Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump BACKPEDALS After Minneapolis ICE Backlash EXPLODES

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Trump’s aggressive ICE strategy in Minneapolis has blown up in his face, triggering deadly clashes, nationwide outrage, and a sudden shift in tone from the White House. From protests and political pressure to leadership changes on the ground, President Trump is now scrambling to backpedal. Alex Wagner is joined by Jon Lovett in Minneapolis to break down the latest fallout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a runaway country, a very special runaway country rapid response for our YouTube channel in Minneapolis. Here we are. With John Lovett. Fortune has it that we're in the same place at the same time. I guess this is the first time we've actually sat down and talked about what we've been doing. Yeah, yeah. And you've been here longer than I have. So just how's it been?

So we got into Minneapolis on Sunday. So we got into Minneapolis on Sunday. We went to the Alex Preti Memorial. And you just, it was late at night and there were people there. Everywhere we've gone, no matter the hour, there have been people there. We went to the Whipple Federal Building, which is where ICE and Border Patrol, their activities are centered and there were people there at all hours. We got there in the morning and there was a person there who had already been there for six hours. I think we went there right now

we'd find people and we've gone back a few times and every time there are different kinds of crowds. Sometimes it's groups of people that just want to shout at ice and the mass people going in and out of the building because they're so angry and every time we've gone there been people that have never been to a protest before and just felt compelled to go there. And you see this group of people just overcome. We went back to Whipple later in the day and we were leaving to go interview Governor Wals. And as we're leaving, we're just talking to people there about what they wanted to hear from the governor. And we asked a woman, what is it you want the governor to know? And she just broke down. She just, I'm like, I'm a little.

I was thinking about it. She just, we're so sad. We're just so sad. And you felt that everywhere you went. You felt that the emotions are really close to the surface for people. You felt that at the Pretty Memorial. You felt that at the Renee Good Memorial. And a lot of that anger is this feeling of disgust that this is being put on them by outside forces.

And I've never seen that in that way in an American city before. I've been to all kinds of protests after horrible things have happened. Horrible things have happened, but it is rare to have this feeling in an American city that they feel as though they are being truly attacked from without. They don't have, that it's not inside of their democracy, that the people they want to hold responsible are not there. I just, it is a strange, I think, dispiriting, enraging experience for the people in the Twin Cities. I was so, when I, I just went to the Alex Priddy Memorial, and I, I've, you know, seen, I've, you know, I've, you know, I've been to places where bad things have happened before. But it was the, I mean, I think the entire country consumed that video content.

Sort of we all watched it simultaneously from multiple angles. And there was something so surreal and nauseating about recognizing the donut shop and the street corner where the woman in the pink coat was taking her footage. And just like knowing without knowing that I knew. like intimately this this stretch of of Minneapolis street and what had happened there and then to see what was now there which of course isn't the body of Alex Pready but this there really are people everywhere on corners monitoring watching not not in all parts of the city but in a lot of the city and around a lot of the schools and preschools and in a lot of immigrant neighborhoods or in a lot of places where there's been a lot of immigration enforcement activity and it's a huge operation. Just there are people invest everywhere around these schools. And this is a grassroots organized form of nonviolent resistance to a lawless agency that is wreaking

so much havoc. And, you know, the, you know, like this Minnesota. Minnesota nice is a term and sometimes it's actually Iowa nice but I just I just say that as a person his father was from Iowa Well every place can claim to be the nice place I suppose New York doesn't New York doesn't no New York does not But yeah there's a kind of aspect of Minnesota that's like a little bit passive aggressive That niceness I think does like belie a toughness and you see that here too you see that in the cold here You know the I'm I've become a soft California boy man the people that are just out for hours and hours and hours at a time keeping watch. We met someone who has been sitting outside

