Subject: Re: Minnesota 1, Spankee 0
As suggested before, God Trump only cares about his polling with MAGA.

He cares about the GOP winning the House in the midterms. He's also incredibly attuned to how his administration is doing on TV, and he's acutely aware that this is not a good look for him on TV. The fact that even 27% of MAGA thinks ICE went too far is a flashing, blaring, enormous red light for him. The fact that even the Fox News shows he loves to watch, and the conservative TV talking heads he uses as a barometer to see how his policies are playing, were all critical of what's been happening in MN despite being generally predisposed to his immigration agenda? Another major red light. No one was happy with the optics coming out of these "surges." Which is why Noem and Lewandowski were demoted in favor of Homan in Minnesota.

Homan continues to threaten violence in Minneapolis, and elsewhere.

Of course they're not going to stop the deportations. This is a choice between tactics.

ICE has about 20K plus agents. Typically, they're spread around the country. These "surges" were a decision to take a whole bunch of those agents and concentrate them in one particular area. They took more than 2K agents and sent them to Minnesota - about 10% of ICE's resources in a state with less than 2% of the US population. Plus some large number of border patrol agents. This doesn't necessarily increase the overall number of deportations - it just makes ICE's activities super-visible.

But it also created problems. Having very high-visibility operations means your supporters get to see how hard you're working on this issue. But it also means that your operations are more easily targeted by protestors - who also get a lot of visibility. Putting 10% of your agents, and therefore 10% of your detentions, into a single state also put massive disproportionate strain on the rest of the system - your detention facilities, immigration judges, regular federal judges, and your DOJ lawyers. Since those systems weren't "surged" up to be proportional to the surge in detentions in that area, those systems started to fall apart. Bad TV coverage ensued.

Homan's certainly not going to stop the deportations and violence. He's an immigration hardliner too. But we might see the end of the tactic of surging all of it into a narrow geographic area, like a single city, rather than just having it spread somewhat evenly around the country.