Name: White House shows first signs of retreat after MN killing
Uploaded: 2026-01-27T17:34:26.000Z
Duration: 10 min 46 s
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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 Bevino.

He's seen here in this archive video throwing a gas canister at protesters last week.

He's expected to take some of the 3,000 federal agents in the city along with him.

The White House says border czar Tom Homan will take over the operation.

For protesters on the ground, Bevino's exit is only a first step.

But I mean, that doesn't mean everything stops.

We can't take back what happened before, but

we're still living in trauma from Renee and countless other people.

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?

Joining me now in the group chat, Alex Thompson, CNN political analyst and national political reporter at Axios, Audrey Fahlberg, National Review politics reporter, and

Chuck Rocha, Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns.

Because we got some signals from the White House.

The president said he had a conversation with Governor Walsh.

But what do you think made the administration finally rethink how it was talking about the death of Alex Preddy and the ICE tactics overall?

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 his strongest issue.

And every poll showed that was the case with the increase.

This is about increasingly over the, over the course of the last year, voters have increasingly soured on the way that Trump has done something polling about this.

The New York Times Sienna poll, how ICE is its job.

The number I always look at independence, 70% disapprove.

So this was even before this second shooting.

And so Trump is now frantically, you also have a looming government shutdown that will happen, 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 now I had seen the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

You had seen other people sort of come out and say, hey, I think this is backfiring.

But the thing that stuck out to me was Chris Medell.

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 Goode.

And he thought he was going to then run for office.

Instead, he released this statement on Monday.

I support the beginning of Operation Metro Surge, the idea of getting rid of the worst of the worst.

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.

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 could 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.

Well, I think this is also putting into stark relief are the very real and long existing tensions within the administration about how this deportation strategy is taking place.

So we have people like Noam, Corey Lewandowski, 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, controversial among Democrats.

Of course, we heard folks at Fox repeatedly saying, you know who you should send in?

Pretty shortly after Tom Holman was going in, proof that the president definitely watches a lot of Fox News.

But he is, you know, proponent of more of this worse first kind of, you know, focusing on illegal criminal aliens.

Excuse me, illegal aliens with a criminal background.

But I think, you know, another thing, there's a tragic, tragic, you know, fatal shooting in and of itself.

And there's the administration's response to it.

In Nome and State, Stephen Miller accusing Preddy of domestic terrorism was obviously not the right course.

It was the Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem 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 Noem and Stephen Miller, which they have not done so far this year.

It appears that there was a meeting with Noem and Trump at the White House and Lewandowski, but

I don't, I know that they, those two were in the meeting.

President Trump says he and Minnesota Governor Tim Walsh are, quote, on the same wavelength.

They spoke for the first time since federal immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

Waltz 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.

We've laid out the case that we do the right thing.

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 look, I think Donald Trump understands it, too.

I want to talk about this tonal shift from, 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 Preddy 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?

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 Noeman 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.