The Trump administration has announced it is going to withdraw 700 immigration agents from Minneapolis. On the surface, this is a well deserved win for the people of the city, who have spent weeks under siege from the US government – putting their lives on the line to document gangs of masked men snatching their neighbours from the street, with total impunity.
The real story is more complex. Few in Minneapolis are counting this as a win just yet, not least because around 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents were deployed to their city and only a few hundred are being sent away.
That leaves no shortage of agents to continue terrorising residents. Many families have spent the first month of 2026 in hiding – from their own government – for fear that they or their loved ones might be taken, even if they have legal status. Since the Supreme Court made it legal to stop people based solely on their ethnicity, being “legal” isn’t enough protection.
If ICE seizes a US citizen or lawful resident, it might mean days or weeks in custody before the confusion is cleared up – and people die in ICE custody. In Minneapolis, people in hiding aren’t ready to emerge. Their neighbours will continue to deliver them food while agents aren’t watching. Citizens will continue to go out on patrol, documenting their governments’ actions.
The fear in the city is that the partial withdrawal might convince the media that the crisis is over. It seems the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti didn’t cause any regret or alarm within the White House – it just caused them to realise they had a political problem. The administration is trying to do the minimum possible to change the headlines, while continuing its programme of mass deportations.
Even a bigger withdrawal wouldn’t be a total victory. Minneapolis was not the first city to find itself on the wrong end of President Trump and his thugs. He sent troops or federal agents into Los Angeles, Washington DC, Portland and Chicago – all heavily Democratic areas – and has threatened to do the same to New York and elsewhere. Pulling out of Minneapolis doesn’t mean much if the same agents are deployed to terrorise another location instead.
There are signs, too, of a bigger and more sinister plan in motion than simply using the machinery of the federal government to ramp up deportations. More than one figure close to Trump has connected these ICE raids to bids by the President and the Republican machinery around him to cling on to power at the midterms and other future elections.
Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi appeared to give this game away in a letter to Minnesota’s Governor, Tim Walz, in which she seemingly demanded access to the state’s voter records, asking for the power to purge voters she saw as ineligible. Under the US constitution, elections are managed by the states, not the federal government.
Mourners visit a memorial for shooting victim Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty)In a podcast interview with Dan Bongino, his former deputy FBI director, on Monday, Trump said Republicans should “nationalise” voting and called for GOP officials to “take over” procedures in 15 states, usually run by local officials.
On Tuesday he reiterated his view that the government “should get involved” in elections which he claimed – withoiut evidence – were rife with “corruption”, claiming that if states “can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over”.
The idea that Democrats have abused voter rolls to allow illegal immigrants to cast ballots is a baseless conspiracy theory pushed by Trump as part of his narrative that the 2020 election was “stolen”. Bondi has demanded access to the voter rolls of Minnesota – a demand likened to a “ransom note” by the state in court filings – just as Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, personally oversaw an FBI raid on an election centre in Georgia.
Trump’s officials appear to be trying to seize control of America’s election apparatus, in direct violation of the constitution. Steve Bannon, his campaign chief for his 2016 election run, took this a step further on Tuesday by suggesting that the administration would deploy ICE agents at every polling booth in November – a blatant bid to deter millions of voters from turning up.
“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannond said on his podcast. “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.”
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The White House has, for now, disavowed Bannon’s proposal, but that means little. Trump himself spent much of the 2024 election campaign disavowing “Project 2025” – the radical nationalist blueprint for his second administration – only to hire one of its chief architects into his White House, and enact the plan almost in full. The President’s opponents are right to view Bannon’s plan as a very real possibility.
America’s dark days are far from over, then. Fewer agents in Minneapolis is surely a good thing, but it is a small relief at best. However that does not mean things are hopeless, either. The persistent and peaceful resistance to occupation by Minneapolis’s ordinary residents shows that the USA isn’t the country Trump and the fanatics around him remember.
The people of Minneapolis didn’t greet ICE as heroes, nor did they stand idly by while their neighbours were disappeared. They organised, and they resisted. They showed themselves to be better. Should the President try to deploy ICE agents nationally, at the ballot, the rest of America would face the same situation as that faced by Minneapolis – the chance to show Trump who they really are. The stakes would be no less than the future of American democracy.
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