Has Trump lost the battle for Minneapolis?

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. Mr Bovino is a wonderful man and he's a great professional. He is going to very much continue to lead customs and border patrol throughout and across the country. Mr Holman will be the main point of contact on the ground in Minneapolis. Caroline Levitt, Trump's press secretary, is all smiles and accolades. But if you listen to her words, she's actually firing Greg Bovino. Trump's borders are in Minneapolis. Trump wanted a battle with Blue State Minnesota. He sent his troops in to fight this fight. Yet in the last 24 hours, it looks like Trump has blinked.

0:41Has Minnesota won after all? Welcome to The News Agents.

0:49The News Agents. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And we said on the show yesterday that it felt as if Trump might be about to make at least a tactical retreat. So obvious was the American public's distaste for all of the events and the killings that we've seen in Minnesota. And indeed, since we recorded that yesterday, that appears to be for now at least exactly what has happened. All comes from the fallout, of course, from the fatal shooting of the 37 year old ICU nurse Alex Pretty by ICE agents. There's been intense nationwide protests, bipartisan political repressure from including, as I say, the Republican Party.

1:28And then we discovered last night that Trump had a call with the Minnesota governor, Tim Walts, someone that he has been decrying for the past month or so, someone who his government has been literally suing for the last week or so. Suddenly, Trump says that he and Walts are on the same page. And the Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino is set to leave the state as part of that drawdown. And Trump has signalled a willingness to cooperate more closely with local officials rather than escalate the standoff. And indeed, he is sending his so-called border czar, Tom Homan, to oversee the situation, which again is being interpreted as Donald Trump basically saying that for the first time he wants to cool things down rather than ratchet the pressure up.

2:12Yeah, it may or may not have been coincidence that Fox News suggested that this is what needed to happen roughly an hour and a half before Trump made the executive decision that Bovino needed to be brought down and Homan needed to be promoted. And perhaps we can offer you a little bit of background on each of those men, because they're sort of names that have become centre stage in the tragedy of Minneapolis right now. But to sort of put it in context, Greg Bovino was known as the sort of commander at large in his role as Border Patrol. And the sense amongst some in the Trump administration was that he went a little bit off piste.

2:53He enjoyed himself a little bit too much. He took matters into his own hands. And the first sense that we had, the first sense maybe even that he had that things were not going well, was when his social media accounts were locked. He was locked out of them. In other words, they didn't like the stuff he was saying. He appeared on the morning shows on Sunday. We played you a clip yesterday. And one of the lines he put out was that the victims in the shooting, the murder of Alex Priti were actually the ICE agents themselves. He was trying to justify what he called the brandishing of a weapon. He was trying to justify what the Trump administration had called a mass escalation of violence.

3:37In other words, he was on the front line basically trying to advocate for impunity for the ICE officers on the streets of Minneapolis who were killing innocent US citizens, some of who were just trying to protect the community. So he is now being put out to pasture. He's been sent to California, maybe even retired. Let's wait and see. And in his place or sort of given a bigger role now is Tom Homan. Now, Tom Homan is quite a central character to the whole ICE project. He actually worked for Obama in 2014. He was Obama's head then of Immigrations and Customs. And he won honours. But, you know, Obama famously actually deported more illegal immigrants than any other recent U.S.

4:28American president, sort of north of three million. And Tom Homan also found himself in the news in September of 2024 when he had reportedly accepted a bag containing$50 ,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives who were investigating allegations that Homan was accepting bribes from border security companies, i.e. on the southern border, in exchange for government contracts. Sounds like an ideal border czar. Well, what happened two months after those allegations came to the forefront? Trump wins the election and mysteriously, the investigation gets shut down because there isn't enough evidence.

5:10But I think to understand the complexity of that, that change of personnel, you have to really understand that Homan has been doing this stuff for decades. And he is called the father of the child separation policy. In other words, the intellectual father of the guy who first came in and said, wouldn't it be a great idea if we put kids in cages and sent their parents home? This goes quite deep. And yet he is the man that people in the Trump administration now see as the grown up in the room, the person to get this sorted out. The nicer version. The soft touch. The soft touch, the nicer version of Greg Bovino.

