Backlash Forces Shift in Minneapolis Immigration Operation (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The Trump administration is changing who's in charge of the ongoing immigration crackdown. So is this a sign that the president is backing down? Today, Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino, he's seen here in this archived video throwing a gas canister at protesters last week, he's going to be leaving town. He's expected to take some of the 3,000 federal agents in the city along with him. The White House says borders are Tom Homan will take over the operation. For protesters on the ground, Bovino's exit is only a first step.

[00:00:32] Speaker 2: Good riddance. Couldn't have came sooner. And but I mean, that doesn't mean everything stops, right? We can't take back what happened before, but we're still living in trauma from Renee and countless other people, right? But now we have this, that he came to our community and caused all this damage. It doesn't just go away because he leaves and then who comes next and what happens next?

[00:00:54] Speaker 1: Joining me now in the group chat, Alex Thompson, CNN political analyst and national political reporter at Axios, Audrey Falberg, National Review politics reporter, and Chuck Rocha, Democratic strategist and former senior advisor to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns. Alex, can I start with you? Because we got some signals from the White House. The president said he had a conversation with Governor Walz, I believe that there's some dialogue there. But what do you think made the administration finally rethink how it was talking about the death of Alex Pretty and the ICE tactics overall?

[00:01:33] Speaker 3: Well, because for the first time in probably at least a decade, the politics of immigration are no longer on Trump's side. He always felt that this was the strongest issue and every poll showed that was the case. With the increase, and this is not just about Alex Pretty. This is about increasingly over the over the course of the last year, voters have increasingly soured on the way that Trump has done immigration enforcement. Right. We have some polling about this.

[00:01:53] Speaker 1: The New York Times, CNN poll, how ICE is handling its job. The number I always look at, independent, 70% disapprove. And this was January 12th. So this was even before the second shooting.

[00:02:06] Speaker 3: And they know that. And they sense it. And so Trump is now frantically. You also have a looming government shutdown that will happen, or at least partial government shutdown that could happen as soon as this weekend, unless they can pass some of the DHS bills. And you need Democratic votes to do that. So the Trump administration is now trying to do all these things via executive actions to try to placate some Democrats. But Democrats so far have said they're not going to go along with it.

[00:02:28] Speaker 1: Now, it's in the Wall Street Journal editorial board. You had seen other people sort of come out and say, hey, I think this is backfiring. Is the president hearing it? But the thing that stuck out to me was Chris Medel. He's a former candidate for Minnesota governor. I say former because he has just decided to drop out from the race. And to give people some context, this is the guy who apparently was a lawyer representing the ICE agent who shot Renee Good. So think about that. Very high profile. And he thought he was going to then run for office. Instead, he released this statement on Monday.

[00:03:02] Speaker 4: I support the beginning of Operation Metro Surge, the idea of getting rid of the worst of the worst. And they did some of that. But it has gone so far beyond that goal that it just got to a point where I just literally cannot support that. I can't look my daughters in the eye and say, yeah, I'm doing the right thing by continuing this campaign, by being a member of this effort.

[00:03:24] Speaker 5: There's political ramifications all across the board here, but there's also real life ramifications. The reason what you're seeing from the White House is because you can say a lot about Donald Trump and I disagree with a lot of things with Republicans and what they do, but he is politically astute and he understands when poll numbers start sinking around an issue that's very direct. And this is, to Alex's point, if you looked at those independent numbers prior to the election, they were upside down when you asked him if they should be deporting criminals or people that were doing bad things. 70% of independents would have been for that. But to Alex's point, it's the way that they've implemented that. We're not talking about the border being closed. We're not talking about actually bad people that's been deported. We're talking about what we're seeing in the street with American citizens dying and that's his problem.

[00:04:02] Speaker 6: But I think this is also putting into stark relief for the very real and long existing tensions within the administration about how this deportation strategy is taking place. So we have people like Noam Koryliewandowski, Stephen Miller, who want deportations up as much as possible for their own sake. Then we have people like Tom Homan, who is seen by Republicans as more of the adult in the room. You know, he's controversial among Democrats, of course. We heard folks at Fox repeatedly saying, you know who you should send in?

[00:04:28] Speaker 1: Tom Homan.

[00:04:29] Speaker 6: And then pretty shortly after, Tom Homan was going in. Proof that the president definitely watches a lot of Fox News, but he is a proponent of more of this worse first kind of focusing on illegal criminal aliens, excuse me, illegal aliens with a criminal background. But I think another thing, there's a tragic fatal shooting in and of itself, and there's the administration's response to it. And Noam and Stephen Miller accusing Pretty of domestic terrorism was obviously not the right course here.

[00:04:55] Speaker 3: Well, you saw this last weekend, it was the Stephen Miller, Kristi Noam response to this because that is how they responded to every controversy over the last year. And what's so striking is that this is the administration overruling in some ways Kristi Noam and Stephen Miller, which they have not done so far this term.

[00:05:12] Speaker 1: And I heard that there was a meeting with Noam and Trump at the White House, but not Miller.

[00:05:18] Speaker 3: I'm not sure. I'm sure he was somewhat involved. I know that those two were in the meeting.

