Trump Does a Soft TACO as Republicans, NRA and Law Enforcement Officers Oppose ICE Thuggery. A Gambit or a Real Climbdown?

One big upside of the smartphone era is that it has become impossible for authorities to tell egregious lies about heavily videoed events and retain any semblance of credibility. The Trump Administration is struggling to find a foothold in the face of the national backlash over the extensively documented execution of ICE execution of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. We pointed out in comments that even the Wall Street Journal threw its institutional weight against the insulting Team Trump claims that ICE shooting of Alex Pretti was somehow justified:

A fresh story in Axios describes how Republicans are reluctant to strip ICE of funding to avoid a shutdown but feel the need to Do Something about the out-of-control border goons. From The dam is breaking on Republicans questioning Trump’s DHS:

After lockstep unity on immigration for the first year of Trump 2.0, a growing number of Republican lawmakers are calling for investigations and testimony from top Trump officials after the deadly shooting of Alex Pretti.

Why it matters: The dam is breaking, with Republicans more directly questioning the administration — including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — for its handling of the tragedy in Minnesota.

• “I disagree with Noem’s premature DHS response, which came before all the facts were known and weakened confidence,” Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) posted on X on Monday.

…

What they’re saying: “I am deeply troubled by the shootings in Minneapolis involving federal agents,” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) posted on Monday.

• “Our Constitution provides citizens protection from the government. We have a right to free speech, to peaceably assemble and to bear arms,” Moran continued.
• “I would encourage the administration to be more measured, to recognize the tragedy, and to say, we don’t want anyone’s lives to be lost,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told reporters.
• “I support a full and transparent investigation into the tragic event in Minneapolis,” Sen. Todd. Young (R-Ind.) said in a statement. “Congress has requested testimony from ICE, CBP, and USCIS leaders in an open hearing, and they should testify soon.”
• This builds on other GOP statements from over the weekend — such as from Sens. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and Reps. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), Michael Baumgartner (R-Wash.), Max Miller(R-Ohio) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas).

What we’re hearing: Many congressional Republicans have been quietly frustrated by the administration’s hasty public response to the shooting, aides tell Axios.

• In an email sent to congressional Republicans on Saturday, obtained by Axios, the DHS communications director wrote that there was an “incident between US Border Patrol officers and an illegal alien with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun,” referring to the killing of Pretti.
• Multiple GOP aides said the message frustrated lawmakers who felt DHS had once again gotten ahead of the facts.

Poll results may also be focusing some minds:

And even though many on Twitter criticized the NRA throat-clearing over the bogus claim that Alex Pretti merely carrying a licensed gun that was quickly and safely removed justified murder by ICE as too weak, even that mild response hit a Republican nerve:

Jessica: It takes a lot to unite the NRA and Greg Abbott against the Trump Administration. The first amendment, the second amendment and fourth amendment have all been violated by the way they are carrying this out. pic.twitter.com/fA3Scwi96g

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 26, 2026

A must-read article by Ken Klippenstein describes at length how law enforcement officers, including many within ICE, are disturbed by the thuggery and lack of professionalism:

I’ve listened to the stories and the beefs of immigration officers….to a person, they all blame the shooter, one of their own…

They paint a picture that is more Police Academy (or even Reno 911!) than a Gestapo on the march…Theirs is also a story of gung-ho 19-year-olds, drunken stakeouts, and senior officers disappearing…

They are also frustrated with the narrative unfolding and the information war…

“As much as I support this administration there needs to be more common sense in situations like this, not a knee jerk damage control narrative that does not line up with the evidence on video,” one Border Patrol agent said …“This individual was shot 8 to 9 times while unarmed.”…

An ICE agent was even more critical. “Yet another ‘justified’ fatal shooting … ten versus one and somehow they couldn’t find a way to subdue the guy or use a less than lethal [means],” the agent said. “They all carry belts and vests with 9,000 pieces of equipment on them and the best they can do is shoot a guy in the back?”…

Sagging morale and declining standards are a constant theme I picked up…

“I can go on and on but overall it’s been a ridiculous experience,” one ICE agent told me. He says that many agents on the ground are just going along with the expanded mission because they are more interested in their away-from-home per diem pay and collecting overtime than whatever the mission is…..

“The brand new agents are idiots,” an experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations told me…

Even one of the new ICE recruits agreed with the experienced agent’s low assessment of the Trump freshman class. “A lot of the guys,” he said, referring to the new ICE recruits he worked alongside, “are honestly pretty sketchy.”

The new ICE officer continued: “I thought federal agents were supposed to be clean cut but some of them pass around a flask as we are watching a suspect,” observing as well that the new guys “have some weird tattoos.”

