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2026-01-28 06:15:25

Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol “commander-at-large” who terrorized people across America in his Nazi-like trench coat, is being put out to pasture by President Donald Trump. The cause was Bovino’s stupidity, not his cruelty.

After his Border Patrol agents disarmed and killed Alex Pretti in broad daylight on Saturday, Bovino shamelessly slandered the 37-year-old nurse only to have his lies immediately and irrefutably exposed by numerous videos of the killing.

Instead of leading his band of masked agents from city to city, Bovino is now returning to his original role as the head of California’s not particularly busy El Centro border sector. The Atlantic reports that the 55-year-old is expected to soon retire. In place of Bovino, Trump has sent his border “czar” and first-term Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan to Minneapolis. Unlike Bovino, who had an unusual arrangement in which he reported to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem instead of his immediate supervisors, Trump has said that Homan will answer directly to him. 

It is worth stressing what Bovino got away with before Trump shoved him aside. In Los Angeles, Bovino and his gang occupied the city like an invading army, marching through MacArthur Park as a public relations stunt and pulling people off the street in obvious spasms of racial profiling that led to Trump’s Supreme Court explicitly legitimizing stops based on skin color.

In Chicago, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez multiple times while she was in her car. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes,” Exum later bragged in a text message. “Put that in your book, boys.” (Martinez survived the shooting and is now asking a judge to release evidence from a now abandoned federal case against her.)

In November, Sara Ellis, a federal judge for the Northern District of Illinois, made clear that Bovino lied repeatedly to defend his and Border Patrol’s conduct in Chicago. As Ellis wrote about Bovino in a 233-page decision, “the Court specifically finds his testimony not credible. Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.” That included, she added, lying multiple times about the events that led to him throwing tear gas at protesters.

He did this all with gleeful menace. His signature look was an authoritarian haircut paired with a winter trench coat reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany. As a writer for the German publication Der Spiegel put it, Bovino “stands out from this thuggish mob, just as an elegant SS officer stands out from the rowdy SA mob. The dashing undercut is also spot on; all that’s missing for the perfect cosplay is a monocle.” As noted by the Guardian, a second German outlet wrote that Bovino looked like “he had taken a photo of [assassinated Nazi paramilitary leader] Ernst Röhm to the barber.” 

None of this stopped Noem and Miller from sending Bovino to Minneapolis, where he and his men predictably continued their anonymous thuggery. That culminated on Saturday with the killing of Pretti. From there, Bovino did himself in through sheer idiocy. Unlike the shooting of Martinez, for example, Pretti’s death was captured from numerous angles. The footage made clear that he was peacefully observing and recording Border Patrol agents before they tackled him, removed the handgun he was legally carrying, then shot him to death.

But Bovino had apparently become so accustomed to lying that he went ahead and pushed the DHS falsehood that Pretti appeared to have “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Pretti, a former Boy Scout and VA ICU nurse, was too sympathetic to be smeared so brazenly. Trump recognized that and sent Bovino packing. But there should be no doubt that Bovino would still be in his job if his agents had done the same thing off-camera, or perhaps even on camera to a more easily maligned victim. His removal was also likely hastened by the lingering outrage from ICE agent Jonathan Ross brazenly killing Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier this month.

At least for the time being, Trump is taking a less confrontational approach in public by touting a “very good telephone conversation” on Monday with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, as well as another one with Gov. Tim Walz, who he now says he appears to be on a “similar wavelength” with. He has also avoided repeating the obvious lies about Pretti spread this weekend by Bovino, Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Vice President JD Vance.

Sources apparently loyal to Noem are now leaking to Axios to pin the blame on Miller for the false statement that was released by DHS on Saturday and repeated by Noem and Bovino. If true, it makes Bovino something of a fall guy for Miller, whose longtime role alongside Trump does not appear to be in jeopardy. (Miller was notably absent from a two-hour meeting between Noem and Trump on Monday, the New York Times reports.)

Homan is a hardliner who has been described by The Atlantic as the “intellectual ‘father’” of the first Trump administration’s family separation policy. Unlike Bovino, however, his most recent experience is with ICE rather than Border Patrol. Along with acting ICE director Todd Lyons, he is reported to favor a somewhat more targeted approach to mass deportation that prioritizes people with actual deportation orders or criminal histories. Whether that changes DHS’ behavior on the ground—especially with Miller still in the picture—remains to be seen.

Trump’s pullback on Monday is reminiscent of his abandonment of the family separation policy in the face of widespread outrage in 2018. The images and sounds of separated families came to define Trump’s first term on immigration—even though the policy ended well before the midpoint of the administration. It would not be surprising if the images of Pretti being shot in the back, then again and again as he lay motionless on the street, go on to occupy the same position.

In that sense, what followed family separation may be instructive. Trump and Miller’s hardline measures to seal the US-Mexico border continued through policies like Remain in Mexico, multiple asylum bans, and expanding detention of asylum seekers who’d recently crossed the border. But the outrage over family separation also helped to wipe away the political advantage on immigration that helped Trump win for the first time in 2016.

The killings of Pretti and Good, along with countless videos of immigrants and citizens being abused by masked federal agents, have similarly degraded the support for Trump on immigration generated by the chaos at the border during Joe Biden’s presidency. On Monday, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted before and after Pretti’s death showed that 53 percent of respondents disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration, compared to 39 percent who approve. That is a 23-point swing from February 2025 when voters approved of Trump on immigration by a nine-point margin. 

