President Donald Trump said Monday he is sending border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota to directly oversee Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the aftermath of the killing of Alex Pretti over the weekend by a federal agent.
“I am sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight,” Trump wrote on social media. “He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there. Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X that Homan will be “managing ICE operations on the ground” while working on the investigations into state fraud that the administration is pursuing.
Leavitt didn’t directly address questions from NOTUS about whether this shift means Trump is unsatisfied with the Department of Homeland Security’s response in Minnesota.
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“Tom Homan is uniquely positioned to drop everything and focus solely on Minnesota to solve the problems that have been created by the lack of cooperation from state and local officials,” Leavitt told NOTUS.
The White House did not answer additional questions about whether CBP officials like Greg Bovino will remain in Minnesota, or whether Noem or Homan is in charge.
The announcement that Homan will make the trip follows a muted response from the White House to the shooting and subsequent protests and backlash. Homan, a former director of ICE, previously blamed Democratic leaders for “hateful rhetoric” after a federal agent killed Renee Good, who, like Pretti, was a U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis earlier this month.
After Good was killed, Homan told CBS it would be “unprofessional” for him to make a judgment call based on one video of the shooting.
“Let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation,” he said. He later clarified that he hadn’t seen adequate footage to comment but reiterated support for ICE.
“This interview was taped earlier today before I had the opportunity to see all the footage and learn the details of the incident,” Homan said on social media in early January. “As I repeatedly have said, the brave men and women of ICE are heroes. Like all Americans, our officers have a right to self defense. Full stop.”
Homan continued to defend the agent who shot Good and said he was acting lawfully in self-defense.
“I truly believe that that officer thought his life was in danger to take that action,” Homan said on Fox News a few days later.
Homan said the federal investigation into Good’s death would reveal further details, but suggested that there was an organized, “funded” attack against ICE officers. And he argued that interfering with ICE officers’ ability to do their jobs is a crime.
“The media is normalizing interference with ICE,” Homan said in the Fox News interview on Jan. 11, arguing that the operations in Minnesota have largely been successful. “We need to enforce the law and arrest these bad guys. We’ve already arrested over a thousand people in that state, and we’re gonna continue to do exactly what Congress has allowed us to do and what the law allows us to do.”
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Editor’s Note: This story was updated with comment from press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
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