On the menu today: Would you believe . . . there’s actually some good news coming out of Minneapolis? For the last two nights, anti-ICE protesters have descended upon a hotel, believing that federal agents are staying there and intending to raise a ruckus. Sunday night, federal agents felt the need to respond before the local police could move in. But on Monday night, state and local police reacted quite differently. Read on.
The Minnesota 180 on ICE
Last night brought something that unfortunately seems astonishing in the current moment, namely, local and state police arrested anti-ICE demonstrators once they had broken the law:
Police in Minnesota began arresting anti-ICE agitators outside a hotel Monday after authorities said the demonstration escalated and was “no longer considered peaceful,” prompting officers to declare an unlawful assembly.
The demonstrators were outside the SpringHill Suites by Marriott in Maple Grove, Minnesota, where they believed U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino was staying.
Maple Grove police said officers responded on Monday to reports of a protest at the hotel and that the protest escalated when agitators allegedly began throwing objects at officers and damaging property.
After police declared an unlawful assembly and issued a dispersal order, several people who refused to leave were arrested, authorities said. . . .
“At that point, the activity was no longer considered peaceful. Individuals participating in criminal acts are not protected under the First Amendment and were subject to arrest,” the spokesperson added.
Under Minnesota law, presence at an unlawful assembly is a misdemeanor; the maximum penalties include 90 days in jail and/or up to a $1,000 fine. However, “Judges often will not sentence a person convicted of a misdemeanor to time behind bars unless they have a criminal history.”
Something dramatic has changed up in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Keep in mind, on Sunday night, another clash outside another hotel in the Minneapolis area turned out differently, as federal officers responded before the Minneapolis Police Department could get its officers in place:
According to an MPD spokesperson, officers received reports of a group protesting outside the Hilton Home2 Suites and making noise. An MPD officer inside the building was assigned to keep guests and staff safe while providing real-time updates to the department.
As the crowd became “disorderly,” MPD said it began its plan to move in, de-escalate the situation and make arrests. Personnel on standby were recalled to duty, patrol officers across the city were called in, and the department requested mutual aid from the Minnesota State Patrol, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and several metro area law enforcement agencies.
After forming a plan, MPD and assisting agencies prepared to surround the crowd, issue dispersal orders and make mass arrests. Before they moved in, MPD said federal law enforcement arrived on scene “without notice or communication” and deployed chemical munitions. MPD stated it did not deploy any chemical munitions.
Was Sunday night’s sequence of events a garden-variety matter of local police wanting a plan in place before they engaged a disorderly crowd, less than 48 hours after a controversial shooting? Or was it foot-dragging, aligned with local officials’ opposition to the presence of ICE in their city and state?
The dramatically different turn of events at the SpringHill Suites in Maple Grove Monday night comes after a remarkable day of President Trump taking a similarly different tone and making sudden changes to how the federal government is approaching the enforcement of immigration laws in Minnesota.
Defenders of the administration will contend the Department of Homeland Security did nothing wrong, and certainly nothing in violation of the law, in the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And in unrelated news:
Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, the face of the Trump administration’s campaign to arrest and deport criminal illegal immigrants, will be leaving Minnesota, along with some border agents, amid violent, and sometimes deadly, clashes between federal authorities and anti-ICE agitators.
Bovino and an unspecified number of U.S. Border Patrol agents will be leaving the state as soon as Tuesday, multiple federal sources told Fox News.
The news came the same day that President Donald Trump announced that he would be deploying border czar Tom Homan to take point in Minnesota.
According to one report from The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff, Bovino isn’t just leaving the state; he “has been removed from his role as Border Patrol ‘commander at large’ and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to a DHS official and two people with knowledge of the change.”
Miroff also reported that his sources said, “Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski, who were Bovino’s biggest backers at DHS, are also at risk of losing their jobs.” (I would make a crack about Kristi Noem being sent to live on a farm, but there have already been enough dead dog jokes about her.)
President Trump said of Homan on Truth Social, “Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me.” That suggests that Noem has been cut out of the decision-making process.
Meanwhile, Trump also posted on Truth Social that he had a productive conversation with . . . Minnesota Governor Tim Walz:
Governor Tim Walz called me with the request to work together with respect to Minnesota. It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength. I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I! We have had such tremendous SUCCESS in Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, and virtually every other place that we have “touched” and, even in Minnesota, Crime is way down, but both Governor Walz and I want to make it better!
Trump followed up by reporting he “just had a very good telephone conversation with Mayor Jacob Frey, of Minneapolis. Lots of progress is being made! Tom Homan will be meeting with him tomorrow in order to continue the discussion.”