Six in ten independents now say that ICE has gone too far, along with more than 90 percent of Democrats. Perhaps more surprisingly, Republicans are now nearly as likely to say ICE has gone too far as they are to say that ICE has not gone far enough, according to the Reuters poll.

After years of trying to avoid talking about immigration on the campaign trail, Democrats are recognizing that times have changed. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling on social media for fellow Democrats to reject an upcoming DHS spending bill. Democratic House leaders have joined efforts to impeach Noem.

It is now Bovino who is silent on X, and not by choice. In the Trump administration’s equivalent of Siberian banishment, he has reportedly been blocked from posting by his superiors.

2026-01-28 05:05:24

A few weeks before Christmas, six siblings huddled around a phone in their mom’s bedroom to talk with their dad and grandpa, who’d just been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Memphis.

Camila, 16, the oldest girl, seemed tense as she sat next to Saraya, 13. Their grandpa tried to lighten the mood, at one point singing to them, but Camila was unusually quiet. “I could barely speak to him, because I would burst out in tears,” she told me later.

Camila (like Saraya, a pseudonym) is tall and athletic, with long brown hair. She’s the fiery one of the bunch, the protector, always ready with a quip. “I wish I could go to the White House and smack Donald Trump,” she said, a little more like herself.

She’d been sleeping almost all day of late, yet still she was exhausted. Camila worried about everything, everyone: Her mom, who came home sobbing after her dad was detained and was now struggling to pay the rent. Saraya, who has darker skin and was constantly getting harassed by cops. Their 12-year-old brother, who’d been withdrawn ever since ICE officers busted into their house, guns drawn, sans warrant. Their grandpa, 75 years old, who said the detention facility where they took him wasn’t providing the blood pressure and diabetes medications he needs. And, of course, her dad, who always used to cook Camila the most delicious frijoles and pinole, and warm arroz con leche at bedtime to help her sleep—but can no longer do so.

With their breadwinner gone, the family has been eating lots of spaghetti. “We’re out of money, and I’m trying to help my mom, but I can’t because I’m a minor,” Camila told me over the phone. “I’m trying to look for a job.”

“If I could get therapy, something,” she added, “because I’m tired. I’m on my last string.”

The family’s troubles began on November 24. It was a Monday night, and father Cesar Alexander Antunes-Maradiaga had been home getting ready for dinner when he realized they were out of cream, which the recipe called for. The store was a short drive away, and he hopped into their 2013 Honda Civic with his father-in-law and uncle-in-law, who lived with them.

It should have been an easy errand, but one of his headlights was out. On his way home, at the corner of Jackson and Gragg, lights flashed behind him: Tennessee Highway Patrol. The cops, as I witnessed myself, had been everywhere lately. On September 29, the Trump administration launched the Memphis Safe Task Force, consisting of around 1,700 officers from a mix of local, state, and federal agencies—including ICE—supposedly to crack down on crime.

Antunes-Maradiaga is an asylum seeker from Honduras. His father-in-law, also Honduran, is undocumented. Terrified, he FaceTimed his wife, Nicole Amaya, who watched events unfold on her phone’s tiny screen: An officer approached the car, and Antunes-Maradiaga held a piece of paper up to the window, a Know Your Rights flier saying he didn’t have to open the door. Unimpressed, the officer smashed the car window and pulled him out, putting a gun to his head.

The officer demanded identification, but Antunes-Maradiaga didn’t have a driver’s license, so Amaya provided his passport number and Alien Registration Number to the troopers via FaceTime. By the time she got to the scene in person, she told me, more than two dozen officers from different agencies were there. Antunes-Maradiaga and her dad, Jorge Fidel Mejia, were in the back of one of their vehicles. Heart racing, Amaya approached an officer from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE. “Y’all told me y’all wasn’t gonna detain nobody!” she yelled, citing an officer’s assurances during the FaceTime call.

“Maybe the trooper told you that,” she recalls the ICE agent saying. “I didn’t.”

Since the task force launched, local critics have called it an “occupation,” and accused the Trump administration of using the city’s crime problem as a Trojan horse, an excuse to boost its deportation count. In its first six weeks alone, the task force conducted nearly 30,000 traffic stops—and nearly 70,000 by mid-January. The federal officers ask drivers and passengers for proof of citizenship, leading to hundreds of arrests of noncriminal immigrants. “Show me his criminal record—you ain’t got it! So what are you taking him for?” Amaya says she yelled at the agent from the roadside, shivering because she’d forgotten a coat in her rush. “My dad can’t go back to his country,” she told me later. A Honduran gang “killed my brother in pieces with a machete when he was 17.”

“We might let your daddy go because you said he’s been here for 25 years,” the agent said, in her recollection.

“Y’all don’t let nobody go; let’s get real,” she responded, before the officers took her husband and father away.

The agents handed her a piece of paper explaining the headlight issue, in case another cop pulled her over. “Good luck getting home,” they said.

When Amaya got back to the family’s small, one-story house, she walked down the hall to her bedroom, then collapsed on the floor and began to cry. Camila consoled her, listening as Amaya tried to explain what had happened. “I’m the one who understands her more than the rest,” the daughter told me.

