Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has reportedly been ordered to leave the city of Minneapolis, the Associated Press and The Atlantic reported Monday evening, citing a person close to the decision as well as Homeland Security Department officials, respectively.
Before federal immigration agents surged into Minneapolis beginning last month, the city had been calm, and its roughly 600 police officers had few problems as they performed their duties. Indeed, “The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone,” Chief Brian O’Hara told CBS News on Sunday.
But after Bovino and 2,000 immigration enforcers arrived three weeks ago, three Americans were shot by federal agents on the city’s streets, and two have been killed, O’Hara reminded viewers Sunday.
“This is not sustainable,” he said. “This is taking an enormous toll, trying to manage all of this chaos on top of having to be the police department for a major city. It’s too much.”
The White House’s “border czar” Tom Homan will now take over in Minneapolis, which is about 300 miles from the Canadian-U.S. border. And Homan—who was reportedly accused of taking a $50,000 bribe in an FBI sting operation in 2024—will begin by meeting with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, President Trump said on social media.
Homan’s visit comes three days after Bovino claimed the latest American shot dead by federal agents had planned to “massacre” law enforcement officers, despite multiple videos from the confrontation that did not support Bovino’s claim. The man who was killed Saturday was a 37-year-old ICU nurse from the Department of Veterans Affairs named Alex Pretti. His killing “ignited political backlash and raised fresh questions about how the operation was being run,” AP reports.
Bovino will now “return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon,” Nick Miroff of The Atlantic reports, and says Bovino’s “sudden demotion is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is reconsidering its most aggressive tactics” as it continues its effort to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, as the president promised on the campaign trail. But that ambition has not been without its violent and often indiscriminate stumbles, as recent developments in Minnesota have revealed.
Also new: “Minnesota’s top federal judge says ICE has been violating court orders repeatedly—detaining noncitizens or rushing them to Texas despite judges’ commands,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney reported Monday evening.
In response, the judge ordered ICE acting director Todd Lyons to appear in court Friday, declaring, “The court’s patience is at an end.” He also threatened Lyons with contempt for ICE’s repeated violation of court orders.
And on Capitol Hill, the chiefs of ICE, Customs and Border Protections, and Citizenship and Immigration Services have been called to testify on Feb. 12, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, announced Monday on social media. Paul chairs the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.
Related: Two legal experts just shared a list of “10 Questions the Trump Administration Needs to Answer About Minnesota” published Tuesday at Just Security. Queries include:
- “How can the Trump administration conclude with no investigation that both the Good and Pretti shootings were justified?”
- “How can you justify the repeated shooting of Pretti when he was lying motionless on the ground?”
- “Does filming or shouting at federal agents during a protest justify federal agents use of deadly force?”
- “If having a gun at a protest is impermissible, as the FBI Director Patel has said, does that apply to the armed people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th and would the Capitol police have been justified in shooting them?” Read the rest, here.
Rhetoric watch: Several senior White House officials—including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—have asserted that Alex Pretti was a “domestic terrorist.” That was “not a slip of the tongue or an impulsive idea. Instead, it appears to be part of the administration’s campaign to demonize opposition to its anti-immigrant policies as “domestic terrorism,” and to weaponize powers of the federal government against such perceived political opponents,” warn legal fellow Tom Jocelyn and former Defense Department special counsel Ryan Goodman, writing Monday in Just Security.
Developing: The FBI says it will begin investigating Minnesota citizens who use the Signal messaging app to track ICE movements. FBI Director Kash Patel announced the move Monday on a podcast with conservative activist Benny Johnson. NBC News reports Patel’s remarks “quickly drew skepticism from free speech advocates who said the First Amendment protects members of the public who share legally obtained information, such as the names of federal agents or where they are conducting enforcement operations.”
Second opinion: “Given this administration’s poor track record of distinguishing protected speech from criminal conduct, any investigation like this deserves very close scrutiny,” Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told NBC.
- When you’re a hammer: A former Army special forces soldier said he believes ordinary American citizens could not possibly organize against ICE as cohesively and effectively as they have in Minneapolis without having closely studied the lessons of insurgencies like al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. According to the Green Beret, “What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t ‘protest.’ It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.” Eric Schwalm argued his case—which strikes your Afghan-vet D Brief-er as a bit overcaffeinated and over the top—in 425 words over on Twitter Sunday, here.
