We’ve had great success.”

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Of course, nothing anyone in the Trump administration says can be believed. Time and again, they have lied—even about the two shooting incidents that were captured on video. We’ll believe that Trump's immigration gestapo is leaving Minnesota when we see it with our own eyes.

This is exactly what leaders in Minneapolis are saying as well.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, told The New York Times. “I’m going to continue patrolling, and I’m going to continue to ask my community to patrol and keep eyes on them.”

In fact, we wouldn't put it past the Trump administration to try to get headlines about federal agents leaving Minnesota just to get Americans to look away so that it can continue to violate people's rights with less public attention.

That's what the Trump administration tried to do at the end of January, when Trump announced that he was pulling wannabe-Nazi Greg Bovino—who had led the Minneapolis operation—out of the state and replacing him with Homan. 

Trump officials tried to paint Homan as a more reasonable alternative, though Homan once proudly asserted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was illegally racially profiling people as part of its deportation agenda.

After taking over, Homan announced he was drawing down 700 agents from the state. That seemed like a large number, and it was an obvious effort to persuade a repulsed American public that the Trump administration would conduct more reasonable immigration enforcement actions in the state.

But Minnesotans said that little changed, with thousands of immigration goons still terrorizing people of color and threatening citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.

No matter what happens, the deadly operation has badly damaged Trump and his party.

Polls show large majorities of Americans think Trump and his immigration goons went too far, and they no longer approve of his immigration policy. In fact, support for abolishing ICE has reached record-high support.

Now, the issue that helped propel Trump into the White House is one of his party's biggest vulnerabilities in the November midterms.

"This was one of the president's number one advantages and it has become a political liability for him," John Feehery, a Republican strategist, told Reuters. "The base is still pretty comfortable with what Trump is doing. But it's not just about the base, it's about swing voters."

rss@dailykos.com (Emily Singer)مصدر