[00:05:23] Speaker 1: President Trump says he and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are, quote, on the same wavelength after a call on Monday. They spoke for the first time since federal immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. Walz says he told Trump he needs to reduce the number of federal agents in his state, and he said he felt a definite change in tone.

[00:05:45] Speaker 7: We've laid out the case that we do the right thing. We don't want criminals here, but we also recognize that someone coming here to find a better life should be treated with dignity, that Americans shouldn't be fearing for their lives to go out of their house just because of the color of their skin and the atrocities we're seeing. And I—look, I think Donald Trump understands it, too.

[00:06:06] Speaker 1: Group chat is back. I want to talk about this tonal shift for both of them. First, I think for the longest time I have heard this argument over the last couple of days, especially from conservative and right-wing voices, that say basically there was a far-left organization that kind of put Pretty in harm's way or—and turned him into a martyr, that this is all part of a strategy. And can I come to you, sort of, are you seeing this as well, and is that starting to fall apart under public scrutiny?

[00:06:38] Speaker 6: I think it is. And I think the important thing to remember here is when a tragic situation like this happens, our government officials are supposed to tone down the temperature, say this is a tragedy, and we're going to investigate the matter. That's not really what we saw from people like Noam and Miller, who again accused him of being a domestic terrorist. I think if he had withdrawn his weapon—he did have a concealed carry permit—if he had withdrawn his weapon and, you know, tried to shoot somebody, that would have been a different situation. But that wasn't the case here. He was filming a law enforcement operation.

[00:07:08] Speaker 1: And they sort of stepped on a rake going after his gun rights. It felt like you had some voices saying, like, the criminal intent is having a gun, and then your own party is not going to love that.

[00:07:19] Speaker 3: The pro-Second Amendment party was now saying that, well, just by having a gun around law enforcement, you are therefore a threat. They also completely misrepresented what happened. And if we had not had cell phone video from lots of different angles, like, the government's word would have been perhaps the last word. And so by them misrepresenting it—and then we still haven't even seen the body cam footage from many of the officers, too, which could actually make this a bigger crisis for the administration.

[00:07:46] Speaker 1: In a statement, Governor Tim Walz's office, they said, the president also agreed to look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and working with the state in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement and regarding violent criminals. There are some people who are going to see that statement and say, look, if Tim Walz had cooperated in the first place, maybe none of this would happen.

[00:08:04] Speaker 5: I don't think any amount of cooperation would have stopped this administration or the Republicans for trying to get the vision what they want, which is them trying to be tough and quote-unquote deporting bad criminals. And absolutely any bad criminal who done something bad should be deported. But this is not what they did. And let's be clear that there's real consequences to what they're saying. I was on the phone all weekend. We were all snowed in. Lots of group chats going on in my actual group chats with Latino leaders around the country. And there's folks traumatized. This left-wing stuff is not about left-wing stuff. This is about folks that are out there that are Democrats or progressives that are just fighting for regular folks and U.S. citizens that are getting killed that's bringing real trauma to a group of people on the ground there that aren't trying to fight their government. They're just wanting to live and not be attacked by their government.

[00:08:45] Speaker 1: But does this mean they're in your group chats because they're like, how can we be more politically active because a lot of people look to Latino voters and said, look, you are the reason that Trump is in office. Right.

[00:08:55] Speaker 5: But this weekend was about how do we take what power we have, like with Latino senators, Latino electives or folks on TV talking about the trauma that's going on on the ground right now with folks that are just trying to abide by the law.

[00:09:06] Speaker 1: I have one more thing. Just sorry. I have to play this. It's the Oklahoma governor, Kevin Stitt. He has publicly questioned the direction of this. And this is a very succinct statement that's sort of saying the loud part out loud. Here he is with Dana Bash.

[00:09:22] Speaker 8: But now Americans are asking themselves, what is the end game? What is the solution? And, you know, we believe in federalism and state rights and nobody likes feds coming into their state. And so what's the goal right now? Is it to deport every single non-U.S. citizen? I don't think that's what Americans want. Oklahoma.

[00:09:46] Speaker 3: I mean, this it is extraordinary what you are seeing in terms of the rhetoric on both sides here. I mean, for the first time in many years, Democrats actually want to talk about immigration and they actually feel that they have the political advantage by talking about it. That has not happened perhaps since 2015, 2016 in a way that most of the party does. And the fact that you have a Republican of Oklahoma saying, actually the policy is not to deport every person that's here illegally.

[00:10:12] Speaker 1: Which is a surprise to me.

[00:10:14] Speaker 3: I mean, but I think that shows because, and this is what people have always been saying, is that that could never be the policy because you would have inevitably some of these images.

[00:10:23] Speaker 5: You should tell Stephen Miller. He's the one who said that they wanted to take away the rights of folks that were going through the processes right now.

[00:10:29] Speaker 1: Or birthright citizenship.

[00:10:30] Speaker 5: That's the birthright citizenship piece.

[00:10:32] Speaker 1: But I want to acknowledge all of the sort of conservative publications that were waving their arms in the air and saying, hey, this isn't working. Like you went to make an example of Minnesota and you ended up making an example of yourself.

[00:10:44] Speaker 5: And losing the narrative.