Tom Homan comes to Minneapolis
And this is what he had to say:
In my meetings with folks so far—and most importantly the governor and the AG to Mayor Fry—we didn’t agree on everything. I didn’t expect to agree on anything. I’ve heard many people want to know why we’re talking to people who they don’t consider friends of the administration. Bottom line is you can’t fix problems if you don’t have discussions. I didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines. I came here to seek solutions, and that’s what we’re going to do. …
One thing we all agreed on was [that] U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a legitimate law enforcement agency that has a duty to enforce the laws enacted by Congress and keep this community safe.
That right there is already surprising. Sanctuary cities and states ordinarily refuse to cooperate with that endeavor, which indicates that they don’t agree that ICE is legitimate and don’t agree those laws should be enforced. No one is asking local and state governments to deport people, but if ICE is legitimate it follows that a state or city would do its part to neither impede ICE nor to encourage its citizens to do so. That, unfortunately, has not been the case in Minneapolis.
More:
I didn’t ask [Minnesota state and local officials] to be immigration officers. I’m asking them to be cops working with the cops to help us take criminal aliens off the street.
What we did agree upon is not to release public safety threats back into the community and [that] they could be lawfully transferred to ICE.
I’m surprised by that agreement, too. Will it actually occur? Apparently it’s already begun – at least, that’s how I interpret the following:
I will highlight that the Minnesota State Prison System under the Department of Corrections has been honoring ICE detainers, and we appreciate the important collaboration. We’re going to expand upon that. That decision has made Minnesota safer—not only for residents of Minnesota, but for the men and women of law enforcement, not just ICE, all law enforcement. Rather than arresting the same significant public safety threat over and over again, they agreed to work with us to identify those people and remove them.
And this will happen, supposedly:
I’m also pleased to announce I had a very good meeting with Attorney General Ellison, and he has clarified for me that county jails may notify ICE of the release dates of criminal public safety risks so ICE can take custody of them upon release from the jail.
And this makes lots of sense. Again, it should have happened in Minnesota a long time ago, the way it does in cooperating red states:
One agent can arrest one bad guy in the safety and security of a jail where he’s behind the wire. We know he doesn’t have weapons. But when you normally release that public safety threat—illegal alien—back into the community, we have a job to do. We’re going to arrest him. So we’re going to find him. And what happens is now we’ve got to arrest somebody on his turf. He has access to who knows what weapons. Now we’ve got to send the whole team out—cover the back door, cover the front door—for officer safety reasons. Then, because of the hateful rhetoric and the attacks on ICE officers, now we’ve got to send a security team behind the arrest team. So what could have been done with one person in the safety and security of a jail, now we’ve got 15, 16 people out there doing it.
I know that causes stress in the community. So if we get these agreements in place, that means less agents on the street. More agents in the jail means less agents in the street. This is common sense cooperation that allows us to draw down on the number of people we have here.
More [emphasis mine]:
We will conduct targeted enforcement operations. Targeted—what we’ve done for decades. When we hit the streets, we know exactly who we’re looking for [and have a] good idea where we may find them. You have a criminal history. You have their immigration history. A lot of information about this person that we get from numerous databases out there. Targeted, strategic enforcement operations. That’s traditionally been the case, and that’s where we’re going. That’s what we’re going to continue to do and improve upon with the prioritization on public safety threats.
I wonder what really happened behind closed doors. Walz and Frey are currently being investigated and could be charged. Was there, for example, a promise not to charge them if they cooperate?
In other news, Walz has declared he won’t be running for public office again. Big deal; I don’t think he could win a race for dogcatcher right now.
Just plain common sense from Homan. He’s the salt of the earth, no nonsense sort of guy. I admire this man as a true American patriot doing a thankless and difficult job. God bless him.
I hope Walz, Frey, Ellison, and company will deliver.
At this point they seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouths. Are they intending to cooperate to some extent, but keep claiming they’re resisting to their base? I suspect so. Weasels.
He couldn’t win a race to clean out the dog catcher’s kennel.
A politician or other public figure can survive or bounce back from a lot of things, but becoming an object of ridicule is not one of them. Walz certainly knows that people, including a lot of people in his home state, refer to him as “Tampon Tim.” And it’s not a nickname given affectionately.
Shoot, I’ll bet there are even people in the DFL who snicker at him behind his back.
I am going to wait until the Fat Lady Sings.
