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greg bovino
Replacing Bovino With Homan Won't Change ICE's Tactics in Minneapolis
Bovino’s departure changes nothing about ICE’s lawless behavior on the ground. If anything, the situation has become more volatile.
Jan 31, 2026
The recent firing of Greg Bovino, the face of Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, was clearly intended to serve as a pressure-release valve for a city at its breaking point. For weeks, we have watched federal agents transform our neighborhoods into a theater of intimidation, characterized by warrantless stops, the brutalization of peaceful protestors, and the killings of two constitutional observers, captured on video and now seen by the majority of Americans.
By replacing Bovino with Border Czar Tom Homan, the administration likely hopes to signal a new direction or a cooling of tensions. But no one should be fooled. Firing a commander is an empty act of appeasement when the machinery of the operation itself remains fully fueled and operational. Bovino’s departure changes nothing about ICE’s lawless behavior on the ground. If anything, the situation has become more volatile.
The timing of this leadership shuffle is particularly cynical when viewed alongside the latest developments in the federal judiciary. On Monday night, the Eighth Circuit granted the Department of Justice (DOJ) a full stay on the injunction previously secured by Judge Katherine Menendez. That injunction was the only thin line of defense protecting protesters from ICE violence and retaliation. With that stay in place, federal agents have been handed a blank check to target activists and constitutional observers in ways that Menendez had previously found unconstitutional.
Operation Metro Surge was never about public safety in the way most Minnesotans understand it. It is a display of federal power, designed to bypass local oversight and treat our state as an occupied zone because the current administration doesn’t like our social welfare policies. Bovino was a symptom of this strategy, not its sole architect.
Minneapolis does not need a new commander, it needs Operation Metro Surge to end.
The tactics of intimidation, unmarked vehicles, lack of clear identification, and the racial profiling of community members is baked into the Operation Metro Surge’s DNA. Changing a public-facing figure while maintaining the underlying tactics only creates a more dangerous environment. It allows the operation to continue under a veil of "reform" while ICE’s mandate continues to broaden, and the reality on the street remains one of fear and violence.
I believe we are now entering the most dangerous phase of ICE’s enforcement operations in Minnesota. The combination of a leadership changeup and a legal victory for the DOJ has created a perfect storm. History shows us that when law enforcement agencies feel vindicated by the courts and pressured by optics, they do not retreat, they push forward, and citizen vigilantes come to their defense.
The attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Tuesday was primed by years of dehumanizing rhetoric against her, prompted by ICE’s illegal actions in Minneapolis, and executed by a lone-wolf reactionary in an attempt to silence calls for abolition. When the administration labels “disrespect” as a capital offense, and has pushed the rule of law to its breaking point, we should not be surprised when citizens take it in their hands to “enforce” the new law.
Minneapolis does not need a new commander, it needs Operation Metro Surge to end. The replacement of Bovino is a tactical retreat, a cosmetic change meant to buy time. If we accept Homan’s takeover as "progress," we are consenting to the continued erosion of our civil liberties and political culture. A leadership shakeup doesn’t change anything; it’s just a convenient news cycle that the Trump administration would prefer for us to focus on. Don’t give them your attention. Keep watching the streets of Minneapolis and the actions of our federal courts.
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The Trump-Vance-Noem-Bovino Message to Americans: Obey or Die
Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these murders were unambiguous messages as clear as could be: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it."
Jan 26, 2026
Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to “massacre” ICE agents.
But that’s not their real message.
Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who’d just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman.
One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches.
“I could kill you right here, right now,” he said with a smile, “and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money.”
His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today:
“We have all the power. You have none. We can get away with murder, repeatedly, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
In other words: “Obey or die!”
It certainly worked for those three; I split the little money I had with them and they let me get on my plane.
These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.
This “we have all the power and you have none” is the classic, eternal message of fascism, wherever and whenever it appears in the world.
Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino aren’t trying to convince anybody (other than the pathetic, brainwashed suckers who watch Fox “News”) that both Alex Pretti and Nicole Good were “domestic terrorists.” They know that both were merely well-intentioned citizens protesting the occupation of their city by masked federal goons.
Their real message — and Trump’s, Miller’s, and Vance’s real message — to Democrats and to America is:
“Challenge us and we will kill you. And we will get away with it. That’s how powerful we are, so you shouldn’t even try to resist.”
And it appears, indeed, that they will get away with it. They’ve already shut down the investigation of Renee Good’s murder, and have now seized the evidence from Alex Pretti’s murder. And suffered no consequences whatsoever for this naked obstruction of justice.
Hakeem Jeffries is hiding someplace in Washington DC, perhaps under the same table as Chuck Schumer. Both should be in Minneapolis right now holding ad hoc hearings and engaging the nation in nonstop media the way Noem and Bovino are: you don’t fight corrupt power by cowering. You have to show up.
Meanwhile, the generally useless and certainly feckless Republicans in Congress are anxiously counting their campaign contributions, particularly the ones to their leadership PACs that they can take with them when they leave office.
Billionaires are buying fancy homes around DC so they can continue to purchase Republican politicians, while rightwing media struggles to convince people that what they’re seeing with their own lying eyes isn’t true.
And the message under it all is:
“We’re in charge here. You may not resist us. We are in control, not you. Obey or die.”
Studies show that conservative men, and law enforcement officers particularly, are generally submissive men who need a “strict father” figure to tell them what to do and who crave regular reinforcement — often achieved by using violence — for their fragile sense of masculinity.
— When a young woman tried to make her peaceful protest known, these cucks felt threatened so they violently threw her down onto the ice and sprayed her in the face with liquid pepper and other chemicals.
Their message: “Obey or die!”
— When Alex Pretti tried to put himself between the CPB/ICE thugs and the young woman they were beating up, he enraged them by claiming some power for himself. Thus, he also had to be punished, so first they knocked him to the ground and sprayed liquid pepper into his face, too, to blind and disorient him.
Their message: “Obey or die!”
— When he staggered back up from that, again asserting his personal power, it was apparently the final straw: to preserve their masculinity, this man — like the woman who’d laughed at impotent officer Jonathan Ross two weeks earlier — had to be taken down.
Their message: “Obey or die.”
— Finding his gun — a symbol of male power they were offended he dared legally carry — was pure gold for them. They eliminated any threat his gun might have represented by removing it and then — like the cowards they are — put as many as ten bullets into his back.
He didn’t obey, so he had to die.
These craven weaklings, desperate to prove their manhood and reassert their power, murdered Alex Pretti for having dared to challenge them, and then applauded themselves as one said of Pretti’s death, “Boo hoo.” Just like Putin does when average people challenge him in Russia, Orbán does in Hungary, the Ayatollah does in Iran, Erdoğon does in Turkey, and El Sisi does in Egypt, among others.
This is how fascist men roll and have throughout history; it’s an entirely predictable playbook as Ruth Ben Ghiat, Mary Trump, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Miles Taylor can tell you: “Obey or die.”
It’s particularly ironic that right now, as a the USS Abraham Lincoln and a small armada of accompanying warships are scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran by the end of this week, that Iranian state TV is running clips of ICE gassing and killing Minnesotans on a loop.
They’re openly saying that Trump is doing the same as they did a few weeks ago, therefore justifying executing their own “domestic terrorists.”
And now, in a pathetic joke, Trump says he’s going to punish Iran’s mullahs for killing their own people on the streets of Tehran at the same time he brags about and justifies gunning down Americans on the streets of Minneapolis.
The brutal, cold-blooded murders of Good and Pretti also show clearly that ICE’s and CBP’s presence in Minnesota has little to do with immigration; there are only an estimated 130,000 undocumented people in the entire state, although Texas and Florida each have millions.
Minnesota, however, is a swing state that Trump lost three times and Republicans are looking at an electoral disaster this fall: something had to be done to set an example there that might cow other Democratic-led states.