Suddenly, they heard a boom. “Oh my god, what was that?” Amaya said.

Then came stomping in the hallway, and the bedroom door flung open. The officers were holding guns and screaming. Some had vests labeled ICE or HSI, she says, and one was labeled US marshals, though that officer said he was from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The officers hauled her 12-year-old son, who’d also come in to sit with her, out of the room before pulling his hair and slamming him to the floor, the family told me. They accused Amaya of “aiding and abetting,” implying she was hiding other undocumented immigrants. “What am I aiding and abetting? My own children?” she yelled. Amaya and her children are US citizens.

Camila felt helpless, she told me later: “I just panicked because what am I gonna do with 20 men?” She cursed out the agents and demanded, to no avail, that they let her mom and brother go.

The family said the officers didn’t have a warrant, an allegation that seems credible given recent developments. Namely, a bombshell report by the Associated Press revealed that ICE told its officers that they may forcibly enter homes without a judicial warrant—which, according to a whistleblower, is contrary to their own training manual, to say nothing of longstanding legal precedent. The US Marshals Service, which handles press inquiries for the task force, ignored my questions about the raid and declined to weigh in on the warrant issue, but confirmed that Autunes-Maradiaga and his father-in-law were detained by ICE during a traffic stop.

The officers searched the house. Not finding anyone else undocumented, they left the same way they came in: through the front door, which they’d damaged upon entry—it would no longer lock and had a huge hole at its base. “I was like, whose gonna fix my door? They just walked off, and they were laughing,” Amaya recalls.

She and the kids inspected the additional damage: a punch mark on a bedroom door the officers had been unable to open, and someone had ripped the wifi router right out of the wall. “I just sat down and cried, because I couldn’t do anything,” Camila told me.

Camila is an 11th grader at Kingsbury High, located in a neighborhood with many immigrant families. Her favorite academic subject is history; for fun she enjoys volleyball and soccer. She hadn’t been able to play lately, though, due to injuries and stress—a month before her dad was arrested, she was hurt while fleeing a terrifying situation.

According to a press release from the Marshals Service, the Memphis Safe Task Force responded to a shooting at around 1:30 a.m. on October 22 at a house in the Nutbush neighborhood, not far from Camila’s school. After officers arrived, they found a corpse with a gunshot wound in the head, and later they found another that was partially dismembered. The 36-year-old suspect, Arsenio Davis, was accused of killing his mother and teenage nephew.

The press release didn’t name Camila, but earlier that same night, she, her cousin, and some friends were hanging out near the house when Davis came out. They didn’t know him, and there appeared to be something very wrong with him; according to Camila, he started yelling at her, demanding she come inside and pay him. Instead, she ran.

Afterward, she filed a police report alleging Davis had pursued her; she had to leap multiple fences to escape, leaving her cut up—scars on her stomach, arms, and legs, a busted knee, and nerve damage in one leg. “I almost got murdered,” she told me. The Memphis Police Department did not respond to my questions about the incident, but the family says an officer found her hiding in an abandoned house nearby, her pants ripped from traversing the fences. “The system still has failed to call to get her any kind of victim [support],” he mother told me.

The trauma kept compounding. In mid-December, Camila says officers went to Kingsbury High and arrested her boyfriend, whose parents brought him to the United States from Honduras at age 2.

The Tennessee Highway Patrol, meanwhile, kept stopping Saraya around the neighborhood; one trooper shined a light in her face. “He doesn’t give no reason,” for stopping me, said Saraya, who is in eighth grade. “He was like, ‘Where’s your mama? I wanna see your mama,” Amaya chimed in.

And then there was the silver car with tinted windows that kept driving past the house multiple times a day—almost every day. Sometimes it would stop out front. They figured it was undercover law enforcement. “I’m not scared of them,” said Saraya, strong-willed like her sister. “They ain’t got no reason taking hardworking people that build their house and help their community,” Camila added. “Why can’t they just take the bad people?”

“That’s what they were supposed to be doing,” Amaya replied. “That was the statement”—the task force’s stated reason for being in Memphis.

“I don’t know how to feel, actually,” Camila said. “Today there was National Guard at the Walmart—they kept on staring me and my two sisters up and down. I told them they’re not supposed to be here. I said, ‘When are they leaving?’ They said, ‘We’re never leaving.'”

In December, Amaya attempted to file a report with the Memphis Police Department claiming the Tennessee Highway Patrol was harassing her family, but an officer told her she’d have to file a complaint with the THP. “I’m scared to call them because they’re already stalking me. I feel like I’m trapped,” she said.

“I’m just sick of being paranoid. I need a counselor or something to talk to,” Camila told me. Amaya had looked into getting trauma therapy for her daughter, but “every single [provider] didn’t take her insurance.”   

The MPD and Highway Patrol ignored my requests for comment, and the US Marshals would not directly address the family’s allegations. I received a statement saying the task force “does not tolerate excessive force or harassment,” and that “all enforcement actions are expected to be conducted lawfully and professionally. Allegations of misconduct are taken seriously and should be directed to the appropriate oversight channels for review.”

