President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said Wednesday that 700 immigration and border agents are departing the Minneapolis area after weeks of violent confrontations and fatal shootings by officers of two U.S. citizens.
Homan said the departing group includes agents and officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Custom and Border Protection. The withdrawal decreases the federal footprint from about 3,000 agents to 2,300 — a significant scaling back but still much higher than the 80 who were in the Minneapolis area before Operation Metro Surge began Dec. 1, according to court records. The reduction in officers is effective immediately, he said.
About 190 officers are in ICE’s St. Paul field office overall, which spans five states, according to the agency’s filings in a lawsuit filed by Minnesota officials that sought to curtail the operation.
Homan said a number of law enforcement agencies in Minnesota had expressed interest in allowing ICE to arrest immigrants for deportation inside jails, after they had already been arrested for a crime. Though the state and several counties already offer that cooperation, Trump officials had said they decided to raid the Minneapolis area because it did not. The operation is the Trump administration’s largest immigration crackdown yet.
“My goal with the support of President Trump is to achieve a complete drawdown and end this surge as soon as we can,” he said.
Homan also said the Trump administration would plan to make body-worn cameras available nationwide, and immediately in the Minneapolis area, saying the failure to use them had been “unacceptable.”
Homan did not acknowledge that the Department of Homeland Security had proposed gutting the ICE body-camera program this fiscal year, or that a Trump administration official said it had opposed making cameras mandatory in the DHS budget that passed the House last month.
The withdrawal comes a day after an emotional forum on Capitol Hill on the use of force by federal agents involved in Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The forum included testimony from the brothers of Renée Good, who was shot and killed on Jan. 7 allegedly by an ICE officer. On Jan. 24, ICU nurse Alex Pretti was fatally shot by a Border Patrol agent and a CBP officer.
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