On January 27, 2026, the Trump/Vance administration announced that Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino would be leaving Minneapolis – and be replaced by border adviser Tom Homan – and that they would be scaling down the surge of federal agents to the city.

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Although President Trump tried to frame this as a victory – – “The Twin Cities of Minnesota in general are and will continue to be much safer for the communities here because of what we have accomplished under President Trump’s leadership,” Mr. Homan said – – it was really the closest thing we have seen yet to Donald Trump admitting a massive misstep. In truth, the heavy-handed immigration operation that had been playing out in Minneapolis – which included the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens – encapsulated a misguided, stomach-turning deportation approach that had become politically toxic. Weeks later, on March 5th, the admission was complete when President Trump fired Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security.

 

So, what circumstances led to this extraordinary shift? Let’s review.

 

From practically the beginning of the Trump/Vance administration, American cities have been crawling with federal agents – working under muddled lines of authority – who shackle people without due process and force them, citizen or not, into unmarked SUVs. These federal agents – who are often dressed in everyday clothes and rarely show any identification – wear masks and grab people they determine look “illegal,” which is blatant ethnic profiling that has, astonishingly enough, been temporarily permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court when they ruled that appearance, location and workplace can be factors used to identify suspected illegal migrants.

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< In May 2025, Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued guidance saying agents could enter homes having only an administrative warrant, with no need for a judicial one. By January 2026, ICE was telling agents that they have even broader power to arrest people without a warrant. Essentially, low-level ICE agents can now execute sweeps rounding up people they suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than carrying out targeted enforcement operations in which they, with a warrant, set out to arrest a specific person(s). >

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People with every shade of brown skin are terrified – even if they are American citizens – as Latinos are increasingly under siege. Families are afraid to go to the grocery store and even church. Parents stay home from work. Kids stay home from school. If kids do go to school, parents ask family friends who have white skin to pick them up.

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With good reason. Between inauguration day and October 2025, the Trump/Vance administration had already arrested around 3,800 migrant children, at least 20 of whom were babies, who were promptly separated from their families, including one 4-year-old boy with late-stage cancer who was born in the United States and one 5-year-old boy in a blue knit bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack – whose dejected and hopeless expression will (and should) be forever seared in the hearts and minds of Americans.

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The number of people of all ages being detained had nearly doubled by December, to an all-time high of over 68,000. These people are being held in facilities that reportedly have unsanitary and at times unsafe conditions, including rotting food, broken showers and toilets, and limited access to medical care and other essential services.

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A New York Times investigation released in March 2026 found that “pregnant women who have been swept up in President Trump’s immigration crackdown have been held in detention centers as late as eight months into their pregnancies without adequate food or medical care… In those cases, the Department of Homeland Security violated longstanding agency guidelines for how to treat pregnant women in detention, subjecting them to conditions that medical experts say can jeopardize the health of mothers and their babies. Pregnant women said they were served food covered in cockroaches and water that tasted like bleach. They described how ICE agents shackled their hands and feet, refusing to believe that they were pregnant until a bump appeared. One woman said ICE agents ignored her as she lay on the floor screaming in pain and took her to the emergency room only after her fellow inmates began banging on the door for help. In five cases identified by The Times, ICE agents cuffed a pregnant woman’s hands and ankles, even after learning about their pregnancies, according to the women, their lawyers, their family members and legal briefs. Two said the agents wrapped chains around their bellies, refusing to remove them even after one woman began bleeding on the airplane bound for a detention center.”

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Djeniffer Benvinda Semedo, who was 22 years old and around six months pregnant, “spent three days in a holding cell with no beds at an ICE office in Burlington, Massachusetts. At 2 a.m. on her third night in the facility, Ms. Semedo felt abdominal pain so intense that she started screaming and crying on the holding room floor... The ICE agents, she said, ‘were sitting right there, watching TV’ for about 10 minutes before they came to check on her. When an officer eventually appeared, she said, he surveyed the room and asked, 'Which one of you needs help?’ ‘He could see me. I was literally lying down on the floor in front of him,’ said Ms. Semedo. ‘It was just terrifying.’”