the Renee Goog memorial for hours. He'd been overnight in his car on a street corner in a Latino neighborhood in Minneapolis. There was a woman watching for ICE who did not even have gloves on because she had to keep being on her phone. It is too cold for that. And they're just the number of people that are willing to step up. You talk about ice, putting whatever, 3,000 people, ice in Border Patrol, I don't want to confuse it to, but putting thousands of people into this city at a scale we've never seen anywhere else. That is daunting. That is a scary thing. But it has not been able to keep up with the number of people in Minneapolis that we're willing to step up. And Minneapolis is not a big city. There's a double-edged sword to this, right? If they can do this in Minneapolis, which doesn't

have extremely high undocumented population, isn't a big city. It isn't one of the biggest cities. even in the Midwest. It's just not that it's a pretty ordinary average size city. And if they can do this here, they can try to do this everywhere. But if they can't even pull this off here, which they really can't, they don't, this is America, a big, fractious, ungovernable place filled with people that do not tolerate this kind of thing. And Megan Kelly could try to take away people's whistles and a bunch of people can say, oh, you brought a gun. That's your fault. But the kind of natural, rebellious democratic instincts that we've seen here, I think we'll kick in everywhere. Maybe there is something special about the Twin Cities and the way this place is stitched

together and the way it's already been organized after George Floyd and the kind of qualities of this place. But I do think there's an American thing happening. And that is inspiring. I just want to ask you about one more thing, which is you saw, I think we inadvertently did a sort of two-parter today, which is you were at Whipple when there were people slated for deportation, I believe transported out. And I went to the part of the Minneapolis airport where the charters that deport people literally physically take them out in shackles on these unmarked planes to points unknown, could be Texas, could be Oklahoma, could be California. And I just want to know what it was like for you seeing the first half of that deportation process. There's aspects of what you see

at that Whipple facility that feels like, for lack of a better term, I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but performative, right? ICE is coming in and out, and people are shouting at them, and they're making their voices hurt, and they're getting media attention, and they're venting their anger, and they're bringing funny signs, and they're showing community, and that's a demonstration of something. So it's defensive in a lot of ways. But then there are also people there that are keeping an eye on who's coming and who's going,

that are seeing what's actually happening there, and trying to use that information as best they can to resist. And when you're there, you see all kinds of vehicles coming and going. People are watching to see how many are coming and going, what cars are leaving. You see ICE, you know, federal officials coming out. Some of them keep their heads down and their masks up. Some of them, like, stoke the crowd a little bit, to be honest, in a really unprofessional way. They, like, either pause and kind of give a look.

You know, somebody, I saw a guy doing, like, one of these, right? Like, they're having a good time in there. but then you see sometimes it's cars with first people shout because they think it's ice and then they see oh no that must be somebody

that's getting released and then everybody cheers and then you see a big van leaving and you watch the people that have been there kind of trying to keep track of what's happening

and saying we think that's a deportation flight we think those are the people that were grabbed over here they're being sent to the airport yes that's the airport flight right so there is an organized way in which people are responding and one of the ways

they're doing it is by kind of trying to figure out what's happening. And then you realize how real this is. And actually part of what being there is for people is trying to do their best to track what's happening here in the Twin Cities. The flights are really hard to find. Like it's very hard to see them.

And they're in a part of the airport that's not really accessible. And they're strategically kind of placed behind gates and these private charter areas make it very difficult. But I was so struck by the kind of the creepiness of it. The discipline. You know, you hear about people being disappeared in other parts of the world. And this was the American expression of that. It's like,

here they are being taken and shackled. And we couldn't even see that. We couldn't see the shot. You just see the planes. And they're unmarked in this private area of the airport. And their records aren't being very well kept. Their lawyers don't know where they're going. Their family, they are literally disappearing from the lives that they've built in America. And in many ways, you know, if they're taken to countries they're not even from, they're disappeared from their lives. And it was so sterilized in a way, right? There's just, just no particular face to it. There's nothing to hold on to. There's no logo to look at. And I, it was so Orwellian. And I really, I don't know why I just needed to see that,

I needed to see like how it happened, right? And I think there is such a utility to being on the ground here, even if you're just walking around and just seeing the things that everybody else is seeing, it's something about being present and bearing witness to this, the unfolding in the degradation of the compact, you know? And then also seeing the people that are putting up the fight to preserve it is like incredibly powerful. This just doesn't have in this community democratic legitimacy. It just doesn't. They're doing it in a lawless way.

