Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann, and you’re watching Raw America.
Republicans may have run on hardline immigration policies to return to power, but now they’re learning what happens when their draconian agenda makes its way to their own backyard. The President is now directly contradicting the actions of his own Director of National Intelligence. And the chaos in Minneapolis is now forcing the Trump regime to re-calibrate.
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GOP Senator Wants ICE to Stay Out of His State
Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi has just delivered a stunning rebuke to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement plans. The powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee has written to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanding that the department take its plans for a massive immigration detention center somewhere else. Not in Mississippi. Not in his backyard.
The irony is almost too rich to believe. Wicker voted for the funding that would make these detention centers possible. He supported giving ICE tens of billions of dollars by voting for Trump’s Big Ugly Bill. He backed the annual DHS funding that enables these very operations. But now that a warehouse in Mississippi is being eyed for conversion into a detention camp for 8,500 immigrants, Wicker suddenly has concerns about public safety, medical capacity, and economic impacts.
What Wicker really seems concerned about is economic development. The location had already been designated for economic purposes, and converting an industrial asset into a detention center forecloses economic growth opportunities. Translation: we want jobs and tax revenue, not a prison camp for immigrants that generates no comparable economic returns or community benefits.
This is the politics of immigration enforcement in 2026. Republicans love to talk tough about border security and mass deportations when they are playing to their base. But when the actual machinery of that enforcement arrives in their states, suddenly there are concerns. Suddenly the costs become real. They have no problem terrorizing their political opponents with their rogue agency, but they won’t stand for it in their own states.
Trump Contradicts Gabbard on Election Raid
President Donald Trump admitted Wednesday he had no idea why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard attended the FBI’s raid on a Georgia election facility last week. Asked by NBC News why Gabbard was there, Trump replied, “I don’t know, but a lot of the cheating comes from... it’s international cheating.” He concluded, “She’s foreign governments.”
The comments directly contradict Gabbard’s own explanation. In a Monday letter, she claimed her presence was “requested by the President” under her “broad statutory authority” related to election security intelligence.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche also couldn’t explain her presence, telling CNN, “I don’t know why the director was there.”
The January 28 raid at the Fulton County Election Hub seized materials relating to the 2020 election. Gabbard was photographed flanked by FBI agents during the operation.
Sen. Mark Warner questioned whether she violated her legal obligation to keep intelligence committees informed or was “injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories.”
Sources said her presence was unusual, as her role “does not include on-site involvement in criminal investigative work.”
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Democrats Detail Their Plan to Rein in ICE
Back in Washington, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House counterpart Hakeem Jeffries have released 10 policy demands aimed at putting ICE on a short leash. This comes amid a standoff over DHS funding, with Congress facing a two-week deadline to negotiate a deal to keep the department funded.
The demands reflect growing Democratic anger over ICE tactics, especially following two separate fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis last month. Democrats’ demands are simple: Federal immigration agents cannot continue to cause chaos in our cities while using taxpayer money that should be used to make life more affordable for working families.
Among the demands are requirements that ICE agents wear body cameras, bans on agents wearing masks during operations, and agents being required to wear badges with their names. These are changes Democrats have sought for weeks as images of masked federal agents confronting Americans have sparked public outrage.
Trump DHS Re-Calibrates Its War on Protesters
And the Trump DHS appears to back down in their war on protesters. This brings us to Minneapolis, where the Trump administration has just done a stunning 180. Or, at least, they want you to think they have. Border czar Tom Homan announced that 700 federal agents will be withdrawn from Minnesota, a little less than a third of those deployed. This comes after leaked documents revealed the feds had amassed some 35,000 weapons in Minneapolis by mid-January, including crowd control munitions like tear gas, stun grenades, and pepper spray.
A homeland security official described the inventory as “overkill” to independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, saying they had never seen this amount of weaponry being used. These weapons were intended for the protesters, not immigration enforcement. Clearly they were expecting problems, and they got them, right? They created them. The administration appeared to be preparing for war with the American public.
But the massive backlash following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti changed the calculus. Even Trump sought to distance himself from the previous Minneapolis commander, Bovino, calling him a “pretty out-there kind of guy.” Both Trump and Homan struck rare notes of contrition, with the president saying the administration would “de-escalate a little bit.”
The withdrawal may seem like it represents a victory of public will over federal overreach, but all it has done has caused an authoritarian re-calibration. Politicians will no doubt try to take credit, but the record shows this very slight drawdown — there are now only three times more ICE officers than there are police officers in Minneapolis rather than four times as many — came from sustained public pressure and protest. This is how dictators seize power. They grab a bunch of it, then they back off slightly in response to public pressure, and when public outrage dies down, they grab even more. So stay awake. Now, we need to go on to the real work of eliminating ICE from Minneapolis altogether.
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I’m Thom Hartmann for Raw America. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.