I will be extremely disappointed if some deal was cut which gives Walz and Frye immunity from prosecution. That’s a bridge too far for me. If they were involved in the fraud, they need to be perp walked. Getting damn tired of the administration all talk and just small fry arrests. The big kahunas need to be taken down. Not holding my breath.
I don’t think he could win a race for dogcatcher right now.
He probably could get elected mayor of Minneapolis.
Tom Homan set the right tone and message in his press conference. I was impressed.
All he wants right now is for the city, county and state governments to cooperate in turning over illegal aliens with detainers to be deported, just like most other states are doing. That will allow the federal government to reduce the number of immigration LEO’s in Minneapolis.
He was very calm, measured, but answering a question, he did make a point that right now the focus is on the the illegals being incarcerated, but that did not mean the federal government has given up the right to pursue other people in the country illegally at some point.
If the government officials at the local and county level will cooperate, the presence on the street can be significantly reduced.
When asked how many ICE and CBP officers were in Minnesota, he didn’t answer but said that some of the agents have been on duty for as long as 8 months and were due to be rotated so they could spend time with their families.
While that will mean a reduction in agents now, implicit in that is other agents could be rotated in if the level of obstruction/violence and lack of local support demands it.
We need to lower the temperature right now, and he struck the right notes. It remains to be seen if Walz and Frey will live up to their commitments to the administration.
Brinkmanship is so exhausting. The protestors – or “protestors” – in Minneapolis have been practicing it for quite a while now, and I think they outnumber the federal agents, so they can take shifts; and they, unlike the agents, generally don’t have to keep their tempers and refrain from using inappropriate force (Pretti appears to have been an exception, coming armed as he did – he DID have to restrain any impulse to use his weapon).
Over on Althouse, one lefty in particular was claiming that the protestors “are only upset about the methods.” I can’t see how that’s the case, since – I think – the “methods” this person was referring to were crowd control methods rather than immigration enforcement methods, and the crowd control methods resulted from the crowd’s prior behavior.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that the person was in fact talking about immigration enforcement methods: removing illegal immigrants from their neighborhoods and places of work. These methods are ALSO the result of Minnesota actions (and Homan is apparently trying to negotiate an end to them, with what carrot and what stick we have yet to learn).
So what’s left? They just don’t want immigration law enforced? This is where I think most of the protestors fall, but they have to claim a pretense that it’s not.
recall this incident happened outside that very curious address, 2614 Nicollet, which has some interesting details, to it, which oddly has not been revisited by any outlet, crickets,
I assume that the fraud investigation is ongoing but sites like this location, probably have had much of that evidence cleared out, I’m cynical about these things
I’m cynical about walz and frey, cooperating, even there are some positive gestures,
De-escalation was inevitable. Trump doesn’t want a civil war. At the end of the day, neither does Walz, IMO. I think both sides realized the situation was out of hand and needed to be diffused before more people died.
Some people on the right really seem to be chomping at the bit for a war these days. It’s concerning.
no they aren’t serious, it’s like that iconoclast, i’m being charitable, who said he was an excon, who ran the buddhist site, that lied about us on another blog,
I don’t think that the people who direct the party are not averse to tear the country apart,
after 2020, I’m less sanguine about that,
a civil war is a terrible thing, for many reasons ‘the sum of all fears’ but certainly the media and academic component of the sysgy is game for this time of an exercise,
some on the right, have facily suggested it’s time,
but not to any consistency,
The situation was not ‘out of hand’. A Democratic operative associated with Walz was the principal dispatcher for ‘activists’ all over town. What happened was that their chats were hacked and their financial sources identified.
Winston Churchill “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” – To Neville Chamberlain
The Trump Administration and GOP are being presented with such a choice. Seeking to avoid the bloodshed that insurrection and even civil war would bring, they are seeking to “deescalate” and reach a compromise of sorts. This is a major mistake and just as with WWII, it will lead to far more bloodshed and deaths.
Upon regaining power in 2028, now a distinct probability, given the constant and unrelenting demonization in the mass media of Trump, his administration and ICE. Propaganda especially effective with low-info independent voters, along with the certainty of high democrat voter turnout in 2028.
The Marxist in all but name democrats have announced their intention to prosecute and imprison Trump, top officials in his administration such as Miller, Bovino, & Homan and field ICE agents. They’ll pass laws effectively gutting the second amendment and pack the Supreme Court so that their laws are ruled to be ‘constitutional’. Implement redistricting that effectively disenfranchises republican representation, as is going on in NYC & Virginia right now.