Those tattoos, I’m told, are symbolic of the fact that the new recruits tend to be more ideologically motivated than those of the past….

It is unclear how these task forces are organized in cities like Minneapolis…but … some agencies (like the FBI) are increasingly no shows in the field, and others are expressing a reluctance to participate in non-immigration missions.

“Last I heard,” says one ICE officer, “FBI didn’t want to help us out much anymore, especially in Minneapolis, due to the bad press.”

However, before you get too excited, the GOP-controlled Judiciary Committee has called on ICE Barbie Kristi Noem to testify…on March 3. This slow-walking suggests that Republican Congresscritters are giving Team Trump time to de-escalate and also get the undisciplined thugs under some measure of control.

Trump is indeed retreating a bit in the face of yet another backfire. From the Financial Times:

Donald Trump has signalled a shift in his administration’s immigration crackdown as the US president seeks to quell the growing furore over the killing of a man by federal agents in Minnesota at the weekend.

The president on Monday said he was deploying border tsar Tom Homan to Minnesota, in a move that was widely seen as a rebuke of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, who has overseen Trump’s aggressive campaign to detain and deport immigrants.

Trump also dialled down his rhetoric about Democratic leaders in Minnesota, saying in a social media post that he had spoken to Tim Walz, the state’s Democratic governor, in a “very good call”….

Trump later posted that he had a “very good telephone conversation” with Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, adding: “Lots of progress is being made!”

Bloomberg also reported that the too-clearly-compensating-for-physical-inadequacy Border Police thug Greg Bovino had been sent packing. From Trump’s Border Enforcer Plans to Leave Minnesota After Backlash:

Greg Bovino, the US Border Patrol commander who became the face of President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, is leaving the city following a mounting public outcry over the killing of two US citizens by federal agents in recent weeks.

Bovino and some Border Patrol agents are expected to begin departing as soon as Tuesday, according to local officials…

The White House said it’s dispatching border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis, where he will report directly to Trump and has been charged with easing tensions.

However, the fact that Bovino is in a forced retreat does not mean he is gone. Later in the same story:

The Atlantic reported on Monday that Bovino had been removed from his role as “commander at large” and was expected to return to his previous CBP position in Southern California. The Department of Homeland Security disputed that report, with Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson, saying in an email that “Bovino has NOT been relieved of his duties.”

Sadly, the Democrats are vanishingly unlikely to press the advantage they now have. The Republicans are keen to avoid a loss of DHS funding or to precipitate a shutdown by standing too firm. That means the Democrats could extract non-funding concessions, such as explicit restrictions on how ICE operates with funding limits set in the event of official non-compliance. Basic changes could have a big ripple effect:

BREAKING: ICE officials are reportedly worried that, if Congress requires ICE agents to unmask and wear identification, 75% of the agents will quit rather than be ostracised for the rest of their lives by family, friends, employers, and society.

— The Halfway Post (@HalfwayPost) January 26, 2026

If this take is correct, it may not be as hard to defang ICE as thought.

However, given Trump’s use of violence, radical uncertainty, and flooding the zone as preferred tactics, there is no reason to think that he has learned any real lessons from his Hitler-esque jackbootery not working according to plan. Trump is also fabulously duplicitous, witness him pretending to negotiate with Iran as Israel made the attacks that started the 12 Day War. Finally, he has an off-the-charts need to dominate, which results in his stepping back when he finally encounters forces he cannot overwhelm, only to have at it again, as we can see with his trade war with China. Even though Xi showed decisively that China has escalation dominance merely with rare earths and has vastly more serious ammo in reserve (such as pharmaceuticals), Trump keeps poking at China and reneging on interim understandings.

A key measure that could prove Trump’s commitment to a real course correction in his immigration policy would be personnel changes, above all the exit of Greg Bovino and the utterly vile Kristi Noem.

It may seem like a small episode in the scheme of things, but it shows how easily and pathologically Kristi Noem lies.

She completely fabricated a meeting with Kim Jong Un, which she put in her book to boast that she stared him down. She never met him, but refused to admit it: pic.twitter.com/rS2ZULBmkT

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 26, 2026

Financial Times columnist and former speechwriter to Larry Summers Ed Luce argues that the best hope for Team Dem is Trump’s remarkable gift for self-sabotage:

Following Good’s slaughter, JD Vance, the vice-president, declared that ICE and border patrol agents had “absolute immunity”. Vance and his colleagues are ploughing through the US constitution at speed. Each of its key amendments — the first on free speech, the second on gun rights, the fourth on protection from warrantless searches — turns out to be optional, depending on whether it is convenient. A competent wannabe autocrat would be covering his actions in the patina of legality, pitching scholars against scholars. Trump, by contrast, is uniting scholars and ignoramuses against him.

