Kristi Noem
President Donald Trump’s decision to send border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, putting him in direct charge of the Minneapolis immigration crackdown, is doing double duty. It is a high profile response to two fatal ICE-related shootings and, inside Washington, widely read as a sharp rebuke to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s handling of the crisis. The move instantly reshuffled power inside the Department of Homeland Security, elevating Homan on the ground while leaving Noem to insist she is still in control from Washington.
Trump has publicly praised Noem and kept her in her job, but the optics are hard to miss: when the situation in Minneapolis spiraled, he reached for a trusted enforcer outside the normal chain of command. That choice has fueled talk that the president is losing patience with his own Homeland Security chief even as the White House scrambles to say otherwise.
Why Trump turned to Tom Homan in Minneapolis
On its face, Trump’s call to dispatch Tom Homan to Minnesota is about regaining control of a deadly situation. After a second fatal ICE-related shooting in Minneapolis, President Trump sent his border point man to take charge of immigration operations in the city, a move that immediately sidelined the existing response led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and former Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who had been overseeing the crackdown before Homan arrived. That shift followed days of criticism over how federal agents handled the shootings and how senior officials talked about them on television.
Trump has long leaned on Homan as his go to hardliner on immigration, hiring him to oversee border security in his second term and branding him his “border czar” as the administration ramped up enforcement against people in the country without proper documentation. In Minneapolis, Homan is now replacing Gregory Bovino as the face of the operation, a change that has been framed as part of a broader reshuffle of the power structure around Bovino inside the department. Profiles of Greg Bovino and separate reporting on how Homan, who Trump to run border security, underline how central he has become to the president’s immigration agenda.
Homan’s arrival is not just symbolic. The White House border policy adviser has already said that any scaling back of the Minnesota crackdown will depend on the state’s cooperation, including giving federal agents access to local jails, and he has promised “massive changes” to how ICE and Customs and Border Protection operate there if local officials get on board. In public briefings, Tom Homan has tied any drawdown of federal agents to that access, while also acknowledging the political pressure created by the killing of an intensive care unit nurse named Pretti, the second U.S. citizen to die in the Minneapolis operations. He has described his mission in Minnesota as part of the Trump administration’s broader push on immigration enforcement, a message he repeated in televised interviews where Trump administration’s top laid out plans for an ICE drawdown if Minnesota officials cooperate.
The quiet humiliation of Kristi Noem
Inside the administration, the political subtext is just as important as the operational shakeup. Before Homan was sent in, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol veteran Gregory Bovino were the ones leading the federal response in Minneapolis, appearing on Sunday shows and defending the crackdown. According to reporting on internal conversations, Donald Trump later complained that Bovino and Noem had come off as too “callous” in those television appearances, a reaction that helped push him toward sending Homan to Minnesota to do damage control. That account of Trump’s frustration with Bovino and Noem has fed the narrative that the president was personally unhappy with his Homeland Security chief’s performance.
Publicly, the White House is trying to put out that fire. Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt has insisted that Homan was not sent to Minnesota because Noem lost Trump’s trust, arguing instead that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem handled the initial response in Minneapolis appropriately and that the border czar’s deployment is simply about adding capacity. In that telling, the White House is backing both Homan and Noem, even as the president’s own actions tell a more complicated story. Trump himself has tried to strike that balance, telling reporters that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will remain in her post and saying he thinks “she’s doing a very good job” while also stressing that Homan will report directly to him and is in charge of the agents on the ground, a message he delivered in a short clip where Donald Trump said would stay while praising his border czar.
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