As Oliver Willis noted earlier today, President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan announced that he will be pulling 700 federal immigration agents from Minnesota, a move that’s being billed as deescalation by the administration and faithfully parroted by the media.
But Homan’s own facts and figures suggest otherwise, painting a picture of a deeply failed operation.
“Over the past two months, more than 3,000 federal immigration agents have descended onto Minneapolis, in what the Trump administration has dubbed Operation Metro Surge,” reported NBC News. “The Department of Homeland Security said agents have arrested about 3,000 undocumented immigrants since the operation began.”
President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan
So let’s do some math.
Over two months, 3,000 federal agents managed to arrest just 3,000 undocumented immigrants. That works out to just roughly 50 arrests per day—a shockingly low number given the high number of Trump’s thugs roaming the city.
We also know that a significant number of those arrests didn’t stick, with judges already releasing detainees, including 5-year-old Liam Conejos Ramos and his father. And do you remember the fiasco when ChongLy Scott Thao was wrongfully arrested?
The numbers are likely even worse than we know.
ICE claims to have roughly 22,000 officers nationwide, while Border Patrol claims to have just over 19,000 agents. That means that around 7% of the entire country’s immigration enforcement capacity was concentrated in Minneapolis—only to produce a pitiful 50 arrests per day.
In the context of Trump’s 1 million annual deportations goal, that pace projects to just about 18,000 deportations annually. That is a terrible return on investment, especially given the public backlash that this operation has generated against Trump and his immigration policies.
As has been noted before, large-scale federal immigration raids are extremely difficult to carry out without cooperation from local law enforcement. Even Trump’s own former officials have acknowledged this reality.
Mark Morgan, who served as Customs and Border Protection acting commissioner during Trump’s first term, was blunt about the limits of federal power, saying that Trump’s mass deportation plan is “not going to be successful, as long as we have sanctuary cities and states that refuse to allow local and state police departments to work with ICE.”
A cartoon by Clay Bennett.
But Trump is getting that local help in places like Florida—to the state’s economic and political detriment—generating backlash that recently propelled Democrats to the Miami mayorship for the first time in nearly 30 years.
But in places like Minnesota, where local authorities refuse to cooperate, the Trump administration is squandering massive resources for a pitiful return.
Pulling out a few hundred agents doesn’t change the reality that more than 2,000 remain and have little to show for it. And Minnesota doesn’t even have a particularly large immigrant population, which makes the point unmistakable.
This was never about immigration; it was a stunt. And now, faced with the numbers and the backlash, Trump is trying to save face after an operation that failed miserably.