New: Employees at the Minnesota Department of Corrections have taken a stand against misinformation from the Homeland Security Department. They recently created a webpage, “Combatting DHS Misinformation,” Minnesota Corrections official Safia Khan said in a post on LinkedIn Monday because officials in the Trump administration have been “distorting facts, mislabeling state custody transfers as ICE arrests, and justifying armed federal deployments based on fabrications.”
“We are witnessing the machinery of propaganda operate at scale,” Khan wrote. “So we fought back with facts. We released proof, footage, and records showing that ICE arrests being touted on federal websites were, in reality, routine, pre-scheduled state-to-federal custody transfers, not a result of Operation Metro Surge.”
“The Department of Corrections alone has identified at least 68 false claims, and we have made every one of them public,” said Khan, and emphasized, “Our team didn’t seek this fight but we have met it with clarity and resolve.”
Update: The U.S. woman who was shot five times by ICE in Chicago last fall is asking a judge to share evidence from her case, which is under a protective order that her lawyer says “keeps the entire country in the dark” about how federal agents use deadly force against American citizens. The Chicago Sun-Times has more about the case of Marimar Martinez, who was shot, criminally charged, and finally cleared when U.S. attorneys dropped the case on Nov. 20, when Martinez’s lawyers challenged feds’ evidence in the case.
A note of clarity on legal accountability for federal agents who kill U.S. citizens: “A series of decisions by the Supreme Court has made it all but impossible to hold federal officers liable for damages in federal lawsuits for violating our constitutional rights—such as in a February 2020 decision involving a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed an unarmed teenager without provocation,” law professors Barry Friedman and Steve Vladeck explained for readers in the New York Times on Monday. “Instead, the historical backstop for a lack of federal accountability, going all the way back to the founding, has been state law.”
However, “the ability to prosecute federal law enforcement officers who commit state crimes in the course of their duties would turn on whether a reasonable officer in their position would have believed that their actions were necessary to fulfill their duties,” Friedman and Vladeck note. “That standard may be appropriately strict, to maintain federal authority when it is needed (think of federal protection for civil rights protesters in the 1960s), but at least based on the videos so many of us have seen, it should not be impossible.” Read more (gift link), here.
A Minnesota newspaper published a visual explainer on the health effects of chemical irritants used by federal authorities. Review that emblem of our current milieu over at the Star Tribune.
ICYMI: Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed Saturday that “chaos” in Minnesota would end if state officials would hand over the state’s full voter roll—including Social Security numbers, drivers license data, and party affiliations. She sent a letter proposing this to Gov. Tim Walz, calling the handover a “common sense” solution to the state’s problems.
This escalation is part of a pattern, Abby Vesoulis and Ari Berman warned Monday, writing for Mother Jones. “These requests and lawsuits are part of a decadeslong history of right-wing activists seeking private voter data to advance the unproven narrative that there is rampant noncitizen voter fraud proliferating across the US. That the DOJ is now using its considerable resources to promote the same repeatedly debunked theory represents a major escalation of these tactics.”
Meanwhile, users say TikTok is stifling posts about the Minneapolis shooting just “days after a deal to spin off the U.S. business to new investors was finalized,” the Washington Post reported Monday.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an investigation into the claims as well, which began over the weekend—and which TikTok officials attributed to a power outage at a data center, NBC News reports.
Consider the case of national-security law professor Steve Vladeck, who on Sunday “recorded a video on TikTok about why DHS’s arguments for the power to enter homes without judicial warrants in immigration cases are bunk.” That was a supplement to his highly-recommended Monday newsletter, “One First,” which tackled that subject this week.
Nine hours after posting his explainer to the platform, “TikTok still says my video is ‘under review,’ and can’t be shared,” Vladeck said on a different social media platform. So he shared a link to that video—which you can find here—on the alternate platform instead.
Update: After a roughly 24-hour review period, TikTok finally posted his Sunday video on Monday.
Related reading: “TikTok alternative Skylight soars to 380K+ users after TikTok US deal finalized,” TechCrunch reported Monday.
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated the concentration camp at Auschwitz, a key development in revealing the Holocaust to the world. Since 2005, the UN and its member states have held ceremonies on this day to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism.
Around the world
International observers are closely watching Iran, where the U.S. Navy has dispatched an aircraft carrier strike group as authorities in Tehran continue their deadly crackdown amid unrest that’s been brewing for weeks.
