In the wake of Alex Pretti’s fatal shooting, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who had been tasked with overseeing Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, has been told to leave Minneapolis, a senior Trump administration official told MS NOW.
President Donald Trump has dispatched his border czar, Tom Homan, to the city in Bovino’s place, as the situation there remains tense. Deborah Fleischaker, who served as the acting chief of staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Biden administration, spoke to “The Weeknight” about why she doesn’t believe the shakeup will change the situation on the ground.
“Changing leadership isn’t the goal,” Fleischaker said on Monday evening, noting that both Bovino and Homan have had fraught histories. “Simply changing the leadership is like putting lipstick on a pig.”
Instead, Fleischaker suggested the administration needed “a change in approach” to “de-escalate” the situation. “By promising a change in leadership, that’s simply not de-escalation,” she said.
“The Weeknight” co-host Symone Sanders Townsend agreed with that analysis and said Homan’s supervisory role “feels like an optical shift, but not a tactical one.”
Sanders Townsend said the administration’s efforts were likely an attempt to quiet opposition, as protests continue nationwide against ICE’s presence in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
“But if the tactics don’t change — and there’s nothing to me that says the tactics are changing — I think the people are going to need to continue to speak up and speak out,” she said. “Because just responding to the optics isn’t going to save anybody.”
According to Fleischaker, it isn’t just the American people who are unhappy with the administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement. The former Biden official said she believes rank-and-file agents inside the Homeland Security Department are also pushing for a change.
“I think that the law enforcement agents in DHS — many of them, not all of them, many of them — are frustrated,” she said. “I don’t think that this is the way that many ICE agents in particular want to conduct their jobs.”
Fleischaker said immigration agents would “like to see a move back towards rationality” and to “go back to the way that it was, where they conducted careful, cautious, targeted enforcement, as opposed to this sort of roving sweeps.”
The former ICE official told MS NOW she believed that kind of change was possible, noting that growing opposition to the administration may have passed a “possible inflection point.”
“They’ve seen the harm that this is doing to the public,” Fleischaker said. “Public opinion isn’t with them anymore. People are fed up, people are scared.”
You can watch Fleischaker’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”