Minnesota is still under siege, and anyone who says otherwise is lying

A week ago, the national media's biggest public questions were over whether and how the Trump White House, allegedly reeling from the bad publicity of murdering a 2nd Amendment-believing white Minnesota man in cold blood, would tamp down a wee bit on the door-to-door ICE and Border Patrol brutalities that have caused Trump's already-dismal polling numbers to collapse and caused even some Republicans to express disgust.

Who would the Trump regime throw under the bus? Would it be Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem? Would this finally be the trigger that convinced Trump to punt murderous (see: boats, fishermen) white nationalist Stephen Miller to the curb? Would Trump administration higher-ups order agents to reduce their campaign of random kidnappings on Minneapolis streets? Or at least stop targeting children, specifically, by barring agents from staking out schools and bus stops?

We now know the answers to all of those questions, and the answers are no. No, from top to bottom: There have been no meaningful changes whatsoever in the Miller-directed purge of Minneapolis nonwhites. Cars continued to be left abandoned in the street, each marking the location of a new ICE kidnapping. Federal agents continue their attempts to intimidate peaceful observers by, among other tools, showing up at their homes. And American citizens continue to be detained without explanation, because ICE doesn't know a damn thing about the citizenship or residency status of those they're assaulting.

They continue to roam Minneapolis and nearby cities in patrols of rented SUVs. When they see a nonwhite face, they snatch them up and worry about the paperwork later. It is a campaign of terror, and it's not stopping because the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as the Trump administration believes that nonwhite Americans and their "supporters" exist to be brutalized. There will be no change. There's nobody in the White House who has the power to do it: Trump has not allowed, in his orbit of trust, anyone with a speck of humanity or decency.

Trump may also be so dementia-brained at this point that he lacks any interest in reining in the horrors that have sent his approval ratings spiraling to humiliating lows. Don't count that explanation out. Don't count out the theory that Trump's aides are lying through their teeth, telling him purely fantasy versions of events because that is what they do to us, too.

An administration that gave a single shit about public opinion would at the least scurry to remedy the most outrageous federal offenses, if only for the sake of pretending that things aren't as bad as they seem.

They aren't doing that. They don't care.

As for the supposed moderations of the federal occupation of Minneapolis, to wit there's been exactly two changes. First, infamous Border Patrol "commander at large" Greg Bovino was chosen as the one and only sacrifice: He was booted out of the city and is currently driving back to his official post in El Centro, California.

Bovino and his gaggle of personal "tactical" guards are taking the loooong way home, and if you've ever been to El Centro you would know why. He was last spotted in Rock Springs, Wyoming, again quickly finding himself surrounded with protesters because all of America now knows him as the face of fascist thuggery.

Sending Bovino on his way is a minor good, in that it's the agents directly under Bovino's control that have proven among the most reliably brutal. But it's a nothing, in the grand scheme of things. For all we know he'll be reappearing in the next federal attack on the next targeted city.

One possible reason for Bovino's departure may be that public observers were beginning to notice and catalog specific events of brutality by members of his "tactical" team—for example, firing nonlethal rounds directly into protesters' faces at point-blank range—and such a catalog represents a useful public precursor to identifying patterns of brutality by specific agents. Public demands for state prosecutions of especially brutal agents continue to grow, and Bovino's team has achieved enough notoriety that they might have been contemplating getting the hell out of Dodge even without White House encouragement.

The second change in Minneapolis is that the Trump administration has shipped equally notorious white nationalist thug Tom Homan to the city to be the new face of the federal assault. Homan is, administration fluttery notwithstanding, nearly a carbon copy of Stephen Miller when it comes to both xenophobic ravings and a thirst for public violence. He's also comically corrupt; Homan is the man who accepted a Cava bag stuffed with $50,000 in cash during an FBI bribery sting, only to have both that cash and the federal investigation magically disappear when Trump's newly appointed Justice officials learned of it.

It's Homan who claimed that there would be a supposed "drawdown" of federal agents in Minneapolis, time frame unknown, and dependent on negotiations with state officials that would allow the feds better access to prisoners in state jails. And because it's coming from Tom Homan, you can presume every part of what he says is a lie—why the hell would anyone with any supposed journalism background believe the public statements of the Cava Bag Bribe Boy.

Again: If Trump's band of neo-Nazis, open fascists and corrupt goons wanted to restore public faith in the system, it would be easy. They could cynically unwind the Minneapolis operation while continuing the ongoing brutalization in Los Angeles, Chicago, and everywhere else. They're not doing that because both they and the agents they've dispatched believe acting like frothing murderous maniacs is what ICE is supposed to be doing.

As for the possible demise of Kristi Noem? Of Stephen Miller? Hasn't happened so far, and the White House is likely planning to ride out the storm without further changes. An Axios report gave us our most scandalous behind-the-scenes version of the fight between the two, with Noem insisting that she was just following Miller and Trump's orders when she repeated the Miller-promoted lie branding Alex Pretti a terrorist who supposedly looked to "massacre" federal agents. This claim is what sent pro-2nd Amendment Republicans spiraling, with some Republicans calling for Noem's ouster. Miller had called Pretti "an assassin" in a frothy social media post, both White House goons lied robustly about what the public video plainly showed, and while Miller's social media post made it pretty damn clear that his smearing of Pretti was intentional, the White House eventually made it back to Axios with a clean-up script that pinned all of it, after the fact, on:

"Bovino should be blamed" for the misinformation about Pretti, "not Stephen," a White House source said, adding that Bovino supplied the details about the shooting to those in D.C.

Ha ha ha ha oh you pitiful f--ks. Sure, yeah, that's the ticket. We all lied about the videotaped murder because, uh, that dude over there lied about it and we believed him. Not our fault! Who would ever think that someone in the Trump administration would lie their crooked ass off? And someone who was fond of Nazi cosplay, no less? What is the world coming to, when you can't trust the words of a recklessly abusive white nationalist who takes his fashion cues from Nazi newsreels.

Translation: The White House won't be parting with shadow president Miller, the only person in the White House with real power. And it really, really doesn't want to part with Noem, because while Noem believes her job to be "eternally pissy social media influencer" not even Trump can easily fire someone who went so far as to get plastic surgery to look like his weird emotionless wife.

So the short version of all of this is that there's been no real change of tactics by ICE and Border Patrol thugs, U.S. citizens and children continue to be widely targeted, the public face of the goon squads is now a goon so openly corrupt as to compete with Pam Bondi and Trump's squad of personal lawyers turned crooked enforcers, and despite Republican and Democratic demands that somebody's head rolls for gunning down a White Man With A Gun, the only American the Republican Party is supposed to give a flying damn about, that probably won't be happening either.

In the meantime, the federal government's retaliation against peaceful protest continues:

Stochastic terrorism by Trump supporters against their perceived enemies continues:

Journalists are being targeted by a thoroughly corrupted Justice Department:

Trump continues to have Very Freaking Public Dementia:

And ICE is using their many billions of newly allocated dollars to buy warehouses. For people.

Don't let up. Any news outlet that tries to tell you the Miller-led, Noem-promoted campaign of ethnic cleansing against immigrants and nonwhite American citizens alike is being "moderated" or "scaled back" is lying, lying, lying.

The administration is attempting to cover up the abuses by lying about them, and they feel the need to pretend they didn't mean to murder people on the streets because, as it turns out, the American people still hate the idea of being murdered on the streets.

So they'll pretend. And they'll hope they can wait out this current burst of public rage.