In the days after the raid at Amaya’s house, Maria Oceja, who co-leads the neighborhood group Vecindarios 901, which documents ICE arrests, drove over to comfort her. She recalled Amaya as shaky and distressed, speaking quickly and peering outside frequently, on the lookout for law enforcement. “She’s very traumatized, very overwhelmed, and just trying to process everything,” Oceja said. And Camila seemed “in shock.” Of the thousands of cases Oceja’s group has witnessed since the task force launched, this one stands out, though there was a similar incident back in October, when officers followed an immigrant family home from a laundromat and then broke into their home.

While Camila slept around the clock after her dad’s arrest, Amaya has struggled to get more than two hours of shuteye at a stretch—anxiety keeps her awake. How will she pay rent? Her husband worked in concrete and her dad would chip in money from odd construction jobs. She worries that the men might never return from ICE custody. Antunes-Maradiaga had an asylum case, Amaya says—he fled MS-13 gang members 12 years ago—but it was dismissed in 2023 without a final decision. Her father, Fidel Mejia, is undocumented. Both are being held at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, where they have reported that they lack mattresses and the guards call them wetbacks. Officials at the facility haven’t allowed him his medications, Fidel Mejia said, although they did at one point shoot him up with a tranquilizer, against his will, when he couldn’t sleep. Also: The tap water is yellow.

Amaya hasn’t been able to get a job because she’s needs to stay home for her kids, especially her 1-year-old. She’s had bad experiences with day cares, which are also expensive. Without a paycheck, she can’t even fix the front door. Cold air blows in through the hole at its base, which the family tried to stuff with towels. They eventually put a couch against it. The last time I spoke with her, their heat and electricity were shut off, and she was facing eviction during a winter storm.

Then, just this week, with the door still unrepaired, someone broke in and ransacked the house. Amaya sent some video footage. I could hear her cry as she walked through the hallway and into her bedroom, now strewn with the family’s possessions—drawers removed from a dresser, clothes everywhere. Their immigration papers were stolen. “I can’t anymore,” she texted me. “I don’t know what to do, and it’s freezing.”

We have “nothing,” Camila had told me earlier. “It’s like this whole world went to shit.”

“I just hope one day these [law enforcement] people understand other people’s pains,” she’d added. “They should see how my mom gets on her knees, starts crying; she don’t know what to do. One day they’re gonna understand” that immigrants “got kids, they got family.”

In the meantime, “I hope they all go to hell and burn.”

2026-01-28 04:41:14

Yesterday I published a story about what was quickly becoming a surprising site of capital R Resistance: the Letterboxd review page for the $75 million documentary film, Melania.

Comments were profane, fun, silly, unprintable. I included some of my favorites. The point I was making was this: Even before the movie’s release this Friday, it has become a lightning rod for anger, not least because Melania Trump’s oligarchic private premiere gala at the White House came the same day Alex Pretti was shot dead in the streets of Minneapolis amid her husband’s disastrous siege of the city. A real let-them-eat-cake moment.

But as my colleague Arianna Coghill went to promote the story today on our social media channels, she discovered the reviews have been wiped from the site entirely.

Sad.

So I sent an email to the Letterboxd press team asking why. What terms were violated? When did that happen? Even though the reviews appeared before the official release of the film, how is Letterboxd to know reviewers hadn’t seen the film itself?

They haven’t gotten back to me, and I’ll share their response when they do.

Update, Tuesday, January 27, 5:45 p.m.: Letterboxd just got back to me (they are based in New Zealand), attributing the erasure to an innocuous, automated back-end update:

This was an automatic update, caused by a previously incorrect premiere date. Letterboxd pulls through film data from TMDB, a user editable database for movies. The official premiere date was corrected on TMDB, automatically updated on the film’s main page on Letterboxd, thus preventing all reviews from appearing on the film page until its premiere. This happens from time to time on film pages through the automated sync, with no manual intervention required from the Letterboxd team.

So there you have it. Friday’s official release of the Amazon-MGM doc will provide would-be reviewers a fresh opportunity to contribute to Letterboxd’s thriving message boards.

Here’s what I had previously pointed out about the site’s publicly available rules and regulations:

Letterboxd’s Terms of Service prohibit using the site to “game the Service’s mechanics,” “alter consensus,” or “participate in orchestrated attacks against films or filmmakers.” Letterboxd also asserts the “absolute discretion” to remove any post. Any account can be suspended for “any reason or no reason whatsoever, with or without notice.”

Letterboxd is also pretty clear in its FAQ: “Letterboxd is for reviews of films you’ve seen, not those you want to see,” and it encourages people to flag “pre-release reviews,” which, it says, “we’ll remove at our discretion.” It also says its undisclosed platform magic helps ensure its ratings are less vulnerable to being abused in online campaigns “to accurately represent the global consensus for each film”—but says people are welcome to report those suspected of waging such a campaign.

I guess we’ll have to wait until Friday, when the “global consensus” will begin to take shape—I suspect somewhat quickly.

Meanwhile, as if pocketing $28 million for just 20 days of being followed by filmmakers wasn’t grifty enough, Melania went on Fox News this morning to sermonize about “unity” after the Pretti killing—beneath a banner promoting her new film, bearing her own name.

Subtle.

