The tone President Donald Trump is changing in Minnesota is the tone he set.
“We’re going to de-escalate a little bit,” Trump told Fox News on Tuesday during a trip to Iowa, after a crackdown that has killed two civilians and brought unrest and fear to Minneapolis.
The president is seeking to pull off a feat of political escapology.
Once his deportation operation became morally unsustainable after the killing of protesting ICU nurse Alex Pretti, pressure piled on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and top Border Patrol official Greg Bovino, the twin faces of the enterprise.
Trump’s two-hour meeting with Noem in the Oval Office on Monday evening was a subtle act of blame-shifting, implying that Noem had erred. The removal of Bovino from Minnesota sent a more direct signal.
But both hard-charging officials were operating under the policies, tense atmosphere of confrontation and expectations of hyped public performance established by the president, who had repeatedly and publicly endorsed the leadership of Noem in particular in Cabinet meetings and elsewhere.
Ever since he descended his golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015, the now-president has sketched a dark picture of a nation held hostage to rapists, murderers, and people ejected from mental asylums before joining a foreign invasion of America. He sees cities as dystopian hellholes of anarchy and crime that need a strongman’s ethos and brutal federal power to fix.
At an event in Clive, Iowa, on Tuesday, Trump said that even migrants who entered the country legally needed to show that they would love America, not hate it.
“They have to show that they’re not going to blow up our shopping centers, blow up our farms, kill people,” he said.
In that context, it’s no wonder his subordinates felt the latitude to send out armed agents in masks and military-style uniforms into the streets of Minneapolis and other major cities in a demonstration of power that came right from the top. The footage has been out there for weeks, and Trump didn’t stop it. And he joined in the maligning of the first Minnesota civilian, Renee Good, to die.
Immigration was always a secret sauce that bound Trump close to his base. Demonizing immigrants is a classic of the populists’ playbook and a tool for imposing unusual personal power. Trump’s vows to stage mass deportations always drew loud cheers at his campaign rallies. The failure of his predecessor Joe Biden to secure the US-Mexico frontier was a stunning act of political malpractice considering that Trump was lurking ahead of the 2024 election.
Given the Democrats’ failures, it’s hardly surprising that voters turned to Trump to fix the problem. Since Americans knew who Trump was from his first term, and he’d never hidden his hardline views, it is a fair assumption that a toughening of enforcement was expected along with stronger border security. The stories top officials told about young victims of murder by undocumented migrants, like Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, are heartrending; the victims and their families deserve justice.
But there was hardly a question the moment would come when Trump’s approach summoned imagery so extreme and offensive to the national conscience that his strategy became a liability. In his first term, pictures of children in cage-like detention were a PR disaster. In the second, the reckoning arrived in less than one horrific minute, when agents in military style garb surrounded Pretti on Saturday and pumped him with bullets.
The days since have been a lesson in the consequences of presidential hubris, which a careful White House might consider as Trump seeks to impose unfettered personal power elsewhere — especially in his increasingly ambitious foreign policy as he eyes generational anti-US regimes in Iran and Cuba.
Recent events also make urgent the question of whether immigration enforcement must be carried out with such ruthlessness. Would a more moderate approach have retained the support of the public and Capitol Hill Republicans, avoiding the shocking videos that have undermined the administration?
It probably would have. But the theatricality of tough-guy agents in the streets and the visuals of confrontation — in which Bovino and Noem enthusiastically participated — were partly the point. This administration is built on spectacle. Trump’s schtick is that he’s strong; he slays political correctness; and he will break the rules, and even the law, to keep Americans safe. What political payoff could he reap from highly effective and humane deportation sweeps that nobody saw?
One issue now is whether the optics will change but leave the policy intact.
The president on Tuesday promised a “big investigation” into Pretti’s death that he’d oversee himself. He’s issued upbeat readouts of his calls with top Democratic officials in Minnesota that his team spent weeks lambasting. And he sent border czar Tom Homan to run deportation operations in the state. Homan will report directly to Trump, an arrangement that seems likely to sideline Noem.
