The Trump administration will immediately pull about 700 federal immigration enforcement agents out of Minnesota, though roughly 2,000 officers will remain deployed, border czar Tom Homan said Wednesday amid ongoing protests over the crackdown.
In an unprecedented surge, U.S. President Donald Trump has deployed thousands of armed immigration enforcement agents in and around Minneapolis this year to detain and deport migrants, resulting in angry and sometimes violent confrontations with residents and street protests across the nation.
Homan said the deportation campaign was in the interest of public safety, and that he was partially drawing down the deployment because he was seeing "unprecedented" cooperation from Minnesota's elected sheriffs who run county jails, although he did not give more details.
Grappling with one of the thorniest political crises of his tenure, Trump sent Homan to Minnesota in late January with a mission to temper the outrage seen in Minneapolis' streets, which intensified after immigration agents twice fatally shot U.S. citizens.
The surge has been opposed and denounced since its earliest days in January by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and other Democrats, who have demanded the withdrawal of a federal deployment that was 20 times the normal number working on immigration enforcement in the state, outnumbering local police forces.
