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State of Play: “Drawdown”
It’s not a great statement on where we are as a country that our best hope for ending the horror show in Minnesota is a notorious anti-immigrant hardliner credibly accused of taking bribes [ [link removed] ]. But it’s better than the alternative.
Tom Homan held a press conference this morning, his first since taking the reins of “Operation Metro Surge” from disgraced Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, and it was something of a Rorschach test. If you wanted to see reasons for optimism, there were plenty:
“I do not want to hear that everything that’s been done here’s been perfect,” Homan said. “What we’ve been working on is making this operation safer, more efficient, by the book. The mission is going to improve because of the changes we’re making internally.” And: “This is common-sense cooperation that allows us to draw down the number of people we have here. Yes, I said it. Draw down the number of people here.”
There were also lots of reasons for concern. “We are not surrendering our mission at all,” he said. And, speaking about people involved in coordinating alleged “attacks” on ICE: “They will be held accountable. Justice is coming.”
It’s probably wise not to take any of this rhetoric at face value. Like any administration being forced into retreat, they want critics to think they’re making changes, and their supporters to think they’re not. Obviously, all that really matters is whether anything changes on the ground. Still, after months of MAGA absolutism, the fact that it’s even open to interpretation is a huge relief.
So is this simple statement from Homan: “I don’t want to see anybody die. Not officers. Not members of the community. And not the targets of our operations.” For my own sanity, that’s one promise I’m going to choose to believe.
What We’re Watching
We spent more time than usual in yesterday’s weekly staff meeting pondering what to cover in today’s taping and how to order it, so for once I’m not entirely guessing. Here’s what we’re looking at for news blocks:
Minnesota
We’ll start with Homan’s news conference, of course, and what it does and doesn’t say about a policy change in Minnesota. But there’s lots more to cover.
Trump is convening a Cabinet meeting shortly, which should provide some grist in the ongoing saga of Kristi Noem vs. Stephen Miller and DHS vs. the White House. These things tend to go on for hours, but we’ll be on the lookout for punchy moments to play on the show. If we don’t get any, we’ll revert to Thom Tillis’s criticisms [ [link removed] ] of both Noem [ [link removed] ] and Miller [ [link removed] ] from this week, because they’re so enjoyable.
Reuters reported [ [link removed] ] this morning that ICE officers are now being told not to interact with protestors. Stunning that they’re only getting that guidance now. We also got a scathing new ruling [ [link removed] ] on Wednesday evening from Minnesota’s chief federal judge, excoriating ICE for violating nearly 100 court orders since the start of the month. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” he wrote.
There’s also the disturbing attack [ [link removed] ] on Ilhan Omar, Trump’s callous reaction to it, and his threat [ [link removed] ] to Mayor Jacob Frey about enforcing federal immigration law.
This may feel a touch old by the time the episode airs on Friday, but Stella Carlson, the bystander who filmed Alex Pretti’s death, gave an extraordinary interview [ [link removed] ] to Anderson Cooper that made all of us go teary. I’m going to advocate for playing some of it.
More polling is trickling in, and the numbers are grim for the administration. In a new YouGov poll [ [link removed] ], 55 percent say that Pretti’s killing wasn’t justified and just 18 percent say it was. Seventy-eight percent say the officers who shot Pretti should be investigated.
Congress and the Funding Fight
We’ll segue from there into Senate Democrats’ plan for extracting concessions on ICE, and the partial government shutdown that now seems … a little less certain than it did last night.
The White House is reportedly increasingly inclined [ [link removed] ] to agree to Democrats’ demands that funding for DHS [ [link removed] ] be broken out from the larger spending package. The shutdown deadline is midnight tomorrow. Lots of uncertainty remains about details.
Democrats want [ [link removed] ] a whole raft of reforms to ICE procedure: tighter rules on warrants, an enforceable code of conduct, a ban on masking, and requiring body cameras to be running.
There has been some talk that Republicans think they can get Democrats to vote for the funding bill in exchange for a promise of a standalone vote on a reform package sometime soon. But as Amy Klobuchar told Jon [ [link removed] ] yesterday, the standalone would have to pass first, and the House isn’t even in session.
Klobuchar also made the point that, reforms aside, the actual funding level for ICE is too high, given the huge payday they already got [ [link removed] ] in the Big Big Beautiful bill. So despite reports of progress in talks late Wednesday, it’s not clear, from the outside, that there’s an easy way out of this jam.
FBI Search in Georgia
There’s still so much attention on Minnesota that it was easy to miss that the FBI served a search warrant [ [link removed] ] at the main elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, apparently looking for records relating to the 2020 election.
Ranting about his election gripes in Davos last week, Trump promised [ [link removed] ] that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did. That’s probably breaking news.” DOJ had already launched a civil suit against Fulton County, seeking access to records.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was onsite as the raid was happening. Not normal. Ed Martin, Trump’s roving enforcer at DOJ, posted a triumphant selfie [ [link removed] ] with crackpot loyalist Sidney Powell this morning. We’ll get into what this could all mean, and how dangerous the precedent it sets could be.
In a kind of companion development, Trump named his pick [ [link removed] ] for “fraud czar,” a new Assistant Attorney General position that seems designed to act as a sort of Grand Inquisitor into states and cities [ [link removed] ] run by Trump opponents.
Dessert: Melania on The Five
Lastly, we’ll cover the highlights from Melania Trump’s appearance on The Five to promote her movie, which Amazon paid tens of millions [ [link removed] ] for the privilege of distributing to mostly empty theaters.
Special Preview: OnlyFriends
If you’re already a paid subscriber then hopefully you saw that today we’re out with the very first episode of Pod Save America: OnlyFriends (you can praise/blame Lovett for the name), a biweekly show just for Friends of the Pod that. digs into the news of the day and chases tangents that won’t make it into the regular show. Going forward it’ll be a rotating cast of PSA hosts, but for this inaugural episode we had all four. You’ll hear a sample of it at the end of tomorrow’s show. (But why wait? Subscribing here on Substack will get you access!)
Open Tabs
My browser windows are always littered with articles I keep meaning to finish, or, in some cases, start. Here are this week’s top three:...

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