Don't be fooled by Trump's Minnesota shakeup: legal expert
Members of the community gather as police officers block the scene after the driver of a vehicle was shot, in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Jan. 7, 2026. REUTERS/Tim Evans
January 26, 2026
After weeks of mounting tensions, protests, and a brutal Department of Homeland Security crackdown on Minneapolis that has left multiple people dead, President Donald Trump's controversial Border Patrol enforcer Greg Bovino is reportedly being ousted from his job.
But don't expect personnel changes to send a meaningful message to Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that they should stop using their current heavy-handed tactics, former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann warned MS NOW's Ari Melber on Monday.
"Your views on this tonight?" asked Melber, himself an attorney by training.
"Well, one view is for the public not to be distracted by a change in lower-level people," said Weissmann. "What we are seeing in Minnesota and, frankly, around the country, from the West Coast to now, the far East Coast in Maine, is a result of the policy of Donald Trump."
"When you have a president who very much is a unitary executive and everyone knows he is controlling all of this, you really can't just, you know, put lipstick on a pig and say it has nothing to do with me," said Weissmann. "And so changing around who is there in Minnesota is not changing the policies. It's not changing the license that was given to ICE that caused Renee Good to be killed. The reaction to that murder was a license to then have what happened to Mr. Pretti."
"So if you go around not having an investigation of Renee Good, and then you say that nothing happened there, it was all fine with no investigation, what's the message to ICE?" Weissmann added. "It's we have your back no matter what. The normal process for anyone in law enforcement is to have an investigation. Everyone in law enforcement knows that. And so this is why this happened."
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