No. of Recommendations: 2
What city will the storm troopers attack next?
I mean - maybe they won't?
Certain folks in the Administration have long wanted to take a "loud" approach to immigration enforcement. Big, splashy massive operations that make the news, get covered on TV, and impinge on the national consciousness. Something that looks more like a major operation rather than law enforcement, and something with more of a visceral impact than just dry figures in some DHS monthly report. Ramp up the detention</> part of the process, do all those detentions in highly visible public places, get a lot of coverage. That's definitely the inclination of Noem and Miller. It's also the sort of thing that Trump himself would be more attracted to, since he's more of a "showman" rather than a "reader" kind of executive.
But........I don't think anyone in the Administration thinks that Chicago and Minneapolis were good for their deportation efforts. I mean, I'm sure they don't think they did anything wrong. I'm sure they are convinced that this is all the fault of those no-good AWFL protestors who were the ones who should really be blamed.
But it's been bad. Bad for them. The TV's been bad, the narrative has been bad, the actual implementation of the operation has been bad. A mass mobilization of front-line agents ended up causing massive headaches for the Administration. And then, the Administration seems to have utterly failed to plan for what would happen after all these agents detained all these people. They overwhelmed the capacity of the MN detention facilities and federal courts and even their own DOJ staff, resulting in even more bad press and pissing off even Trump appointees in the federal judiciary.
Trump cannot be happy about how it all went down. His team took the gift of the Minnesota fraud scandal and managed to turn it into a self-inflicted wound.
So I think there's space for those within the Administration who have argued for a different approach (like Homan) to push back. Those folks have long advocated for quiet draconian enforcement. Just as terrible for the people experiencing it, but quieter. Individualized detentions by agents all over the country, conducted at night or early morning away from prying eyes and protestors' phone cameras, with agency resources allocated across the entire process (including processing and legal) and not just the flashy "detention" phase.
