Minneapolis: Don’t be Fooled, the Siege Continues
January 30, 2026
Photo: Steve Perry.
Minneapolis.
Wednesday night, more than 48 hours after Tom Homan came to Minneapolis to stanch the bloody headlines, state Attorney General Keith Ellison confirmed to CNN that the feds still had not handed over the names of the two masked men who shot Alex Pretti nine or 10 times while the rest of their goons held him down. If you’re in a hurry, that’s about as much as you need to know about what’s changed here since the abrupt exile of tiny Nazi clothes horse and made-to-order fall guy Greg Bovino.
Thursday morning Homan made a speech and took questions in his first local appearance. The talk was larded with assurances of “great progress” in his dealings with Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Ellison; he magnanimously conceded, sotto voce, that perhaps a mistake or two had been made by federal stormtroopers. He admitted at the outset that the state Department of Corrections was honoring ICE detainers and turning over inmates as prescribed by law, a point that Bovino and Kristi Noem had lied about so often that the DOC built a webpage to correct those lies. What a guy! No wonder Walz, ever a sucker for good manners—only recall his disastrous coopting by JD Vance in their VP debate—told an interviewer Homan “is law enforcement and he knows right from wrong.”
The whole show was mainly for the benefit of Senate Democrats as they weigh what to do about the pending ICE budget package, and the message was that you all don’t need to go fussing around with U.S. immigration enforcement. Uncle Tom is here and he’s a reasonable man. To anyone who has kept abreast of what’s happening in Minneapolis, or who listened closely to his words, the performance was reminiscent of Orson Welles as Hank Quinlan, the sweaty, porcine, rotting-from-the-inside police detective in Touch of Evil.
It was a more subtle performance than we’ve been accustomed to. When Homan referred to reducing the size of the local ICE force and paused to stress the point, when he went on to say, “We are not surrendering the president’s mission on immigration enforcement, let’s make that clear,” it sounded very much like a concession of defeat couched in face-saving terms. It was supposed to. But the make-nice tone didn’t stop Homan from hedging his force-reduction pledge—in fact, he made clear that there was no such guarantee—or stressing repeatedly that ICE would continue to deal harshly with anyone who impeded its investigations. And we know from hundreds of video clips and on-the-ground horror stories that “impeding” is whatever the thugs in blacked-out SUVs say it is.
No matter. Homan’s ritual act of contrition will probably dampen media coverage of events here, at least until the next murder. It likely won’t do much to dissuade the people of Minneapolis and the surrounding metro from chasing the ICE hordes around and documenting their atrocities. Sadly, it’s probably more than enough to assuage Senate Democrats, who have been waking up with flop sweats about how to avoid a fight over the obvious and necessary remedy, which is to abolish ICE even if it means shutting everything down and waiting. At this point it’s a daily duel between Chuck Schumer, Chris Murphy, and Cory Booker to see who can hit the most fatuous notes. My money is on Murphy. “It should freak the American people out that Trump, Noem and Bovino lie so enthusiastically,” he tweeted the other day. It should freak them out even more that, knowing as much, Murphy proposes reforms that are as easy to ignore or circumvent as all the laws and rules they’re ignoring now. His latest demands, tweeted Wednesday on X:
– No more roving patrols or profiling. ICE/CBP are not trained to do this. And it’s wrong. Require warrants.
– No more secret police. Take off the masks. Show ID.
– And real accountability for murder and assault.
That’s telling them. And while you’re at it, why not tougher jaywalking penalties to keep them from dashing into the street, smashing out car windows, and kidnapping the people inside?
Certain things become clearer when there’s a boot on the neck of your town and your neighbors. And one is that the shameful performance of the national Democratic leadership since the siege of Minneapolis rehearses the whole history of their capitulation to the hard right since the days of Reagan, writ small.
You cry out for relief from Nazis and you get–good Germans!
Steve Perry is a former editor of the defunct Minneapolis weekly City Pages and a longtime CounterPunch contributor.
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