2026-01-28 03:46:00

George Floyd’s aunt, Angela Harrison, sits in her car down the block from Renée Good’s memorial, warming her hands against the heater. Outside, two women walk toward the memorial in face masks and ski goggles, the snow squeaking under their boots, to join the dozens in puffy jackets and face masks who are already there.

It’s a bright Friday morning, negative-13 degrees outside. That afternoon, tens of thousands of protesters will gather downtown to protest ICE. A day later, immigration officials will kill Alex Pretti.

But in this moment, Harrison is feeling a weighty gratitude as she watches the crowd.

“They’re still coming out here,” she marvels. “God bless them.”

A man with a cane takes in the collection of flowers, signs, paintings, and flags. Some children have left their teddy bears. A woman kneels in prayer. A few gather around the bonfire that regulars have kept burning every day since Good’s death.

Harrison has come here several times over the past couple weeks, sometimes after she visits her nephew’s memorial a few blocks away. On the evening of Pretti’s death, she will attend a candlelight vigil for him at George Floyd Square. She knows all too well what Good’s and Pretti’s families are going through: the pain, the grief, the media frenzy, the scrutiny and character attacks. “There’s no time to really grieve, there’s no time to do anything, because you’re just in survival mode,” she says.

Harrison is a woman of faith, and after her nephew was murdered, when she was in a dark, lost place, she says she heard from God. She came to believe that when Floyd was pinned down, each time he said I can’t breathe was an act of hope that someone would help him. If her nephew had the courage to ask for help—not once, not twice, but 27 times—she could have the courage to raise her own voice. In the years since then, she has made a point of showing up for grieving families of those killed by authorities. She hasn’t reached out to the families of Good or Pretti—it doesn’t feel like the right time—but it feels important, she says, to simply pay her respects, as so many did for her in 2020.

“We didn’t know what to do, but one of the things that kept us together was a unity,” she says. “I still see the unity.”

We get out of the car and Harrison goes to the trunk to get her purse. “In case I get stopped by ICE, I’ll have my ID,” she says, with a wry laugh. “I know, it’s terrible you have to say this, but you do.”

I grew up in Minneapolis, 10 minutes away from where Good was killed, and returned last week to a hometown that felt under siege. Even if you’re not looking for it, ICE’s presence is impossible to ignore. Residents carry whistles on lanyards or strapped to backpacks. They patrol sidewalks in yellow vests. Restaurants in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods have seen business plummet; many keep their doors locked during open hours. The city has cleaved along a new line of haves and have nots: those who can attend schools and hospitals, and those who are forced to attend virtually. Everyone seems to know someone who hasn’t left their home in weeks.

There’s a pervasive sense that ICE is just around the corner, lurking in SUVs with out-of-state plates. At first, it seemed to me like this vigilance bordered on paranoia—until I drove past an idling car on a quiet residential street, and there they were, four agents sitting inside wearing camo face masks and tactical gear.

In ICE patrol chats on Signal, residents sound the alarm when agents are nearby, leading observers to descend on the scene, blowing their whistles and honking their horns and filming on their phones. The hyperlocal chats have proliferated, dividing and multiplying when they reach the 1,000-person limit. Some include requests from people or places asking for help: an apartment complex with heavy ICE presence that needs observers, a restaurant asking for patrol during a shift change.

The patrols, the chats, and the mutual aid feel familiar—the reignition of a decentralized, citywide rapid response apparatus that was last activated in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder. Soren Stevenson, a city council member who took office earlier this month, remembers doing neighborhood watch in 2020, sitting on his porch across the street from a Black church through the night to make sure it didn’t burn down. During a peaceful protest after Floyd’s death, police shot Stevenson with a rubber bullet, causing him to lose his eye.

“After the murder of Renée Good, we’ve gone into overdrive,” he says. “We’re connected to our neighbors. A lot of people are like, ‘Hey, I haven’t seen you since the uprising. But here we are. We’re back.’”

When we speak—six days before news breaks that Trump is pulling some federal agents out of the state, and that senior Border Patrol official Greg Bovino has been dismissed from his post—Stevenson predicts that the city’s social fabric will ultimately cause its residents to prevail.

ICE’s presence “will end at some point, and we’re going to still be united,” he says. “We’re going to still be looking out for each other when they’re gone.”

One morning, I drive with photojournalist Madison Swart, who’s signed into a few ICE patrol Signal chats. There are so many messages coming in that it looks like her phone is glitching.

She’s also called into one of the many continually running Signal calls—also divided by neighborhood—where a dispatcher runs license plate checks of potential ICE vehicles and tell observers where they’re most needed. The calls have the feel of an amateur police radio. Volunteers use quirky aliases and the military alphabet but sometimes don’t remember—a caller might say something along the lines of, “This is Cheese Curd, and I’d like a plate check on Texas plate One Three Four Six Charlie, uh, Robert.”

Word is that there’s a convoy of ICE vehicles, including Bovino, nearby. It is the middle of the workday, and as we drive, we pass dozens of observers on patrol. Some volunteers direct traffic in the direction of the supposed convoy, blowing their whistles. Others run after the convoy themselves. As we get closer, the sound from the whistles and the honking is cacophonous. Soon enough, we’re part of the line of cars, which has evolved into a strange mix of white Jeep Wagoneers with ICE agents in camo masks, observers leaning on their horns and filming with their phones, and journalists toting big cameras. Traffic rules seem to fly out the window—everyone is blazing through red lights, like a cross between an angry funeral procession and a car chase. A woman sprints out of her front door in sweatpants, blowing her whistle. We’re directly behind a sedan with a man yelling, “FUCKING NAZI!” out the window to the Jeep in front of him. The immigration agent in the driver’s seat leans out the window, looks back, and waves.

