TheTrump administration is backing down in Minneapolis and Minnesota, after White House border czar — and one of the few remaining public-facing grown-ups in Trump’s arsenal — announced that “Operation Metro Surge is ending.” While some levels of immigration enforcement will remain, and despite Tom Homan’s claim of supposed enforcement victories, there’s only one way to describe this decision: a massive “L” for the Trump administration.
In the short term, this decision is somewhat understandable, given that polling has indicated a collapse in public support when it comes to Trump’s most concrete and consistent policy: immigration and border control. Now, almost half of Americans “strongly disapprove of how Trump has handled border security and immigration,” with these numbers being just 38% last summer and 34% last April. Of course, these sorts of poll numbers are going to set off alarm bells in the White House, with the reflex response being to simply run away from the problem, hoping that the poll numbers will slowly recover.
But that’s not how any of this works. Why? Well, if we are to reasonably assume that this implosion in public support for Trump’s immigration strategy was caused by the response to the deaths of two ICE protesters in Minneapolis, then we should understand the timeline here.
Operations in Minneapolis, and specifically Minnesota, only accelerated in the first place because the Trump administration and the influencer-obsessed Kristi Noem and her Department of Homeland Security hoped to cynically capitalize on the short-lived viral pseudo-investigation into allegedly fraudulent Somali daycare centers, as if we had suddenly uncovered completely unknown and unlitigated acts of fraud that could only be solved by an influx of immigration control officers.
But while such an influx was undeniably cynical, motivated by political hunger more than anything else, once the horse had bolted, the job had to be finished. By withdrawing now, cowering behind pathetic claims of victory, the Trump administration is doing one thing and one thing only: providing the radical Left with a blueprint to replicate in left-wing cities and states across the country.
The pattern here is clear: foment agitation and mob violence by comparing federal law enforcement officers to the Nazi secret police and illegal immigrants to Jews during the Holocaust, thereby driving enraged and unstable citizens into harm’s way by encouraging them to engage in violent protest and obstruction, and then leveraging the deadly results.
It worked in Minneapolis, so why wouldn’t it work elsewhere?
WHY IT COULD TAKE WEEKS TO FEEL THE BRUNT OF A DHS SHUTDOWN
Again, none of this is to suggest that the administration’s decision to throw all of its eggs into the Minneapolis basket was a good move. But since we aren’t equipped with the ability to time travel, the administration was faced with just two remaining choices: finish the job, or run away.
This time, they ran away, and don’t think that other blue cities and states didn’t notice.
Ian Haworth is a syndicated columnist. Follow him on X (@ighaworth) or Substack.