They will do what they think they have to do to never lose power again because it’s always been about power and control for them. Mamdani and Virginia Gov. Spanburger are just the beginning. They will force a far harsher civil war upon us because their ‘solutions’ will become ever more intolerable.
“The GOAL of socialism IS communism!” Vladimir Lenin
…I don’t think he could win a race for dogcatcher right now.
Oh, I think he could with a campaign that went something like; “Hey folks! Wanna see a rabid dog bite Tim Walz in the a**?! Then this November vote Walz for Hennepin County dogcatcher!”
I think Trump is winning bigly on this issue and I think the donkey party is in its death throes. This is why they are already whining that Trump is going to rig the election.
I wish there were more Tom Homans in the Republican party. Instead, there’s an over representation of weak, stand for nothing, don’t get Democrats mad quislings.
Wasn’t Obama accused of Seditious Conspiracy with documentation? Where are the indictments? How come Republicans aren’t talking about that EVERYDAY?
I made the mistake of donating money to a few of ’em. Now I get a daily tongue bath of platitudes from these weaklings on my messaging service.
Read my lips – not one more dime until you grow a spine.
We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out, but I agree with J.J. that Homan has been impressive. Maybe Trump is handling the situation with aplomb.
I also agree with physicsguy that it would be unsatisfactory if Walz and Frey skate on any provable corruption charges. On the other hand, sometimes criminals avoid justice by providing info about other criminals to the authorities.
= = = = = = = = =
Thinking about the increasing threat of civil war here, and how terrible it would be. When it ends, USA would be radically transformed, perhaps not for the better.
— physicsguy
It takes a lot of political capital to take down the big kahunas, unfortunately, and Trump et al have a finite amount of that.
If it helps, compare the present situation to the first Trump term, or the second term of Bush the Younger. When you make that contrast, you can see that things have moved considerably in the right direction.
I remember back when Republicans kept wondering why Trump didn’t dismiss Jeff Sessions* as Attorney-General when he let the Dems and the Deep State run rampant. I used to get into debates on-line in which I had to remind people that yes, Trump could have fired Sessions, but then who would he have appointed that the Dems in the Senate or (even more important and worse) the business-wing Republicans** in the Senate) would confirm? Any replacement for Sessions would have been, at best no better, and might have had to be worse.
Bondi is far from perfect, but she’s a big improvement over Sessions. Patel is better than Wray. Vance is vastly better than Pence. Things are a long way from perfect, but they do seem to be moving slowly in the right direction.
*I honestly don’t know what Sessions’ issue was. As a Senator he had done yeoman work, he was one of the early voices against ‘Comprehensive Amnesty’.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that America has two people principally to thank for the horrible Kennedy-Bush-etc. amnesty bills in 2006 and 2007 not ending up becoming law: Rush Limbaugh and Senator Sessions.
But as A-G Sessions just couldn’t seem to oppose the Deep State. I don’t know if he couldn’t admit to himself that the Justice Department had become that corrupt, or if he was operating under some mistaken sense of ‘civility’ or what.
** The business wing ‘establishment’ Republicans are still there, though they’re much less influential now than they were 2017-2021. They still want to go back to the pre-2016 open borders status quo. The Governor of Oklahoma recently piped up that we could solve the illegals issue by issuing work permits, i.e. legalize them. Amnesty.
Thom Tillis has piped up again lately, too. He’s been much quieter this time than he was 2017-2021, but he’s still a creature of North Caroline business interests, and he still wants open borders and amnesty.
Trump has done yeoman work since a year ago, but he’s still constantly being blocked and interfered with behind the scenes by this bunch.
The contrast between how Homan handles the situation and how Noem handles it is stark. I voted for this president, largely agree with his policies, agree rather less with *how* he pursues those policies, and frankly Trump on a bad day is better than Democrats running things.
But people are noticing that Secretary Noem is a problem.
…county jails may notify ICE of the release dates of criminal public safety risks so ICE can take custody of them
I’d much rather see MUST than MAY in that phrase. Seems like Mr. Homan’s being a bit cute with his report. Aren’t Minnesota sheriffs largely loaded against handing over the bad guys to ICE? Or is that just the press who reports on them?
I don’t think Homan can force county or city governments to give ICE the release dates, or hold prisoners for ICE to pick up. That’s the crux of the problem.