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At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, more than the number in President Biden’s entire four-year term. In one case, a fellow detainee says he witnessed 55-year-old Cuban immigrant Geraldo Lunas Campos being choked to death by ICE guards on January 3, 2026 at Camp East Montana, a massive makeshift tent encampment on the Mexican border where detainees have reported sketchy conditions and physical abuse (in September 2025, ICE inspectors found that the tent facility was violating at least sixty federal standards for immigrant detention, including failing to properly monitor and treat detainee’s medical conditions; lacking basic procedures for keeping guards and detainees safe; and failing to provide a way for many detainees to contact their attorneys, inquire about their cases, or file complaints).

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In an announcement, ICE said that staff observed Geraldo Lunas Campos “in distress” but gave no cause of death. When pressed for details, then assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said that Mr. Campos died after attempting to take his own life: “Campos violently resisted the security staff and continued to attempt to take his life. During the ensuing struggle, Campos stopped breathing and lost consciousness. Medical staff was immediately called and responded. After repeated attempts to resuscitate him, EMTs declared him deceased on the scene.”​ Unfortunately for Ms. McLaughlin, the El Paso County Office of the Medical Examiner disagreed: “Based on the investigative and examination findings, it is my opinion that the cause of death is asphyxia due to neck and torso compression,” Adam C. Gonzalez, deputy medical examiner for El Paso County, said in the report. “The manner of death is homicide.”

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Meanwhile, the United States is deporting people to repressive regimes, even if they have no ties to the country. This includes El Salvadore’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) – even though Amnesty International has made it clear that the facility “faces critical levels of overcrowding, reaching a 300 percent occupancy rate, equivalent to more than 100,000 inmates… Many detainees report being subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, including restrictions on food, water and access to sanitary facilities, lack of adequate medical care, and excessive use of force by prison guards.”​ 

 

In February 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that fifteen migrants the Trump/Vance administration deported to Cameroon were being held in a secret detention facility under prison-like conditions, according to attorneys for some of the deportees.​ < Being in America illegally is a civil offense under U.S. law, and not punishable by imprisonment. Also under U.S. law, migrants considered to be in danger of persecution in their home countries can only be sent to a third country if an immigration court issues a special order authorizing the move. One of the attorneys for the detainees claims a U.S. court had previously barred the government from sending the migrants to their home countries, but the government did not give them the required opportunity to contest deportation to Cameroon. >

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A February 2026 analysis by the news agency Reuters found that, since inauguration day, immigrant detainees had filed over 20,200 federal lawsuits demanding their release. In at least 4,421 cases, more than 400 federal judges determined U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was holding people illegally as it carried out its mass-deportation campaign. < Other cases were still pending; had been dismissed because the detainee was released; or were transferred to another district, which requires the immigrants to file a new case. >

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Although hundreds of U.S. judges have ruled over 4,400 times that the Trump/Vance administration is unlawfully detaining immigrants, the administration continues to jail people indefinitely – prompting the chief federal judge in Minnesota Patrick Schiltz to say on February 26th “one way or another, ICE will comply with this court’s orders... The court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt – again and again and again – to force the United States government to comply with court orders.” < Judge Schiltz identified 210 orders issued in 143 cases in Minnesota in which he claimed ICE had not complied with court orders. >

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Aggressive and at times violent videos circulating on social media are shocking – women being pulled kicking and screaming from their cars; children being taken from day care centers and their schools without a parent present; an apartment complex in Chicago being raided as helicopters hover overhead and U.S.-born children in their pajamas are zip tied and led hysterically crying into the street; an American couple and their baby leaving a Sam’s Club as a passing dark SUV of federal immigration agents spray pepper spray into their car, hitting the 1-year-old baby squarely in the face (video shot before, during and after this episode was released by the family).