The convoy is driving big loops around the south side of the city. The frenetic drive doubles as a surreal tour down memory lane—we zoom by the diamonds where I played softball and the path where I used to run. We soon arrive at Minnehaha Parkway, the road I took to high school each day, where the convoy does a lap around a parklet that’s just a hundred yards long. The agents, followed by a perhaps 20 cars, drive around the parklet a second time, and then a third. The honking and the whistling are nonstop. The press and the observers have their windows down and are filming the agents, and the agents appear to be taking photos of the observers and the press with their own cameras. Around and around we go. The agents look like they’re having a blast, leaning out their windows now, singing to music we can’t make out in the din.

Inside the entrance of Dios Habla Hoy Church, in South Minneapolis, the wood box on the wall for tithes and offerings is barely visible, surrounded by pallets of canned tuna, heaps of potatoes, and cardboard boxes of fruits and vegetables. The wall of the light-filled sanctuary is lined with boxes of diapers. Dozens of volunteers of all ages buzz in every direction, sorting and stacking donated food and assembling boxes of groceries.

Pastor Sergio Amezcua, who presides over the 500-person church, wasn’t anticipating this. When ICE came to town in early December, he assumed that they’d be going after the bad guys.

Now, he’s come to see ICE as the bad guys. “The real story is that ICE is acting like narco cartels back in Mexico, but doing worse things than narco cartels—arresting five-year-olds, messing around with pregnant women, killing females. Not even narco cartels do that stuff,” says Amezcua, who immigrated from the Mexican state of Sinaloa. “Coming from a conservative government, Christian government—I just think they’re reading their Bible backwards.”

The grocery delivery operation was also something of a surprise. When his assistant told him in December that lots of community members were scared to leave their homes, Amezcua suggested that the church put up a link on social media where those in need of deliveries could register. He was expecting 10 or 20 families to sign up. By the end of the day, 2,000 had put their names on the list.

Over the six weeks to follow, close to 4,000 volunteers have registered to help. So far, they’ve delivered grocery boxes to 17,000 families.

One volunteer, a 28-year-old strategy consultant currently between jobs, found out about the operation on a neighborhood Facebook group in December and has been coming ever since. She walks me through the logistics: The church receives food from community donations and food shelves, many of which are seeing low attendance right now. Grocery boxes are packed in an assembly line around a U-shaped collection of tables in the church entryway.

“I feel like it looks very dire and hopeless from the outside, and I feel that sometimes too,” she says. “But then there’s a weird juxtaposition—like, it’s also so hopeful. We’re literally turning volunteers away saying, ‘Please come back another time.’” Indeed, during the 10 minutes we speak, a gray-haired man walks in, asking how he can sign up to volunteer. Another comes in moments later, asking where he can drop off a check.

A routine of sorts has set in at the federal Whipple Building, the brutalist structure where ICE operations are based, and where, on the sidewalk behind a barricade, there’s been a standing protest for weeks. Every time a vehicle pulls into the entrance to the building, the crowd—perhaps 50 people last Tuesday afternoon—yells and whistles and jeers. On the corner, there’s a pile of gloves and coats for protesters who arrived without enough layers. An elderly woman drives up to drop off cookies.

The protesters have their own reasons for showing up in the middle of a weekday, but many of them say they couldn’t stand to be inside doom scrolling or pretending to work.

“I was sitting at home, and it was driving me crazy, and I was like, ‘What can I do?’” says Shontay Evans. “So I packed up a bag of snacks down there on the corner and came down here passing out snacks and water, and I got two pizzas on the way.”

Evans, who wears a Minnesota Wild sweatshirt and blue snow pants, is the owner of the state’s only Black-owned plant nursery. She talks a mile a minute. “Minnesota is definitely about solidarity and sticking together and standing for injustice, just like we did for George Floyd,” she says. “Don’t forget, if you’ve been silent, that’s complicit, so you’re agreeing with what’s going on, so we need everybody to stand up. You need a hand warmer?”

Jessica Hernandez stands back from the crowd. She has a gentle smile, introducing herself as the daughter of Mexican immigrants who was born in Minnesota and raised in Texas. She says she doesn’t feel comfortable screaming and blocking roadways and things like that, but she wants to be here to represent the many people who don’t feel safe to leave their homes.

After we chat for a few minutes, I ask Hernandez if there’s anything I’m not asking that she wants to talk about. “While I operate from a place of love and compassion, for the most part, I think we’re at a tipping point,” she says. She smiles that gentle smile. “I’m licensed to carry in Texas, and I’m not afraid to exercise that right to defend my family as well as those who cannot defend themselves.”

Later, I meet Ian Austin, a 35-year-old Army veteran who lives in Philadelphia. He says he’s done six combat deployments and has severe PTSD, and he speaks with the urgency and impatience of someone who’s about to break into frustrated tears.