Frey posted on social media that “the president agreed that the current situation cannot continue. Some federal agents will begin leaving the area tomorrow, and I will continue pushing for the rest involved in this operation to go. Minneapolis will continue to cooperate with state and federal law enforcement on real criminal investigations — but we will not participate in unconstitutional arrests of our neighbors or enforce federal immigration law.”
You may recall administration officials like Noem rushing out of the gate immediately after the shooting to accuse Pretti of being a “domestic terrorist” who was “brandishing” his gun. (Yesterday’s newsletter forgot to mention that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called Pretti an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”)
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt adopted a strikingly different tone when discussing the Pretti shooting and other recent clashes in Minneapolis:
Nobody in the White House, including President Trump, wants to see people getting hurt or killed in America’s streets. This includes Renee Good, Alex Pretti, the brave men and women of federal law enforcement and the many Americans who have been victimized at the hands of illegal alien criminals.
Saturday’s shooting remains under active investigation by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI. The Customs and Border Protection is also conducting their own internal review. As President Trump said yesterday, the administration is reviewing everything with respect to the shooting, and we will let that investigation play out.
Cooler heads, open and clear communication with state and local officials, and calmer statements are all good news. One can’t help but wonder if the sudden responsiveness of state and local police to anti-ICE protests is related to yesterday’s new tone from the administration.
According to the Wall Street Journal, over the weekend Trump grew frustrated with how his top officials handled the aftermath of the shooting:
But Trump worried that his administration’s enforcement activities in Minnesota looked chaotic, not strong, according to people familiar with the matter. His concerns only grew as cable news commentators picked apart comments made by his top immigration officials, with even some of his allies noting on television that their words weren’t supported by the video footage.
“We certainly should not be labeling him as being a domestic terrorist who is going to execute cops. There’s no evidence to support that,” former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), an occasional Trump golf partner, said on Fox News. “I disagree with Secretary Noem’s premature DHS response, which came before all the facts were known and weakened confidence,” Sen. John Curtis (R., Utah) wrote on social media.
“I am appalled at the violence in Minneapolis,” Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) said in a statement on Sunday evening.
As the backlash over federal immigration officials’ tactics in Minnesota grew, some in the administration privately voiced concern, according to people familiar with the matter.
The restoration of immigration enforcement is one of the administration’s top priorities. Tom Homan has been a law-enforcement officer since 1983, and he joined what was then called the “Immigration and Naturalization Service” the following year. His father and grandfather were police officers. As the Washington Post wrote back in 2016, “Thomas Homan deports people. And he’s really good at it”:
He was honored last week with the government’s highest civil service award, bestowed on federal leaders whose work gets “extraordinary” results. According to his bosses at the Department of Homeland Security, not only did Homan successfully handle an unexpected surge of unaccompanied children and families who have streamed here from Central America across the Southwest border, but last year his operations set records for the share of illegal immigrants expelled from the U.S. who had criminal records.
You may not agree with every decision Homan makes — and you may wonder about that “bag of cash” story — but he is a serious professional who has spent nearly his entire adult life enforcing immigration laws, who knows the issue inside and out, and who rarely gets too far out over his skis.
Kristi Noem has spent most of her adult life in elected office, first in the South Dakota House of Representatives, then in the U.S. House of Representatives, and then as governor of her state. Her first role in law enforcement was as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, unless you want to count the “Meth: We’re On It” slogan in the awareness initiative she unveiled as governor. It cost taxpayers nearly $449,000.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication, Texas Senator Ted Cruz has tried to warn President Trump about the effects of his tariffs and the importance of the cost of living on the GOP’s chances in the midterms. Cruz said the president responded with a seven-letter phrase that starts with ‘F’ and ends with ‘U.’
In the column, I mentioned the average point-of-sale price for six grocery items in late December, provided by the global marketing research firm NIQ. Already a reader insists those prices are “flawed” because they paid much more for a different item at their local store recently. It never fails; an astonishing number of people who read news cannot differentiate between “the national average” and “the price they paid at their local store.” (This happens just about every time I mention the national average price for a gallon of gasoline as well.)
As of April 2025, the state with the cheapest Big Mac at McDonalds was Texas, at $4.67. The state with the most expensive Big Mac was Massachusetts, at $6.72. That’s more than a two-dollar difference per burger!
In localities, the difference can be even more stark. In Austin, Texas, a Big Mac cost $4.36; in Seattle, Wash., it cost $7.06! That’s almost a three-dollar difference!
When someone cites a national average price for an item, and it is starkly different from the price you’re paying, they’re not lying to you. It reflects the fact that you live in an area with a different cost of living than the national average, which could reflect taxes, minimum wage laws, distance from where certain goods are produced, access to a port, and a wide variety of other factors.