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This last example is not an isolated incident. Immigration officers are using chemical irritants in ways that grossly violates U.S. policing norms, testing the boundaries of use-of-force laws. In Chicago, for instance, ICE agents shot pepper balls directly into multiple protests (which were, by almost all accounts, peaceful), including one outside an ICE facility where Reverand David Black – a man of the cloth who was there offering to pray with people – was shot in the head with one.

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In addition to spraying babies in the face with them and hitting pastors in the head with them, federal officers have thrown chemical agents out of vehicles and onto city streets – creating a hazard for motorists – and have thrown tear-gas canisters near stores and schools, exposing children, pregnant women and the elderly to the toxic fumes.

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A Minneapolis couple recounts that, while they were driving home from their son’s basketball game, ICE agents deployed tear gas and stun grenades around them and their six children – ages eleven years to six months – after they found themselves caught in a conflict between protesters and federal agents. One of the blasts shook the vehicle to the point that the airbags deployed.​ The mother, Destiny Jackson, told The New York Times that, “My baby was completely unconscious, not breathing.” Emergency services gave her instructions over the phone on how to perform CPR, while bystanders soaked the other children with milk to help neutralize the tear gas. The Jackson family was then treated by emergency medical services, who took the parents and three of the children to the hospital.

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This got so out of control that residents of an apartment complex in Portland – who live within 100 feet of an ICE office – are suing the Trump/Vance administration, claiming they knowingly and recklessly released poison gas into the homes of American citizens. The chemicals – which soak into carpets, clothes, furniture, walls and children’s toys – create a toxic environment, they say, posing a serious threat to their health.​ One of the plaintiffs, Mindy King, says that she and her 13-year-old son have had to wear gas masks in their home and her neighbor, Diane Moreno, has been forced to go twice to urgent care with tightness in her chest and bloody discharge from her nose.

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All of this was unsurprisingly upsetting lots of people so, naturally, here came the lies. On CBS’s Face the Nation on January 18, 2026, former DHS head Kristi Noem denied her department had used pepper spray after a federal judge issued an order not to use it, or any other “crowd dispersal tools,” at protests: “That federal order was a little ridiculous,” she said, “because that federal judge came down and told us we couldn’t do what we already aren’t doing.”​ Unfortunately for Ms. Noem, she was then confronted with a video that showed ICE deploying chemical agents. What she had meant to say, she revised, is that protesters were to blame for ICE’ use of force, and federal officers “only use those chemical agents when there’s violence happening and perpetuating.”

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Far from being embarrassed and/or horrified by anyone seeing or hearing these thing – or even when they are caught red-handed in a lie, which is happening more and more – the Trump/Vance administration seems to relish in it, still gleefully broadcasting raids on social media and sending in-house video producers on raids with ICE agents to capture every nasty second of them. With these guys, fear and cruelty seem to be the entire point… well over a year into this.

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As The Economist so perfectly predicted in January 2025, the Trump/Vance administration is focusing “on theatrical cruelty as a substitute for real action. Expect workplace raids with camera crews in tow, harsh internment in border states and ICE agents surging in sanctuary cities… the point is partly to deter would-be migrants. It is also to persuade voters that the government is serious.” Then they nailed their conclusion: “Cruelty for its own sake is wrong. By denying migrants’ humanity, it coarsens American values.”

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What makes all this chaos so much worse is that – despite all the cruelty and terror and egregious erosion of rights – we are making our overall situation worse, not better.

 

We are surrendering the moral high ground and sacrificing our global reputation…. for what?

 

Without question, far, far fewer people are entering the country. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in February 2026 there were 26,963 total encounters nationwide and 6,603 U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border. From January 21st through the end of November, CBP says there were 117,105 total enforcement encounters along the southwest border.​ 

 

< This “encounters” thing can be confusing and counterintuitive. A lower “encounters” number is generally considered a positive outcome by government officials because ostensibly fewer people are trying to cross the border, suggesting successful enforcement and more secure borders. >

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How do these numbers along the southwest border compare to years past? The average annual number of encounters down there during Bill Clinton’s eight years in office was 1,379,558; the average annual number during George W. Bush’s eight years as president was 1,002,111; and the average annual number during Donald Trump’s first four years as president was 488,163. It may surprise Republicans to learn that the lowest average annual number of encounters at the southwest border over the past three decades was 413,377 during Barak Obama’s eight-year presidency.