5:44It's probably true. I mean, that's the weird thing, the disturbing thing about where we are. I think that clearly we were talking on the show yesterday about what, if anything, could make Trump change course. And look, there has been and it's been pretty unusual in this second Trump term. There has been discontent from within the Republican Party at what they've seen. Now, I don't think for reasons I think we get into that that has been the determining factor, but it has nonetheless been notable. For example, just listen to this. This is Chris Maidl. So he was the Republican candidate for the gubernatorial, the governor election in Minnesota to replace Tim Walts, who has already said that he's stepping down.

6:29He's a Republican. And he said yesterday, he put this video out yesterday explaining why he was withdrawing from that race. I have two primary reasons for this decision. Number one, I cannot support the National Republican stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so. I support the originally stated goals of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement's Operation Metro Surge in locating and deporting the worst of the worst from our state. and I've seen many examples of ICE arresting non-U.S. citizens in Minnesota convicted of serious crimes, including murder, rape, and child sexual assault.

7:12No reasonable person should want these people here, and I am glad that they are gone. But Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threats. United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That's wrong. ISIS authorizes its agents to raid homes using a civil warrant that need only be signed by a Border Patrol agent. That's unconstitutional and it's wrong. Weaponizing criminal investigations against political opponents is unconstitutional regardless of who is in power.

7:56Republicans and Democrats alike have engaged in this misconduct. and both must be held to the same standard. Extraordinary statement there from, it would be extraordinary enough, given that he was the Republican candidate for the governor's race, even more extraordinary to consider that, you know, this isn't some sort of woolly-eyed liberal we're talking about here. Maedal is actually the lawyer for Jonathan Ross, not that Jonathan Ross, Jonathan Ross, who of course was the ICE officer who killed Rene Good. So as far as we know, he's still doing that. But even for him, he believes that the tactics that are being used, the justification that's being put forward by the federal government and what we're seeing from the Trump administration is so unconstitutional and beyond the boundaries of acceptability that he cannot in good conscience continue to represent the Republican Party in the state.

8:43That tells you something about Republican Party opinion even in the Trump era against what we've seen. Yeah, and at the end of that video message from Chris Madel he actually says that he's done it for his daughters. He wants to be able to look his daughters in the eye and tell them that he did the right thing. And it's interesting how many people are sort of turning to their young on this whole question of public morality. Martha Stewart, you know, the lifestyle expert, former jailbird, of course, has told her three million or so followers on Instagram that things have got to change. and this is the first time she's come out and said a statement about ICE, prompted again by her granddaughter who turned to her apparently and said, why aren't you talking about this, granny?

9:29I'm not sure whether she gets called granny or not, but you've got a platform, you should be speaking out. And she's another voice who sort of added hers to the fray. I think all this is, as you say, part of the public pressure on Trump. And we've also heard from Greg Abbott, Texas governor, as red a state as you will find. And a proper ally of Trump as well. And an ally who has gone as close to he can as suggesting that maybe this isn't working out quite the way it should. Well, you point out a concern in that is this, in general, we need to have respect for law enforcement officers in the country.

10:10They are law enforcement officers. And so they, being the White House, need to recalibrate on what needs to be done. to make sure that that respect is going to be re-instilled. And that's not an easy task, especially under the current circumstances. But I know that they're working on a game plan to make sure that they are going to, let's say, recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure that they get back to what they wanted to do. I think that the pressure from the Republican Party may have influenced things. But in a way, I think that that is responding to something else, which is about public opinion.

10:46The Republicans are worried. The Republicans, you know, it's a midterm year now. They are very worried about the prospect, as we were saying yesterday, that what Trump is doing in overplaying his hand in this way is taking what should be a real positive campaigning issue for the Republicans, which is immigration, and turning it into a negative, something that the Democrats can successfully run against. So they're worried about that. I think that the most heartening is the wrong word because it's taken so much to get to this point. But I said yesterday that I thought that what happened next would be a massive test for the overall health of American democracy, because I think this has basically been a test to what extent the Trump administration and Trump himself still cares about public opinion, which is a key element of any democracy.

