First Lady Melania Trump was part of the discussions President Donald Trump held with top advisers on how to reset his illegal immigration crackdown, according to a report.
After a year of ugly scenes on the streets of major Democrat-led American cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., the surge by ICE and other federal immigration agencies into Minneapolis in January proved a disaster, resulting in the deaths of two protesters and a huge public outcry.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem – who had wrongly described the victims, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as “domestic terrorists” – held crisis talks with Trump at the White House and initially appeared to have saved her job before being dismissed earlier this month.
The Wall Street Journal now reports that the president met with his top team, including his wife, and told them he was concerned about the torrent of negative headlines Noem’s DHS had attracted.
He concluded that voters had come to oppose the term “mass deportation” and urged a renewed focus on catching “bad guys” rather than stirring up chaos in order to lower the program’s profile.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is reportedly leading the revamp, having become concerned that what was once a winning issue for Trump now looks like a liability ahead of the midterms.
Border czar Tom Homan – who was drafted in to restore order and ultimately withdraw from Minnesota – is said to be spearheading the new emphasis on the “bread-and-butter arrests of criminals.”
Under Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, who was stood down and returned to California after the killings of Good and Pretti, the crackdown took an aggressive catch-all approach that was deemed necessary to meet ambitious arrest targets set by Trump aide Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner.
Miller reportedly demanded 3,000 detentions per day to meet a target of 1 million deportations for 2025, a goal the DHS did not come close to realizing.
Arrests are currently around 1,200 daily, according to the WSJ, down from 1,500 at the height of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson has denied that the rethink amounts to a shift in policy, saying in a statement: “Nobody is changing the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda.
“President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities.”
This week, the president’s nominee to replace Noem, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, endured a difficult confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, in which his past mockery of Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul came back to haunt him.
Paul, the committee’s chairman, was brutally assaulted by a neighbor in 2017 and left seriously injured, an incident Mullin once gloated over, leading to an angry confrontation with the senator, who voted against his candidacy, leaving it up to controversial Democratic Sen. John Fetterman to save the day for the nominee.
A full Senate vote on his confirmation is now expected to be held early next week, in which Sen. Mullin is expected to narrowly prevail.
Before the committee, he pledged to run DHS with greater cooperation with local law enforcement than was seen during Noem’s tenure, also promising fewer clashes with activists, a reversal of agents’ no-warrant entry policy, and that he would be leading the department, not Miller.
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