President Donald Trump’s heavy-handed immigration blitz could make a return after the midterms, a political commentator predicted.
Author and journalist Molly Jong-Fast said she doesn’t believe that the 79-year-old president has given up on his Minnesota-style raids—he simply knew to set them aside to avoid jeopardizing the Republican Party’s odds in the midterms.
“I really do believe—and I think it’s important when we cover this to realize—that the reason that every state is not Minnesota at this moment is not because Donald Trump has had an about-face on immigration,” she told The New Republic. “It’s because Donald Trump sees the midterms coming down the pike and he knows it’s not popular.”
Immigration and border patrol agents plunged Minnesota into chaos in January when they killed two American citizens—Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both 37—in a frenzied effort to round up immigrants as part of “Operation Metro Surge.”
In February, two weeks after Pretti was shot dead, border czar Tom Homan announced the end of the operations in Minnesota. The following month, Trump fired Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
Though Trump continued to insist in March that “people are starting to say, ‘ICE, you are nice guys,’” several polls showed that the agency had grown increasingly unpopular, with only 33 percent of Americans holding favorable views of ICE in February, down from six points just months earlier.
But Jong-Fast isn’t convinced that the violent raids have ended there.
“I think he’s got, certainly, an inability to steady himself, to prevent himself from doing things, to prevent himself from saying things. It feels like his frontal lobe is not firing on all four cylinders,” she said.
“So the question is, what does a Donald Trump that is not hemmed in by the midterms look like? And I think it looks a lot more like a country of Minnesotas,” she continued.
“Noem lost her job because it was loud and it looked very corrupt and it was bad for business. But that doesn’t mean that that kind of corruption couldn’t come back after the midterms. He just doesn’t want to lose the House because he doesn’t want to get impeached.”
When reached for comment, the White House insisted that Trump was elected on his immigration-related campaign promises.
“President Trump campaigned on and was elected on his promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in history,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “The entire Trump Administration is working to fulfill that promise despite the media’s and Democrats’ lies about ICE operations. ICE officers conduct themselves with the utmost professionalism and integrity to protect American citizens from criminal illegal aliens. It’s time for the media to start sharing the truth.”