New York Times: “Officials in the Middle East are increasingly worried the United States will strike Iran in the coming days, an attack that could trigger a cycle of retaliation against U.S. bases across the region by Iran and its proxy groups.”
Lincoln has reached CENTCOM’s AOR. As of Monday, the Abraham Lincoln carrier group was in the Central Command’s area of responsibility in the western Indian Ocean, a U.S. official told the Times. “If the White House were to order attacks on Iran, the carrier could, in theory, take military action within a day or two. The United States has already sent a dozen F-15E attack planes to the region to strengthen strike aircraft numbers, according to U.S. officials.” Read on, here.
Adds The Guardian: “The US fleet including several guided-missile destroyers are not yet in final position but are already in striking range of Iran. It is by no means certain that further US attacks on Iran will reignite the street protests, as many Iranians opposed to the clerical leadership in power since 1979 are also opposed to externally imposed regime change.” More, here.
ICYMI: “Bombing Iran would shore up its regime,” Rosemary Kelanic, who leads the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, opined last week in Defense One. “External attacks stir up nationalism and redirect public anger outward, a ‘rally-around-the-flag’ effect long documented by political scientists.” Read on, here.
Dubai standing down: The UAE said Monday it is “not allowing its airspace, territory, or waters to be used in any hostile actions against Iran, and to not providing any logistical support in this regard,” according to a statement from the foreign ministry.
In other regional activity, Iranian ships have been supplying jet fuel to the military junta in Myanmar, which took over following a coup in February 2021. Just a few days later, the junta’s war planes conducted a fatal air attack on a school, which killed two people and wounded nearly two dozen others. Investigative journalists from Reuters followed the path of Iranian tankers from ports near Iraq, through the Hormuz Strait and to destinations inside Myanmar this past fall to make their case in a multimedia presentation published Monday.
Panning out: The Myanmar junta has attacked “more than 1,000 civilian locations in 15 months,” according to Reuters. “Iran has also dispatched cargoes of urea, a key ingredient in the junta’s munitions, including the bombs it drops from drones and paragliders.”
Why it matters: “Taken together, the Iranian deliveries to Myanmar’s military have helped shift the dynamic of the five-year civil war, which pits the junta against an array of rebel groups, none of whom have a conventional air force or a ready supply of weapons as powerful as the bombs and missiles launched by fighter jets. And for Iran’s embattled government, the trade has brought in new revenue and influence as sanctions tighten and old allies lose power,” four Reuters journalists explain. Worth the click, here.
Developing: China is investigating Xi’s top military deputy, Reuters reported Saturday, and expanded their coverage on Monday. According to the New York Times, “General Zhang’s downfall is of a different magnitude from the dozens of other generals who have been toppled in Mr. Xi’s unrelenting campaign against perceived corruption and disloyalty over the past three years. His fate has astonished even longtime experts who thought that they had taken full measure of Mr. Xi, China’s most powerful and imperious leader in generations.”
Additional reading:
Trump said he would raise tariffs on South Korea on Monday. “Autos, Lumber, Pharma, and all other Reciprocal TARIFFS” would be raised to 25 percent from 15 percent, he declared on his social media platform, because he believes Seoul is not moving quickly enough to implement the bilateral trade deal agreed in October over gilded gifts. It’s not clear whether or when the tariff increase will actually happen, notes CNN, which adds, “Trump’s ability to increase across-the-board tariffs on goods from South Korea or other countries could be hindered by the outcome of a landmark tariff case currently before the Supreme Court.”
Related: Secret recordings show that Sen. Ted Cruz ridiculed Trump’s tariff policies in meetings with donors last year, Axios reports.
Effect on warships? It’s not immediately clear how increasing tariffs might affect Trump’s promise to help South Korea build nuclear submarines, nor the signed and prospective deals meant to garner Korean help in building warships for the U.S. Navy.
Around the Defense Department
Lastly today, Navy shipbuilding stands to get $27 billion in funding in 2026, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reports off last week’s compromise bill. “House and Senate appropriators backed the White House’s shipbuilding goals with an additional $6.5 billion in funding for fiscal year 2026—including adjustments to fix accounting errors resulting from last year’s budget reconciliation. The compromise bill, released last week, allots a total $27.2 billion for shipbuilding, with increases across several efforts.” Read on, here.
Additional reading:
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