Border Patrol agents surrounded by protesters in Minneapolis
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Border czar Tom Homan’s announcement today that 700 federal agents will be withdrawn from Minnesota— a third of those deployed—may come just in time to avert a showdown.
According to a homeland security munitions inventory leaked to me, by mid-January, the feds had amassed some 35,000 weapons in Minneapolis. The inventory lists over a dozen different types of “crowd control” munitions, things like tear gas, stun grenades and pepper spray. These weapons are intended for protesters, not to facilitate immigration enforcement.
Leaked CBP munitions inventory
“Fucking overkill,” a homeland security official said of the inventory. “I’ve never seen this amount of shit being used.”
President Trump as recently as Sunday was hinting at an imminent showdown between federal law enforcement and protesters. “I have instructed ICE and/or Border Patrol to be very forceful in … protection of Federal Government Property,” he said in a post to Truth Social, labeling ICE opponents “Lunatics, Agitators, and Insurrectionists.”
Trump warned protesters if they continued to harass or “attack” federal officers, “those people will suffer an equal, or more, consequence.”
But jumping to Homan’s announced withdrawal today, I can’t think of a more obvious reversal from an administration famous for never backing down—or of a more obvious victory of public will embodied by the massive backlash to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Homan announced during his press conference that “we will draw down 700 people effective today” from Minnesota; that homeland security would create a single chain of command; that “moving forward, ICE will be conducting targeted immigration enforcement operations”; and finally, that all federal agents in Minneapolis will now be wearing body cameras.
The announcement formalized changes in federal tactics already observed in recent days.
Last week, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported seeing “fewer large caravans of federal agent vehicles, fewer agents on foot questioning or arresting pedestrians they come across, and fewer confrontations with protesters.”
Even Trump has sought to distance himself from the previous Minneapolis commander, Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, saying that “he’s a pretty out there kind of guy,” and adding: “maybe it wasn’t good here.”
Both Trump and Homan have struck a rare note of contrition in response to Pretti’s death, with Trump saying “we’re going to de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis; and Homan remarking today: “I and the President expect that any misconduct will not be tolerated and will be and be swiftly addressed.”
The withdrawal of a third of the federal agents rushed to Minneapolis under Operation Metro Surge represents a stunning reversal from just last week, when the government reported stockpiling weapons for the coming war with the public, according to a detailed inventory of munitions leaked to me.
The list, titled “CBP Table of Munitions Used in Operation Metro Surge,” reveals that there are 35,765 total munitions “on-site,” including a detailed list of “crowd-control” munitions.
The list, produced by Border Patrol’s parent agency Custom and Border Protections, shows that the majority of weapons shipped to Minneapolis (and which arrived two weeks ago) are intended to battle protesters.
For now, 2,000 federal agents remain in Minneapolis, and I’ll watch whether the munition inventory diminishes, or when the feds decide to withdraw their anti-protestor arsenal. (Please become a paid subscriber to help me keep an eye on all of this (or chip in via my GoFundMe!) But today represents the first reversal of the federal buildup at any point since Trump’s inauguration last year, as far as I can tell.
Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan, as the saying goes. Politicians are going to try to take credit for the drawdown, no doubt with an assist from a beltway news media that sees Washington as the protagonist of the country. But let the record show: this was a victory of public will.
Subscribe if you think the thousands of Minnesotans protesting in the freezing cold deserve more credit than Congress does
— Edited by William M. Arkin
From Ken Klippenstein via This RSS Feed.