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Then came President Joe Biden, who allowed our southern border to descend into total disarray. Illegal crossings at the southwest border skyrocketed during Biden’s presidency – to the highest level they had been in over 60 years.

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In FY2021, CBP encountered 1,734,686 migrants at the southwest land border, and in FY2022, that number jumped to 2,378,944. In FY2023, the total number of encounters down there was 2,475,669 (in December 2023, encounters hit the highest monthly total ever recorded, reaching 301,981. Arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico also reached a record high, hitting 249,785. That was a 31 percent increase from November). In FY2024, the total number of encounters at the southwest land border was 2,135,005.

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So, the fact that there were only 117,105 total encounters along the southwest border during the first ten months of the Trump/Vance administration obviously represents a dramatic shift.

 

But at what cost?

 

Let’s break this question down into three things: the actual cost, the cost to our economy, and the moral cost to society.

 

The Actual Cost

 

Back in 2019 – during Donald Trump’s first term when the average annual number of encounters at the southwest border was 488,163 – Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were already struggling to keep up.

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In its Enforcement and Removal Operations report, ICE reported its operations were “significantly impacted” by the “high volume of migration, including unprecedented numbers of family unit and Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) arrivals.” This, the report said, “stretched both Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) resources and those of the entire U.S. government to the breaking point and created a severe humanitarian crisis and border security crisis that continues to cripple the immigration system.”

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So, naturally, the kneejerk reaction in Washington was – not to come up with a common-sense, long term comprehensive strategy – but to just throw tons more money at the problem. GET PEOPLE OUT AT ANY COST!

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Before the One Big Beautiful Bill, the Department of Homeland Security’s annual budget for FY2024 was $103.2 billion, with $41 billion going to immigration. After the Republicans’ passed their monster legislation, the budget for border and interior enforcement increased to over $170 billion over four years – more than the annual budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined.

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We're sorry to report that this massive influx of money is still not enough to carry out the Trump/Vance administration’s immigration deportation delusion. As a result, budgets for real national security threats have been slashed and thousands of federal agents have been redirected from investigating cybercrimes, drug smuggling, sexual exploitation and organized crime to immigration enforcement.

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Almost 1,000 employees of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) were fired; election security programs have been dismantled; and funding for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center – a core cyber threat sharing service that improves the overall cyber-security posture of state, local, tribal, and territorial government organizations through coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and increased communication – has been decimated.

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Federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations; the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF); the U.S. Marshals Service; the FBI; and even the Postal Service have been pulled from their traditional duties and enlisted to help find, arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. This is no small thing since the ATF only had 2,572 special agents in the first place.​ Almost a quarter of the roughly 13,000 FBI agents across the country have been reassigned to immigration enforcement, with the number reaching over 40 percent in the nation’s largest field offices… and this number doesn’t even reflect the agents that get pulled in less than full-time.

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The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University reports that federal referrals for prosecution are decreasing across agencies. Between May and June 2025 alone, the DEA referred 10 percent fewer cases; the U.S. Marshals Service 13 percent fewer; and the ATF 14 percent less.

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Based on internal DHS documents The New York Times received after the paper filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, “Homeland Security investigators worked approximately 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February through April compared to their average in prior years.” They reported this disturbing example:

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“Earlier this year, special agents at Homeland Security Investigations found online videos showing violent sexual abuse of an unidentified young child. Trained to hunt down pedophiles who use the internet to distribute illegal imagery, the H.S.I. agents spent weeks analyzing the footage to try to identify the child and infiltrate the online networks that had shared and may have directed the abuse, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation... But the agents working the case have since been asked to go out in the field and help arrest undocumented immigrants. The reassignment has hindered progress toward identifying and rescuing the child, said this person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation. The person said that the agents, no longer able to spend as much time undercover online, had lost contact with a key source they had cultivated over years in the online world of abusers.”