“When they say, ‘Why would you be out here?’ How the fuck could I not be out here?” he says. “My nation is under attack.” He goes on, “We’re turning into something that I can’t even begin to respect, and something that I literally went to war—or they told me I went to war—to fight against.”

He arrived on a Thursday night. The next day, outside the Whipple building, federal agents tackled and arrested a dancing protester dressed as a fox. Video captured by CNN shows that when Austin walked toward the action, he was tackled and arrested, too.

Austin says he and other arrested protesters were shackled and held in a holding cell in Whipple. He estimates he was there for seven or eight hours before being released without charges. He did okay in detention—“thankfully I’m flexible and I meditate,” he says—but he weeps when he talks about being released without his phone. Austin’s a poet, and “if I don’t get my phone back from the government, I’ve lost my photos and my videos from my entire life,” he says. “That’s everything. That’s memories, that’s life, that’s my purpose.”

A couple of days later, news breaks that federal officials have arrested three demonstrators who interrupted a church service in St. Paul because of the pastor’s work as an ICE official. Announcing the arrests on X, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote, “Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP.” The protesters, who were later released, face federal charges for conspiracy to deprive rights.

After I see the news, I call Austin. He also had been a demonstrator at the church. When I reach him, he’s at a protest outside the courthouse, where there’s a hearing for Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the arrested protesters. I ask if he’s worried that he’ll be next. “I’m slightly worried,” he says. He’s Sharpied the number of a local lawyer onto his body in case he’s taken in. “That’s why I was here today, because I was like, ‘You’re going to take them? Take me too,'” he says. “‘Take me too.’”

2026-01-27 23:52:00

Donald Trump announced Monday that he is sending his border czar, Tom Homan, to Minnesota to take charge of the chaotic immigration operation that led to the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good by federal agents. According to Trump, Homan “knows and likes many of the people” in the state, and his arrival comes amid growing criticism—including from some Republicans and conservatives—over the administration’s violent crackdown. The Trump administration also removed hard-right Border Patrol official Greg Bovino from Minnesota.

Homan is being portrayed by many as a less extreme and more professional alternative to the leadership of Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. But these days, Homan is hardly a moderate. Last year, he called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) “the dumbest congresswoman ever” and attempted to enlist the Justice Department to investigate her over her efforts to educate migrants on their constitutional rights. In April, during a speech in Arizona, he waved off concerns that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics were spreading fear, saying that “if you’re in this country illegally, you should be looking over your shoulder.”

For decades, Homan worked at Customs and Border Protection, before being appointed to position at ICE during the Obama administration. He pioneered the use of family separations to deter immigration and helped implement that policy as acting ICE director in the first Trump administration.

Homan left government in 2018 and established a consulting business. In the summer of 2024, he was reportedly recorded accepting $50,000 in a paper bag from businessmen—who were actually undercover FBI agents—seeking help winning contracts with ICE if Trump returned to office. Homan has said he did nothing illegal and has stated that he “didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” Trump’s Justice Department ultimately dropped the matter after investigators, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.”

In 2018, my colleague Noah Lanard wrote a lengthy profile of Homan. People who worked with Homan prior to the Trump years remembered him as a voice for nuance who was focussed on ensuring positive public optics for immigration policy. At the time, some officials who had interacted with him for years were surprised that Homan was fitting into the Trump administration’s immigration machine so smoothly. Homan, one said, had become “unrecognizable”:

Homan was “the person who made the most passionate argument against removing anybody,” [former Obama White House official Cecilia] Muñoz says. Muñoz had won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work on behalf of immigrants, yet Homan was the one making the strongest case against arresting people who came to the US as minors. Homan, she recalls, said he didn’t want a repeat of the 2000 Elián González case, when a Cuban boy was taken from his Miami relatives at gunpoint. Homan says in a statement to Mother Jones that he didn’t think the arrests would have been “the best use of our limited resources.” 

Still, Homan became the face of Trump’s aggressive enforcement efforts in the first term, recommending the policy that led to family separations. He was known for fiery attacks and for firmly backing his boss. And he seemed to understand how how to leverage Trump’s fixation with appearances:

Crucially for a president obsessed with appearance, Homan—a barrel-chested former cop—looks the part. His presence is imposing enough that two former colleagues said, unprompted, that they’d never seen him bully someone. In July, Trump said he’d heard that Homan looks “very nasty.” He replied, “That’s exactly what I was looking for.” Many of the 12 former colleagues of Homan interviewed for this article, from Arizona, Texas, and Washington, DC, say he has a soft side behind the gruff exterior. But that hasn’t stopped Homan from playing up his “cop’s cop” persona on TV, surely aware that it goes over well with his most important viewer.

In Trump’s second term, Homan’s perceived proximity to private interests has emerged as a significant issue. FBI sting notwithstanding, he pledged to avoid any involvement with federal contracting when he returned to government in 2025 as White House border czar. But as Mother Jones and the Project on Government Oversight reported last fall, at least some prospective government contractors seemed to believe he could be helpful. In one instance, we found that a company seeking federal contracts told investors that it was “trying to get access to Tom Homan and the folks over at DHS at the secretary level.” Meanwhile, some of Homan’s former clients are landing big federal paydays:

In addition, a review by Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight shows that a number of Homan’s former clients from his time in the private sector have been awarded lucrative border and immigration-related contracts during the second Trump administration. Those projects include constructing private prisons, sprawling migrant detention camps, and a section of border wall. It is not clear whether Homan has played any role in helping his former clients land these deals—the White House says he has no involvement in the “actual awarding” of contracts.