In so doing, he is stirring the public out of an apathy that is essential to any power grab. Someone once remarked that Trump’s incompetence outruns his malevolence….

The legitimate fear is that Trump will rig the US midterm elections this November to stop a widely forecast Republican defeat. But he is robbing himself of the means to get away with it. The meta-tool available to him is public gullibility. Enough people must be willing to believe that ballot boxes are being stuffed, or illegal immigrants are being bussed to the polling booths, for any shenanigans to work. The hollow people working for him are wrecking that tool with easily discredited propaganda.

That, in turn, threatens to neutralise Trump’s on-the-ground muscle. ICE and Border Patrol are the obvious federal crack troops to respond to viral stories about “illegals” swamping polling booths. The US public is now deeply familiar with masked men poking guns in the faces of unmasked civilians. “We are the storm,” said Miller at the funeral of the murdered Maga broadcaster Charlie Kirk last September. “Our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve . . . You are nothing. You are wickedness.” That indeed was a scary threat from Miller. But it was super-unwise. A competent autocrat would be stoking the country’s desire to be protected from the “enemy within”. Instead, Americans increasingly fear their alleged protectors.

Luce does point out: “It is possible that actual Democrats will miss the open goal that Trump has presented to them.” Since he presumably remains well-connected to insiders, his scenario of “rigging the elections” shows a lack of imagination as to how far Trump might go to prevent the Republicans losing the House, which he knows would mean yet another impeachment process, and perhaps even the Senate. We are hardly alone in speculating that Trump would find a way to cancel elections. We have said in comments even before the Trump pullback that trying to deploy the military would not work now. Not only would the courts (even this Supreme Court) be unlikely to back that on the present fact set, but the armed forces would similarly not be willing to fire on Americans given the current givens. If he tried to instigate a deployment over court orders, a variant of the Nixon Saturday Night massacre, where a series of DoJ officials refused to comply with his orders, is within the realm of possibility. If anything, Trump could even trigger a military coup against him, either soft form by refusing his orders (as they did at end of his first term when they rejected his instruction to pull out of Afghanistan) or something more visible.

Trump, even more so than most, is a prisoner of his deeply flawed character. Like the scorpion in the fable of the scorpion and the frog, it’s in his nature to keep pressing for what he thinks is a win, no matter how much evidence accumulates that he is rapidly making his situation worse. But sadly, with less apparent venom than the fabled scorpion, the Democrats are also captives of their self-destructive tendencies, above all to compromise with bad actors out of misguided self-preservation reflexes rather than take even a modest risk to do the right thing.

Update 7:45 AM: G. Elliott Morris’ latest post dropped after ours launched. Key sections from The ICE shootings are a tipping point:

Note: I wrote this article the morning of Monday, Jan. 26, before news broke that Greg Bovino is being fired as “commander at large” of U.S. border control (the White House disputes the reporting), and that Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski could be next. Bovino’s ouster is further evidence that the politics of immigration enforcement are deteriorating quickly for the Trump administration, and that the backlash I describe below is now driving consequences inside the White House. I’m not saying that this is proof of the tipping point…but if we had hit a tipping point, these are the consequences we’d probably see….

I. The numbers are moving against Trump fast

First, consider the trajectory in Donald Trump’s overall approval rating. His net rating — the difference between the percent of Americans who approve of his presidency and the percent who disapprove — is -17.5 in the FiftyPlusOne.news aggregate, a record low for his second term. But the more telling story is what’s happening on immigration specifically. And his approval percentage also hit a new low this week, at 39.2% of all adults….

And, for what it’s worth, the averages may be underestimating Trump’s recent decline on immigration. Other surveys have shown even steeper drops for the president: a New York Times/Siena University poll last week found Trump at -18 on the issue. A NYT poll from last Sept. had Trump at “just” -6, so the Times is clocking a 12-point drop in four months (compared to ~5 points in the average)…..

The way I have been thinking about this is that by pushing extreme enforcement measures that are now resulting in the deaths of innocent American citizens, Trump has changed the images people attach to the word “immigration” in their heads. When “immigration” doesn’t mean “pictures of migrants under an overpass in south Texas” but “ICE officer killing a woman in her car and calling her a ‘fucking bitch’” or “regular guy being shot 10 times in the back after being tackled to the ground and disarmed”, that’s going to change how people view the issue.

As I wrote last April, opinions change when voters get new information about an issue. The information that has been saturating U.S. political news in the last month is violence against citizens that is a direct result of the president’s policies….

II. This is a tipping point

It is not normal for the public to move 50 points on an issue in just a little over a year.

Please read his important and well-documented argument here.