11:28Right. I didn't think it was clear that Trump does not care. I mean, the two things that clearly Trump cares about, the only U-turns he's done so far, are kind of this and tariffs, at least to some extent. And those, I think, are motivated by the two things that Trump cares most about, which is the markets. And ultimately, if there is such a groundswell of public opinion against him, that it forces him to move. I mean, it goes back to that old Lincoln quote about American politics, which is public. And he was saying this in the 19th century. I think it's so true even now. Public sentiment is everything.

11:57With public sentiments, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed. So I think what we are seeing here is that there is still, well, there's certainly two things. There is still some life in the American democratic process, something we've been worried about, that it might not be the case. But also as well, that speaks, I think, to something maybe we don't talk about enough, which is that, you know, America is not Trump. America is not Trump. There is still a fundamental decency across the American public. Yes, the Republican Party has been colonised by and occupied by an extreme cult, frankly, at its top, epitomised by someone like Stephen Miller, who is a radical ideologue and as close to a modern day fascist, I think, as it is possible to get.

12:34But even they do have to respond. The elastic can only be bent so far. Now, unfortunately, it has taken the murder of two American citizens, innocent American citizens, to get that far. So it is a terrible price to pay. But I think it does show us still that there are limits even to Trump's power. Yeah. And I think that that turn of public opinion is, I mean, to go back to the old Orwell quote that the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. People have their eyes and ears via so many mobile phones, so many clips of the footage now, which is making it impossible for the administration to lie in the way that they have been used to doing.

13:17You can lie about things that are happening millions of miles away from people's homes. But when people are standing there on their own streets and filming every single frame of a shooting, of a murder, of an attack, then you can't carry on lying so convincingly. And I think this is actually an admission that the people have won because they're calling out the lies. Now, just one thing to add to that, when Renee Goode was murdered in her car, the 37-year-old mother, about 20 days ago, they said there wouldn't be an investigation. They immediately called her a domestic terrorist. And the only investigation they decided to do was into her widow, who they called an activist, an anti-IS activist.

14:05This time round, after the killing of Alex Pretty, they've ordered an investigation. But there's been some really interesting reporting from CNN in the last few minutes. And they've looked into what kind of investigation this means. And they've said there is no criminal investigation being opened. There is no judicial investigation being opened. So there is nothing that goes to the DOJ that says an investigation is underway. So what is this investigation? Is it just an administrative investigation? Or is it no investigation at all? It's merely a way of words. It's a way of telling people, oh, don't worry, we're on to this.

14:47We'll check it out. It's all fine. Again, it's this sort of soft peddling of a nation's fear with lies and with cover up and with dissemination by sort of trying to look as if you are taking action when you're not. And I think, frankly, that's what people have just had enough of. They've used up their credits, their lying credits now. I think what you're saying there, Emily, is really interesting because what it's framed around, in a way, is what Trump's politics has been anchored around for 10 years, right, which has been what we've called the post-truth era, right? And most of the time that can work.

15:23And as you say, the exception is when basically everybody's filming it all of the time. And that is obviously on one level heartening. It's also extremely disheartening, right? Because the truth is, is that at this moment about this story, about which there was such intensity, such massive media attention, it became impossible to live in that post-truth world and to lie. But that's one thing. That's one thing. And your thing just there about the investigation sums it up perfectly. Because as soon as the phones go away, as soon as we're looking elsewhere, which will happen, all of that post-truth world returns.

15:58because by definition you can't be filming what is happening in the inside of the federal government in investigation once the attention and that hyper pitch of scrutiny is taken away then they can go back to their old tricks and this is what i would think about as well about what happens next in terms of the immigration question as well look i think it's likely that they do make a tactical retreat but you know absolutely that there will be voices within administration not least people like steven miller who will be arguing for a resumption in short order now maybe they spread their activity around the country a bit more.