Regardless, the pattern highlights what critics call the legalized corruption of Washington. While Homan denies taking a bag of cash to rig a contract, he openly ran a business in which he traded on his years of government work and high-level contacts to help clients who paid him prosper in the procurement process. Now that he is back in government, even the impression that he can influence federal contract awards creates the appearance of corruption, ethics experts argue.

Homan will be reporting directly to Trump as he leads the operation in Minnesota. In a social media post on Monday afternoon, Trump seemed to be striking a conciliatory tone, indicating Homan would be working with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. It remains to be seen whether that will help diffuse the crisis Trump and his team have already created.

2026-01-27 23:25:44

On Saturday, federal immigration agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse in Minneapolis, sparking swift backlash both in the streets and online. Even some conservatives characterized the incident as a bridge too far. But, in other corners of the internet, female conservative Christian influencers appeared to be attempting to convince their largely female audience that officers were simply doing their job.

Rachel Moran, a Senior research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, sees influencers’ messages as part of a broader pattern. “For more conservative female influencers, we’re seeing them frame ICE-related violence within cultural frames that feel comfortable to them, such as religious narratives—battles of ‘good versus evil’ in which ICE is always good and any form of protest bad,” she wrote via email.  

One of the loudest voices calling for women to stand with ICE is Allie Beth Stuckey, a podcaster, commentator, and author of a 2024 book titled Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. That phrase, “toxic empathy,” stands in for a larger argument of how Christian morality has been used to pull people—especially evangelical Christians—to the left. As Stuckey explains on the podcast of the New York Times‘ Ross Douthat:

Empathy by itself is neutral. Empathy by itself, I believe, is neither good nor bad….But putting yourself in someone’s shoes, feeling what they feel, can also lead you to do three things that I say makes empathy toxic: One, validate lies. Two, affirm sin. And three, support destructive policies.

You can catch the drift here: Calls to love your neighbor have, according to Stuckey, drowned out the other side of the equation—the harms supposedly caused by helping someone. If you are empathetic to an immigrant, you are ignoring the harm Stuckey says immigration causes.

On Tuesday, Stuckey tweeted that Pretti and Renée Nicole Good, who was shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, “were people made in God’s image whose lives had value, and their deaths are tragic.” Still, she wrote, their deaths were the result of “local law enforcement refusing keep the public from impeding ICE and local politicians stoking the flames by calling ICE ‘Gestapo.’

Megan Basham, a Christian influencer and author of the 2024 book Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, retweeted Stuckey and added some of her own messages, as well:

“If your favorite fashion or beauty or home design [influencer] or what have you is posting anti-Ice sentiments, please DM me,” she tweeted on Sunday to her 197,000 followers on X. “I’d like to hear about it.” A few hours later, she tweeted, “Ladies, we need you on Insta being informed and unafraid!”

Basham also reposted a tweet that speculated that Pretti might have been radicalized by the nurse’s union he had joined.  “It’s time we have a talk about the way healthcare orgs and unions including MNA and SEIU are radicalizing their employees and members across Minnesota and have been for several years,” it said. (The tweet has been liked more than 12,000 times.)

Stuckey and Basham were not the only female Christian influencers defending ICE. While others were tweeting about their shock and sadness about Pretti’s death, Anna Lulis, an anti-abortion influencer with 122,000 followers, was posting photos of children who she said had been murdered by illegal immigrants, ostensibly in an effort to show the other side of the story in the toxic empathy equation. Stuckey amplified some of those posts.

In a similar vein, an account called Conservative Momma, with 135,000 followers, tweeted out a photo of a college student who had allegedly been killed by an undocumented immigrant. “To the those wanting to ‘stop ICE,’ you are advocating for more innocent lives to be cruelly taken,” she wrote.

Kristen Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life, tweeted, “This is about the Left, the party that celebrates 1 million abortions a year, wanting to stop Trump from enforcing our immigration laws, creating chaos, and trying to win over the public (despite his very high approval ratings) before this November.”

On Instagram, one creator posted a tongue-in-cheek series of tips titled “Simple Ways I Lower My Risk of Being Shot By ICE.” The list was accompanied by cozy, stylized photos, including “drinking coffee and cuddling with my baby,” “cooking nutrient dense and healthy meals,” and “hanging out with my husband.”

“Such frames advance traditional conservative Christian values that tell women to disengage from political discussion as it’s outside of their realm of authority,” Moran wrote me. Posts like this encourage followers to “interpret emerging news about ICE violence as justified or outside of their responsibility.”

Still, some followers of these influencers seem increasingly skeptical. In replies to some of the pro-ICE posts, followers pushed back. “It’s sad that you just can’t condemn something that was so clearly wrong,” one commenter told Stuckey. “You are a kook if you can’t watch the video and see for yourself he was not brandishing a gun and threatening anyone,” wrote another.

But Stuckey, at least, appears to be undaunted. “I am really glad I have never listened to the naysayers on X who say changing women’s minds on culture and politics is pointless and impossible,” she wrote on X on Saturday. “I have seen their minds change—over and over and over again. To others with me in that fight, keep slugging.”