They are doing it against the wishes of the people who live here who want to protect their neighbors. And so Trump is seeing terrible images. The country is turning against this. It's a PR problem for him, not a moral problem for him. Fine. Not surprising. But then they're going to what they're going to change the personnel. They're going to try to do mass deportations in a way that's less obviously sinister, whatever that could mean,

by slightly more professional people at the top that are less ham-fisted and cruel and careless as Christy Noem or Greg Bovino. know. But there's no mass deportations are ugly and violence. There's no way around that. Yes, the ICE recruits are buffoonish, dangerous, unprepared, untrained. It makes all matters worse. The CPP guys seem to be another brand of thug here too. There's a lot that's going into this. but I don't care how much Tom Homan knows how bad Bovino was as if Tom Homan is some great step up. When Tom Homan is a step up, the goalposts have been moved off the field. But they can claim they're going after the criminals all they want. There is no way to hit the numbers they're talking about without going after people whose crime was coming to a country that said,

We have built a massive economy on the backs of undocumented people. There are jobs here for you, and we all want you to do them. We're all going to look the other way because you're not going to get benefits when you retire, and you're not going to have the protection of the law. There's a problem at your work. Your kids get to go to school. And you're going to work for a lot less than everything else. And you're going to work for less, but you're going to take that bargain because it's better than what's on offer,

and you can maybe have a better life for your family. And then we're going to visit all the pain of that on you when the tides change, when the political circumstances change. And that's what they're trying to do. It doesn't have purchase in these communities. And so the only way they can do it is with these kinds of tactics by hiding, right? Or by kind of trying to dominate and bully people. And it's just not working. But there's no burgers without the butcher shop.

You know, like there's just, there's just not going to happen. There's no way to do what they're saying they want to do. The policy is reprehensible. The policy is going to cause the pain. And they can, there's just, that's the math that they can't escape. And the fact that there are the Stephen Miller's and the gnomes and the bevinoes and the homins of the world that, that make that obvious. It doesn't mean if you had a better brand of deportations are that it wouldn't be monstrous. Deportations are by its, I think, by virtue of what it means in this administration is a monstrous position.

Well, the one thing I will say, John, is you seem to have gone. undergone a metamorphosis into a cold weather person in your short time here. Yeah. And I've been, you know, I've been learning from the best. I, the, the, the, the, the, the fact that the people are out here in this cold, like, there are people out there right now. I know. They're right there out there right now.

Like, we went, we went, we went, we can get in our car and we will go find a couple hundred people out there right now. I believe it. I don't need to see it anymore. I just makes me feel less than every single time I put my foot out the door. People in Minnesota are great. That's the, the people here are great. They are.

And they're showing the country how great we can all be, you know? Hell yeah. Maybe in slightly warmer temperatures, though. John Lovett. Housden smiled on us giving us this time. I'm glad we got to be here in our nook, in our beautiful nook. It's a great nook. That could be in any hotel in America because an aesthetic was determined in some sort of algorithmic.

It was on Instagram. Private equity slot meeting in which this became the thing we were. want it when part of what made it the thing people claim they wanted is it represented something of a time they were nostalgic for then the corporations turn that nostalgia into easily printed fabrics that becomes what a hotel feels like to us and so then we claim we won't clamor for something else but there's no one left to give it because the corporations are the only people that make this kind of thing and so we sit in these amorphous liminal unreal spaces I like it and wonder what happened to this country I like

the felt. I'll tell you what's running away. This country, this nook, runaway nook. You already are first. John Levitt, inaugural runaway nook episode. Thank you, my friend, for your time and thoughts and rage. Sure.