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The report continued: “(Homeland Security Investigators) that investigate sex crimes against children in cities including Newark and Los Angeles have had significant numbers of special agents dragooned into immigration work, according to people with knowledge of the changes. At one point, an entire unit of roughly 5 people investigating child exploitation in Los Angeles was working immigration duty, with agents trying to advance their cases on nights and weekends, one of those people said.”

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The New York Times also reported that one of the cases that had been put on the back burner is “a national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear.”

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The Wall Street Journal too reported on agents being redirected: “Child-exploitation cases are among those affected. Several current and former agents said investigations that require subpoenas, warrants or grand-jury testimony have been postponed or canceled outright.”

“Informant networks are also fraying. Building trust with sources inside drug gangs or child-trafficking rackets takes time in the field, investigators say – time they no longer have. In some cases, agents said that it has become more difficult to offer the visas that once kept informants inside the U.S. Some have resorted to asking informants to be extra careful, avoid incidents that could draw attention and to call them if they get caught up in a traffic stop... In Arizona and Texas, highway checkpoints run by CBP have gone unstaffed, including one on Arizona’s State Route 82, a prominent fentanyl trafficking route. Many CBP agents who used to staff them have been redirected to other states to detain migrants far from the border, said one person familiar with the situation. Ports of entry are understaffed. Some border patrol sectors are stretched thin, this person says.”

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The Cost to Our Economy

 

The Trump/Vance administration’s draconian immigration policies are threatening vital U.S. industries, including agriculture; construction; manufacturing; leisure and hospitality; and elder care, childcare and long-term health care – mainly because our economy has become so dependent on immigrant labor. Over the past decade, just under half of all new civilian workers (roughly 6 million) have been immigrants, the majority of whom entered the U.S. legally.

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By the end of 2025, ICE raids, coupled with crippling tariffs, had exacerbated the agriculture labor crisis to a degree that some farms were going under (315 farms filed for bankruptcy in 2025, up 46 percent from the year before). The U.S. agricultural workforce fell by an estimated 155,000 to over 200,000 workers between March and July 2025 alone.

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Farms of all kinds have been raided by agents as they detain and deport agricultural workers. This is a major problem since the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that over 68 percent of hired crop farmworkers are foreign born. In 2020–22, 32 percent of these workers were born in America, 7 percent were immigrants who had obtained U.S. citizenship, 19 percent were other authorized immigrants (i.e., permanent residents or green-card holders), and the remaining 42 percent held no work authorization.​ In California – the largest food producing state with an agricultural economy worth almost $60 billion – over 80 percent of hired farm workers came from Mexico before 2025, and more than half of those held no work authorization.

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Aggressive raids on construction sites have led to substantial delays and major economic disruption, including a significant loss in sales and even more bankruptcies.

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To make matters far worse, immigrants with legal authorization are also being detained, and even workers with valid work permits are forced to wait weeks to see a judge before being released – creating insurmountable fear among all workers. So, they’re not going to work either, bringing the industry to essentially a standstill.

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From Texas cattle ranchers to Nebraska meat packing facilities to corporate giants like Disney, Walmart and Amazon, businesses are scrambling to replace workers after aggressive actions by the Trump/ Vance administration have taken both legal and illegal immigrants out of the work force.

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Companies that operate nursing homes and home care agencies, for example, have lost tons of staff because of the administration’s efforts to halt deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants with temporary legal status. This is another huge problem since 28 percent of the long-term care work force are immigrants.

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Likewise, since many health care specialists who work in rural America come from other countries, the administration’s new rule that companies pay a $100,000 fee to hire an immigrant worker using an H-1B visa has put a significant dent in the rural health care workforce, putting patients who need timely care at risk.

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< The H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to hire workers with specialized training, usually when they cannot find American workers to fill the jobs. The workers from abroad that work in the health care sector fill crucial gaps in underserved regions. Before the change to $100,000, fees had been between $460 and $1,000 for nonprofit health care facilities. >