16:30Maybe it's a bit more diffuse. Maybe it's just a little bit quieter than it was before. Maybe it isn't quite as theatrical as it was in Minnesota. But do I believe that this is the end of the sort of ice tactics that we've seen in Minnesota and elsewhere? No, I don't think that. I just think they're going to probably try and do it more quietly, away from prying eyes, and most germane of all, away from the glare of the lenses of our phones. Yeah, and actually, just on that question of the phones, what's really critical still is what they do with Alex Pretty's phone, which has all the footage from his own point of view.

17:05Clearly, he was holding the phone. They have taken that phone. They haven't released it. I think he was wearing body cam. They haven't released that. There are answers as to exactly the sequence in which everything happened that he has filmed that will tell us the whole story, which we may never see. and it sort of dawned on me that all these ideas were, oh, we thought he was holding a weapon. He was holding a weapon. The weapon was never the gun. It was always the phone. In other words, the phone that sheds light on truth on what is happening minute by minute is actually far more powerful right now than a gun and a holster.

17:48That's why they attacked him. As we were exactly saying on the show yesterday, the reason that they are filming as they are is precisely to ensure that the federal government the trump administration do not get away with what the trick they try to get away with which is to besmirch and to outrageously slander people that they themselves have killed because if not just alex pretty but others hadn't been there if there wasn't that quite extraordinary kind of information network that we were reporting on last week which says gets an address and it pings up on the phone and get there right now before you know where you are, four or five or six people are observing.

18:25If that footage did not exist, where would we be right now? The Trump administration would not have retreated. They would still be trying to claim that Peretti was a domestic terrorist. They would still be trying to slander him. They would still be trying to insult his family and possibly use, who knows, other instruments of the law to go after his family as they did with the family of Rennie Good. So let us not pretend in any way that the Trump administration has retreated from this out of the goodness of their hearts or because they've suddenly had a sudden conversion to a different way of doing things, they are doing what they're doing because they have been forced to do so by the very people they so dislike, who are the people who come and observe them every single day.

19:04Yeah, I mean, if you want to get darkly comic about this, you could say it's because President Trump has found that those around him just aren't as tactical or as gifted at lying as he is. So he had this two hour meeting with Kristi Noem last night in the Oval Office. Everyone is now looking at whether Kristi Noem, who's the Homeland Security Secretary, will still be in her job. Corey Lewandowski, her top aide, who's been part of the sort of Trump gang, was on the Trump campaign in 2015, 2016. Next day, will they still be in their jobs? and it's almost like if you watch Trump in these sort of press conferences, he comes, as we've often said, very close to saying the thing that you think you've heard but he hasn't actually said it so he doesn't need to retract it.

19:48Kristi Noam says it. She goes out and she tells a blatant lie. So it may just be that this whole meeting now, and I think what we're hearing is that she requested to see him but obviously rumours are whether she will still have her job this time tomorrow, Lewandowski will have his job. this time tomorrow. It may just be that they are trying to figure out a way to keep doing what they're doing and not actually head to the media so quickly with a narrative that is so demonstrably false so quickly. I think that's right. And I think that one of the ironies of this whole thing is if Trump is one thing, we know he's been the social media president and that his rise would have been impossible without social media and without X, formerly Twitter in particular.

20:31This is an example, I think, of one of those moments when he's actually failed to understand. the changes in the media. Because without, again, his rise would have been impossible, but his retreat in this case would have been impossible without it. So this is something, as you say, you get the feeling that rather than a retreat, this is something that is going to be... Is it a complete strategic withdrawal, or is it a tactical retreat? And I have a horrible feeling that it's going to be a tactical retreat. Yeah, I mean, to your first question, your opening question, which was, has Minnesota won?

20:59I mean, the answer is categorically no. It's lost at least two US citizens to... It's been traumatised. To Ismael. It's been traumatised. We have seen monitored at least 2 ,000 people deported in the first, what, 26, 27 days of January alone. So Minnesota hasn't won. It has been traumatised. It has been wrecked. The communities are stronger as a result of it. I think they have come together. But actually, it seems that all they're waiting is for Trump to turn his attention to somewhere else, turn his ICE agents to somewhere else. And, I mean, we're not going to be talking about Iran today, hopefully later in the week, but it does seem extraordinary that 10 days ago, Trump messaged help is on the way.