This is a full-scale political retreat apparently prompted by grim poll numbers and anxiety on Capitol Hill. It’s just the latest imbroglio facing Republicans who fear a midterm election wipeout.
Yet there’s no guarantee that shuffling the pack of top officials will help politically. Homan is no shrinking violet. He might have worked for the Obama administration, but his bullish persona fits Trump’s penchant for central-casting candidates who seem to personify the job he picked them to fill. It would be a shocker if deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s draconian policies on illegal — and even legal — immigration goes anywhere, even after Trump on Tuesday disagreed with Miller’s assertion that Pretti was an “assassin.”
Miller, one of the president’s longest-serving aides, told CNN in a statement on Tuesday evening that officials were evaluating why Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis “may not have been following” proper protocol before the fatal shooting of Pretti.
But the impacts and sweep of the enforcement push seem to go far beyond the protocols for one individual incident.
Seeking a reset, Trump on Tuesday stressed the most popular aspect of his immigration policy.
“The border is totally secure. You know, you forget, we had a border that I inherited where millions of people were coming through,” the president said, reminding Americans that he’d fulfilled a task they set him in the 2024 election. “You know, people forget. As soon as you accomplish something, it goes into history and nobody ever wants to talk about it.”
Perhaps if he had claimed victory on the border and turned to tackling the affordability issues haunting so many Americans, Trump might have spared himself a political mess. But he’s often found it hard to claim a win and move on. He keeps doubling down. He got NATO member countries to spend more on their defense, for example, but now seems to want to destroy the alliance itself.
Like most presidents, he’s guilty of overreach. His immigration purge has gone far beyond his assignment from voters of fixing the border. His team insists that he’s presided over the deportation of thousands of “the worst of the worst” criminals. But the proportion of deportees charged with violent crimes has steadily fallen since the start of the purges. A Cato Institute study in November found that only 5% of people detained by ICE over the period beginning October 1, 2025, had violent convictions, while 73% had no convictions.
After the shooting of Good, and before Pretti was killed, a CNN/SSRS poll this month showed that Americans said 51% to 31% that ICE enforcement was making cities less safe. Some 52% of Americans say Trump’s deportation efforts have gone too far. And his approval rating on immigration was at 42%, down from 51% in March, suggesting that wavering Democrats and independents have left him on the issue, leaving him down to his most loyal supporters.
Where does this leave Noem and Bovino?
Bovino may be permanently on the shelf after strutting through demonstrations in his trench coat and making inflammatory television appearances — including on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, when he described the agents in the Pretti killing as “victims.” He committed the unforgivable sin of stealing the spotlight from his boss. “You know, Bovino is very good, but he’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy, and in some cases, that’s good — maybe it wasn’t good here,” Trump said.
Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Tuesday vowed to seek Noem’s impeachment if she doesn’t resign. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who often acts independently of her GOP colleagues, said it was time for Noem to step down. “I think you have a secretary right now that needs to be accountable to the chaos and some of the tragedy that we have seen,” she said.
Trump insisted Noem is “doing a very good job.” But sometimes senior officials have to take the fall to ensure that the buck doesn’t stop with their boss. That may still be Noem’s fate, although Republicans will be loath to initiate a divisive confirmation fight for a successor in a midterm election year.
And Trump called the former South Dakota governor into his Cabinet for a reason. She was an early and staunch proponent of MAGA. She’s popular with his supporters and beloved by conservative media. And she’s in a category of officials whom he’d find hard to replace with anyone as pliant to his most radical views and wishes. If she remains a red-hot political liability, Noem might keep her job but disappear from public view — just like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whose once-bright media star has faded.
But the most compelling reason for Trump to keep Noem is that ditching her might imply that he was wrong to pick her and that his entire approach to immigration in his second term is a disaster.
Trump “has built a force and a system to do this, to abuse people and to terrorize communities,” Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on Tuesday. “Let’s not make a mistake and think that these are accidents and they’re just happening on their own. This was the system that this president has designed.”