Paul Cantrell
Please do not waste your time listening to, reading, or analyzing what Tom Homan actually said this morning. That man is full of shit, everything that comes out of his mouth it shit, and you don’t need to eat it.
I hope ICE and CBP actually leave soon. I’ll believe it when they do. They’re still out there right now. They’re still horrible. They’re still destroying lives.
1/
Paul Cantrell
Even if they do leave, they’ll still exist, they’ll still be funded like a national military, they’ll still be an authoritarian secret police in the making.
And the damage they did to my city, to the lives of my neighbors, will echo through generations.
2/
Paul Cantrell
Hold on to this:
Operation Metro Surge was a catastrophic failure for the Trump regime. Yes, as a terrorist operation, it succeeded: they meant to hurt and terrorize black and Brown people and the whole opposition, and they succeeded at that. But in doing so they lost their credibility, they lost the support of mushy institutions and politicians, they lost much of the popular support a would-be authoritarian needs to consolidate power.
And they lost it because we stood up to them.
3/
Paul Cantrell
The Trump regime is •still• in the “alignment” phase of establishing authoritarianism, trying to consolidate power and get everyone lined up being them.
Still. Meaning they haven’t done it yet. Still.
And they look a lot further from it than they did at the start of the ICE invasion of MSP.
/end
Paul Cantrell
From where I sit, I don’t think it’s a trap. It’s been clear for a while that they’re digging themselves deeper in a hole the longer they keep doing what they’ve been doing, and that they’re going to need to declare “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” so they can switch to some different awful thing.
However, this is very much a “don’t let your guard down” moment. They’re gearing up for some different horrible thing. They’re not disappearing.
Paul Cantrell
Honestly, I’ve been expecting the “mission accomplished” banner since the day they murdered Alex Pretti. Maybe they were hoping for an ICE officer to be shot in retaliation so they could go for martial law, but a few days later when that hadn’t happened and the country was still seething, the writing was on the wall.
Paul Cantrell
If I’m guessing, I expect them to go hard on strategies that are much less visible: snatching people from jails instead of streets, mass detention camps that nobody can see inside, that sort of thing. They need to sustain the terror, but they can’t afford to keep looking so bad in videos while they do it.
Redish Lab
Agreed that we cannot let up our vigilance.
However, I would assume they are going to another city to do the next iteration. There was LA. Then there was Chicago. Then there was MSP.
They don't have enough agents to attack multiple cities, but they are refining their methods. Like the Borg, they learn from their encounters with the us. I can only hope that other cities can learn from what was done here (I am SO proud of MSP!) and they can defend themselves as well.
Meanwhile, we still need to shut DHS down. To quote MN Senator Tina Smith: "We need to rip ICE down to the studs and start over." https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/opinion/ice-trump-good-pretti.html
Paul Cantrell
Update from later in the day in MSP:
I’ve heard or uttered variations on the phrase “I’ll believe it when I see it” in numerous conversations through out the day. That seems to be the prevailing sentiment. People are willing to be hopeful, but nobody’s counting their chickens just yet.
Paul Cantrell
In the meantime, please note carefully the rhetorical deception Republicans are playing the Senate:
They whining that Democrats are holding up funding for the whole DHS because “they’re angry about this incident” (meaning the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti) but “There are thousands of arrests that are happening every day that are happening by the book” (i.e. without a murder).
Deception: because the objection isn’t just the two murders; it’s the utterly reckless, unconstitutional, authoritarian behavior of ICE that Good and Pretti were protesting when ICE murdered them.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/dhs-funding-blocked-senate-democrats
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