When Pam Bondi sent her letter to Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz saying that if he’d just turn his voting rolls over to her (presumably so she could “clean” aka “purge” the list to rig this November’s election), she’d pull ICE and CPB out of the state.
That’s how Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğon, et al remain in power, by intimidating the population at the same time they rig their elections. It’s the model Trump has in mind for 2026 America, and tried to execute in 2020 with his phony electors scheme, a conspiracy with over 140 Republicans who voted not to confirm Biden, and, when those didn’t work, finally the attack on January 6th.
Trump’s message on January 6th was the same: “Obey or die.” Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi barely escaped being killed by Trump’s murderous mob, and four police officers lost their lives at the hands of the GOP’s shock troops.
We’re nuts if we think Trump and the people around him wouldn’t try it again, particularly when they’re all looking at the possibility of prison time if an impeachment effort is successful because so many Republicans could lose their seats this fall.
Trump himself has already been convicted of fraud multiple times, as well as stealing money from a children’s cancer charity and raping E. Jean Carroll, and his lickspittles have to know that John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, and 40 other senior officials (including a Cabinet member) went to prison in the 1970s.
Trump is a weak, psychologically damaged man, as were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and most of the world’s other historic strongmen. Their weakness and emotional damage are what drive them to their “Obey or die” proclamations.
Such people not only draw others with a similar malady into their circles, but they also typically inflict generationally-destructive damage on their own countries when people push back against them.
These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.
History is unambiguous about what happens when bullies aren’t confronted early and publicly: their violence escalates, their lies morph into history and law, and intimidation against anybody who dares speak up becomes the new normal.
Soon, everybody is silent.
Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these intentional killings, these murders, were unambiguous messages as clear as the one I got in Uganda that fall afternoon: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it. Obey or die.”
And unless Democratic leadership takes a cue from the good people of Minnesota and steps up and fights back hard, the next message will be even broader and bloodier, because authoritarians always interpret silence as permission.
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Greg Bovino Throws Gas Grenade at Lawful Protesters After Court Lifts Restrictions on ICE Use of Force
The Minnesota Star-Tribune described "plumes of green and gray smoke" that "burst over the crowd."
Jan 22, 2026
US Customs and Border Protection Commander Greg Bovino on Tuesday was caught on video throwing a gas grenade at lawful protesters in Minneapolis on the same day that a court temporarily lifted restrictions on federal immigration agents' use of force in the Twin Cities.
As reported by the Minnesota Star-Tribune, Bovino hurled a gas canister at protesters who had gathered at Mueller Park in the Minneapolis neighborhood of Whittier.
After Bovino threw the can, the Star-Tribune wrote, "plumes of green and gray smoke burst over the crowd," causing protesters and observers to flee the scene.
According to NBC News' Maggie Vespa, the attack on the protesters began shortly after Bovino and other immigration agents were denied service at a local Speedway gas station. As they exited the station, they were "swarmed" by demonstrators, and the situation "devolved" from there.
In addition to lobbing gas at protesters, immigration agents were also seen deploying chemical spray on protesters and observers. In one case, an agent was caught on video spraying a person directly in their eyes even after they had already been brought to the ground and restrained by fellow officers.
The ICE agents' use of gas and chemical spray on protesters came shortly after the 8th Circuit US Court of Appeals froze an earlier ruling from US District Judge Katherine Menendez that had barred federal agents from using such forms of force on peaceful protesters.
According to Twin Cities-based local news station Fox 9, Menendez's restraining order also prohibited federal officials from arresting observers who were following them from a safe distance in their cars.
Minnesota has been under siege from federal immigration agents over the last three weeks, and tensions between officers and local residents spiked after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer fatally shot Minneapolis resident Renee Good on January 7.
Vice President JD Vance, who has vehemently defended the shooting despite video evidence calling into question the claim that it was in self-defense, is scheduled to visit Minneapolis on Thursday to express further support for ICE.
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