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Donald Trump is deploying his border tsar to Minnesota amid a growing backlash against his administration’s immigration crackdown after federal agents shot and killed a second person in Minneapolis over the weekend.
Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday that he was sending Tom Homan to the state. The president described the former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as “tough but fair”.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Homan would manage ICE operations on the ground in Minnesota and “continue arresting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens”.
Homan’s deployment comes as public outrage continues to grow after immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday. His killing came less than three weeks after ICE agents shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis.
Pretti’s killing sparked indignation across the political spectrum and piled pressure on a White House that has made the mass deportation of illegal immigrants the centrepiece of its domestic political agenda.
Several Republican lawmakers and state governors have publicly expressed concern about the shooting, calling for a full investigation and suggesting that ICE should cease operations in Minneapolis.
Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, have refused to sign up to more funding for the Department of Homeland Security, and threatened to shut down the federal government in protest.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published late on Sunday, Trump said his administration was “reviewing everything” about Pretti’s shooting, adding immigration agents would withdraw from Minneapolis “at some point”.
But the president’s decision to send Homan to Minnesota indicated the administration was not ready to back down in its efforts to round up and deport illegal migrants in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
Trump has for months been engaged in a war of words with Democratic state and local leaders in Minnesota, including the state’s governor, Tim Walz, who abandoned a re-election bid this year amid growing public scrutiny of a scandal involving a group of Somali migrants alleged to have fraudulently accessed the state’s public welfare system.
Leavitt on Monday said Homan would “co-ordinate with those leading investigations” into fraud in Minnesota, while Trump said on Truth Social that his Department of Justice was investigating Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota who was born in Somalia and has been among the president’s most ardent critics.