February 12, 2026 | Thursday
Tags: tom-homan
A 77-day ICE and Border Patrol surge in Minneapolis has concluded after roughly 4,000 arrests, officer-involved shootings and sustained public protests. Meanwhile, Congress is negotiating Homeland Security funding that ties appropriations to new operational reforms for ICE and Border Patrol, raising the prospect of a partial lapse in funding.
Tom Homan announced at a morning press conference that Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis is concluded. The operation had begun on December 1 and Homan declared the surge of ICE, Border Patrol and supporting personnel finished after what his office counted as roughly 4,080 arrests over the operation’s span. That total equates to the roughly 55 arrests per day Homan’s team reported during the 77 day deployment. The sequence of events described publicly included an earlier personnel change when Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino was removed from leadership of the surge, the graduated withdrawal of roughly 700 officers reported last week, and then the full drawdown announced by Homan. The public narrative accompanying the withdrawal includes two high-profile officer-involved shootings, the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretty, broad street-level protests and organized disruption of enforcement operations in Minneapolis, and statements from Homan that local officials will now “notify officers about an immigrant’s imminent release and allow them to make arrests inside jails instead of on the street.” Homan framed the operation as having “targeted serious offenders” and argued it identified more than 4,000 arrests since December 1, while also acknowledging internal failures and increased internal affairs oversight in Minnesota.
The raw numbers and the operational timeline permit an evidence-based contrast with past enforcement tempos. In calendar 2025 the administration’s own statistics registered a much higher daily arrest rate for ICE nationwide, sometimes cited internally at about 1,000 arrests per day and roughly 350,000 arrests for the year. The Minneapolis surge, by contrast, was billed as an escalatory showcase of mass enforcement in response to alleged large scale fraud within Minneapolis’s Somali community and to alleged criminality linked to that fraud. The deployment was visibly large, included Border Patrol and National Guard elements at certain points, and was accompanied by coordinated social media documentation of door-to-door actions. The sequence — surge deployed, public resistance and organized disruption, two fatal shootings, removal of Bovino, incremental withdrawals and then the announcement that the operation is concluded — is now a closed operational episode with concrete metrics and a public exit statement from Homan.
The strategic interpretation of that sequence is decisive for future enforcement. The withdrawal was accompanied by an explicit policy shift toward precision enforcement limited to individuals with criminal histories and an administrative reliance on state and county lockups to effect transfers to ICE custody. That shift reduces the visible street presence required for mass sweeps and, in practice, limits removals to the subset of noncitizens who are apprehended by local criminal justice systems. On the numbers this is material. Mid-2024 figures referenced by administration officials and press reporting put the universe of noncitizens with criminal histories at fewer than 700,000, far short of the 11 million plus estimate for the total unauthorized population. Converting an authorization to deport millions into actual removals would have required a persistent, high-tempo daily arrest-and-removal capability across large metropolitan areas. The Minneapolis operation ended with a demonstrable reduction in tempo and a public recalibration to targeted removal. The tactical and operational lesson is unambiguous: visible mass enforcement in a major city produced sustained confrontation, political blowback and incremental policy retreat rather than the accelerated removals that would be required to meet campaign-era promises.
Congress is advancing a package of appropriations bills that splits regular funding into discrete measures, and Democrats have conditioned support for Homeland Security funding on a multilateral reform package aimed at restraining ICE and Border Patrol tactics. The negotiating text as described on air and in contemporaneous reporting includes a roughly ten point set of requirements: mandatory body worn cameras, nationally standardized rules of engagement for enforcement actions, restrictions on the use of certain protective concealments described colloquially as “masks,” greater local control and notification requirements before federal arrests in local facilities, and amplified oversight and reporting mechanisms. Republicans on the relevant appropriations subcommittees have provided partial concessions but not the full suite of reforms demanded by the House Democratic negotiators. The immediate consequence is a looming partial lapse in appropriations targeted to the Department of Homeland Security that would affect non-enforcement components such as the Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration while, by political design or effect, leaving day-to-day ICE and Border Patrol operations temporarily insulated from funding cuts in the short term. The funding bill timeline places a critical vote and potential partial shutdown risk in very near-term congressional action.
Those legislative demands will have operational consequences for enforcement even if the bills do not immediately cut ICE payroll lines. Mandating body cameras, imposing binding national rules of engagement, formalizing notification requirements for jail transfers and constraining the use of concealment or identification measures materially change the risk calculus for federal agents executing enforcement orders. Operational tempo will slow as agencies implement new compliance functions, procurement cycles for cameras and data storage will add cost and delay, and the new rules will likely expand the volume of civil litigation risk connected with arrests performed under novel or unsettled ROE standards. Legally mandated notification and transfer procedures shift the locus of enforcement from federal frontline raids to the local criminal justice system, which removes the element of initiative from federal agents and converts removals into functions contingent on local arrests. Those reforms, in sum, institutionalize the “targeted enforcement” approach already described by the administration and reduce the capacity to perform large-scale, visible roundups that require aggressive street-level federal presence.
The fiscal and political trajectory created by the funding standoff promises to harden these constraints over time. The strategy of conditioning funding on operational reform is a durable, repeatable lever for a minority party to shape executive practice without control of the White House. If appropriations are used to impose binding operational limits, those limits become statutory or appropriations-based guardrails that survive personnel changes and reduce the executive branch’s discretionary capacity to resume mass sweeps. Separately, the present sequence portends larger fights in subsequent Congresses: a House majority determined to press further reforms can attach more prescriptive limitations, insert transfer and reporting bottlenecks, and pursue oversight and subpoenas that degrade institutional morale and recruitment. That combination of legislative design and political pressure is likely to keep high-volume deportation strategies on hold absent a sustained reversal of congressional posture. The immediate fiscal squeeze on non-enforcement components of DHS will demonstrate the leverage of appropriations, and the longer term effect will be to convert operational reforms into durable restraints on the exercise of immigration enforcement across major metropolitan jurisdictions.