‘Not the Soft Target They Thought’

Today’s notice: What comes next after the Minneapolis drawdown: a dispatch from the city, and a look at the politics. Reporting from Memphis on an age-gap primary. A new study on who primary voters are. And: A COVID-era fraud hunt goes slightly awry.

THE LATEST

The feds back down: Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said last night that he spoke to Donald Trump by phone and that the president agreed to have “some federal agents” leave the city. Included on that list is the man who led “Operation Metro Surge,” U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino.

Life came at him fast. In July, the Trump administration said it put Bovino in charge of its controversial enforcement surge in Los Angeles “because he’s a badass,” as one DHS spox told The Atlantic. Now he’s reportedly had his social media access cut off and is headed for retirement.

“Goodbye and good riddance,” the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party posted on X.

Third rail no more: Minneapolis has opened up a conversation among Democrats that seemed unthinkable a year ago, when lawmakers lined up to back MAGA-tinged bills like the Laken Riley Act. Sen. Bernie Sanders even said Trump “did a better job” than presidents before him on securing the border, referring especially to Joe Biden.

That moment is over. In the race to replace retiring Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan is accusing Rep. Angie Craig of shifting into an opponent of MAGA immigration policy only after Operation Metro Surge. “Donald Trump did not make it a secret what he was going to do in the second term, right?” Flanagan told NOTUS’ Ursula Perano.

Craig says she supports a resolution to impeach DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. “I would love for the lieutenant governor to join me in standing up to the Trump administration,” she told Ursula. “I think the biggest difference is I’m actually doing something about it.”

In Illinois last night, it took only minutes for divisions over what to do next to come up in a Democratic Senate primary debate.

“I want to abolish ICE,” Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton said. There was no ambivalence. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi wants Noem impeached, DHS appropriations blocked and a reform plan that includes a ban on masked officers and an inspector general to enforce it.

Why stop at ICE? The Department of Homeland Security is “too big,” Rep. Robin Kelly said. She introduced the articles of impeachment against Noem, but she also said the problems go deeper. She ticked off the alphabet soup of CBP, USCIS, ICE, etc. “Build an agency that people can trust,” she said. Dismantle ICE and “rebuild the whole immigration system.”

These are blue-state politics. In Nebraska, things are different. Sen. Pete Ricketts called for an investigation into this weekend’s killing of a protester by CBP officers in Minneapolis, but also posted, “My support for funding ICE remains the same.” His team was actively, even gleefully, pointing out that independent candidate Dan Osborn had not taken a public position. An Osborn spox did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Open tabs: Far From Minneapolis, Memphis Remains Under a Different Federal Crackdown (NYT); U.S. Government Investing $1.6B in Mining Company (WSJ); Lindsey Halligan no longer employed by the DOJ (NBC); Trump Administration Plans to Write Regulations Using AI (ProPublica)

From the Hill

Request denied: That is the modus operandi of Senate Republicans and the White House, who have rebuffed growing calls from Democrats to pull DHS funding out of the bill needed to keep the federal government open after Jan. 30. This fight is making a partial government shutdown more and more likely, NOTUS’ Em Luetkemeyer and Riley Rogerson report.

“That certainly would not be my first choice,” Sen. Susan Collins told reporters yesterday of the Democrats’ demand. “I think there might be a way to add some further reforms or procedural protections, but those discussions are ongoing and really involve the leader,” referring to John Thune.

But the strategy to pressure Democrats to fold doesn’t seem to be working (cue the déjà vu).

A Senate Democratic leadership aide told NOTUS that Republicans and the White House have reached out but have not yet “raised any realistic solutions.”

From Minneapolis

“Not the soft target they thought it was” — that’s Minneapolis resident Niko Le Mieux, who stopped by a vigil for Alex Pretti yesterday and talked to NOTUS’ Jose Pagliery.

Residents are deeply concerned that federal agents will engage in a cover-up of the fatal shooting, Jose reports. Their concerns are being echoed in federal court, where lawyers for the state battled with representatives of the Trump administration over whether independent state investigators — and ultimately, the public — will get to see evidence gathered from the scene.

From the campaign trail

Watch Rep. Steve Cohen’s primary: “Everybody out here knows me. They voted for me in the past. They said they’re going to vote for me again,” 76-year-old Cohen, a Democratic incumbent for two decades from Memphis, told NOTUS’ Alex Roarty.

“His absence isn’t felt,” Justin Pearson, a 31-year-old state lawmaker trying to unseat Cohen in a primary, told Alex at a Memphis MLK Day march Cohen skipped.

(“I didn’t go this morning because it was 8 in the morning,” Cohen said.)

Cohen embodies a veteran Democratic class, with a long record to point to. Pearson is a rising star who believes he speaks for what voters really want. The relationship between these two is frosty, much like the political generation gap that defines them.

Cohen has a lot to be confident about, like a big war chest and a record of trouncing primary opponents. But Alex reports that he, like a lot of older Democrats in 2026, may not be what voters want right now.

“There is zero enthusiasm in the Nashville community for supporting Cohen in his primary campaign against Pearson. Zero,” a Democratic fundraiser in Tennessee told Alex, suggesting that the state’s Democratic power players might be looking for new blood.

FIRST ON NOTUS

Primary voters vs. the average American: We’ve got an exclusive first look at a new report from centrist political group Unite America on primary voters in 2024. Eighty-seven percent of House races were decided in primary elections that year, which according to the group means “the 7% of voters who participated in these elections effectively chose the vast majority of the U.S. House.” Who were they?

“Significantly older, whiter, wealthier, and more educated than the population at large” is how the report describes primary-voter demographics.

NEW ON NOTUS

Show me the money: Some congressional Republicans have criticized the Employee Retention Credit program, a COVID-era initiative to keep Americans employed during the pandemic, saying it was rife with fraud. But federal regulators are probing whether officials with the Republican Party of Texas properly accounted for $600,000 worth of funds the committee received from the program, NOTUS’ Manuela Silva reports.

More: ‘Know Your Rights’ Efforts Confront Reality of ICE’s Forced-Entry Tactics, by Jackie Llanos

Private Prison Contractors Spend Millions on Lobbying, Get Billions in Immigration Detention Contracts, by Taylor Giorno

The Weekend’s Storms Hit Southern States the Hardest. State Lawmakers Wonder if They Can Rely on FEMA. By Torrence Banks

NOT US

• ‘The Superhuman President’: A good-faith attempt to ascertain the truth about Donald Trump’s health. By Ben Terris for New York
  
• The Battle for Minneapolis, by Emily Witt for The New Yorker
  
• ‘Chaos’: Behind the Scenes of Amazon’s Melania Trump Doc, by Tessa Stuart for Rolling Stone

Thank you for reading! If you liked this edition of the NOTUS newsletter, please forward it to a friend. If this newsletter was shared with you, please subscribe — it’s free! Have a tip? Email us at tips@notus.org. And as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts at newsletters@notus.org.