21:44We know that Iran is slaughtering its own citizens right now in possibly the tens of thousands. This is somewhere legitimately that the world would welcome Trump's intervention, I think. and yet help was on the way 10 days ago. Nothing's happened there and people are getting murdered on the streets of Minneapolis, a blue state that he didn't win.

22:17The News Agents Right, we talked on the first story about how phones have, in the case of Minnesota, in a way ended up being the saving grace. We also know, of course, and talked a lot last year, about how radicalising particularly social media algorithms could be, particularly when they're in the hands of certain people like Elon Musk. And it seems that, perhaps I think for the first time, a very senior police officer in the UK has come out and said what a big problem it is proving to be for policing as well, in an exclusive interview with LBC and the Crime Agents podcast. And one of the Crime Agents co-hosts, Andy Hughes, has hopped over the water to talk to us.

22:53Andy, tell us about who you've been speaking to and what they've said. Yeah, so this all started when I got the invitation into the counterterrorism operations centre. This is the centre that was built after the wave of terror attacks in the UK in 2017, and it was built to draw all the different agencies together. so I was invited in the first journalist ever to see their operations room and this is where they monitor all their extremists and at the moment there are more than a thousand people on their radar that they are constantly monitoring that number is up and the reason for that is that radicalization is up massively.

23:28PREVENT which is the government's de-radicalization program they have seen a 27 percent increase in the last year which is huge and it is the highest number more than 10 000 people were referred to that that's the highest since records began and i've been speaking to the relatively new head of counter-terrorism policing for the uk assistant commissioner lawrence taylor and he blames a few things for that one of the reasons he says is that isis the terror group they are now reforming and they are pumping out rhetoric online to their followers all across the world but really he is pointing his finger fairly heavily at the social media companies because he says that the majority of people who are being radicalized now are pretty much the vast majority all online it's not it's not done through the dark web or anything it's done through very popular social media networks including meta which is run by mark zuckerberg and of course x which is run by elon musk so i asked him about that and this is what he said should we now be getting to a point where tech bosses talking elon musk mark zuckerberg should they be uh subject to counterterrorism laws and charges so they've definitely got a responsibility in this space do you think they're doing enough no not even close to enough um so i've talked about the algorithms that pump this stuff to you yeah so if you know an algorithm is pumping stuff to you it ought to be relatively easy to identify where it's coming from right and take it down.

25:02The challenge comes back to the point I made around what's lawful and what isn't. If it is lawful, what is the motivation for a tech company to put a load of resource into taking stuff down that isn't a sort of an illegal post or something like that? So it comes down to, you know, what's their sort of moral perspective, how are they running their business? I would put huge pressure on the bosses to manage this more effectively. So I guess the fact he raises the question of whether it's lawful or not takes it out of the hands of social media, doesn't it, and into the hands of legislators. I mean, is he saying it isn't illegal or it should be illegal or they should be taking this stuff down anyway because it's clearly doing so much damage?

25:44Yeah, he's saying that the social media companies should know where these algorithms are coming from and that they should be identifying them much earlier, while it is still legal, because these things then progress to illegality, and that is when they are allowed to go after. But by that point, it's too late. The horse has already bolted. Who are the thousand people on the extremist watch list here? Are they British citizens or are they people who shouldn't be here? No, no, they're homegrown. 75 % will be Islamist extremism. Around 20 to 25 % will be far right. And then there's a small growing number of hard far left.

26:24And to be clear, what the assistant commissioner is saying, which I think is sort of remarkable in a way that it isn't dealt with, he's basically saying that what develops are terror related algorithms. Yeah, so I did an interview with someone who works for him about six months ago, and he works in his far right unit. And he showed me, we couldn't broadcast any of the stuff, of course, but he showed me some of the stuff being targeted to young people. And it was, you know, stuff about Hitler, and then trying to invoke anger amongst the young people. And they were using at that time, because asylum hotels was dominating the news at that time, they were using that issue to target young working class boys.