SEKULOW

Announcer: We got breaking news. Tom Homan announces a major drawdown of ICE in Minnesota. Keeping you informed and engaged now more than ever. This is SEKULOW. We want to hear from you. Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. And now your host, Logan Sekulow.

Logan Sekulow: Welcome to Sekulow. I'm back. Thank you, Will, for holding down the fort yesterday. Always glad to be here. Jordan was on, obviously, from Washington DC. Jordan's going to be joining us, I believe, a little bit later towards the end of the broadcast. Of course, we want to hear from you at 1-800-684-3110. That's 1-800-684-3110.

The breaking news out of Minnesota today, it feels like every day there's something new going on with this story. But today it was a pretty big one, which is Tom Homan, who had been sent in there to kind of chill it out, to bring things down to see if he could actually lower the temperature, as that was the famous quote I feel like everyone kept saying. Can we lower the temperature? Of course, we agreed. We thought that there needed to be a time where Minnesota could have some form of peace and could at least move forward a little bit.

Tom Homan announced a massive drawdown of the federal presence from ICE that will be there. It was with unprecedented cooperation from local police. We are talking about 700 federal agents who will be departing the Twin Cities. I think this is an interesting moment. One, I don't know if all of us know the scale of how many ICE agents are actually on the ground. If you told me that withdrawing 700 was not withdrawing the massive majority, I would have been pretty surprised. But it's actually, as Will said, I believe only about 20%.

Will: About 20%. There were between 2,800 and 3,000 officers in the Minneapolis area in Minnesota. That is a lot. That is a significant operation. But at the same time, this kind of goes back to what a lot of people had been criticizing the leadership in Minnesota about is that if they were cooperating—not necessarily needing to go round up, but to report when there is a release of someone from detention for criminal charges, whether it be local law enforcement or state law enforcement.

If they were coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, and ICE and saying, hey, this person that's undocumented that is also facing criminal charges or is a criminal themselves is being released, how about you come pick them up? What happens? A lot less drama, a lot safer for both the community and the federal law enforcement. Also, you need a lot less people.

Logan Sekulow: I see a lot of comments coming in saying he's surrendering to the left, he's watering down everything. I want you to hear this comment from Tom Homan. He said, "I'll say it again. This is efficient and it requires only one or two officers to assume custody of a criminal alien target rather than eight or 10 officers going into the community and arresting that public safety threat." And again, he said, "We currently have an unprecedented number of counties communicating with us now, allowing ICE to take custody of illegal aliens before they hit the streets, unprecedented cooperation."

So essentially saying we don't need eight to 10 officers going after one person or whatever it may be. We're going to scale that down. We only need one or two. And that is going to help the visual a lot. It's going to help the conversation move forward. Look, I think it's important when you have the chaos surrounding Minnesota to have a moment where it does feel like there's some bipartisan work and bipartisan effort. If the intention—and look, you could say surrendering, I doubt it. This is probably coming from the very top to go in there and to bring the tone down.

They sent in Tom Homan, who had been lauded as now like the savior had come in. At this moment, it seems like he is doing his job. He was able to take a couple weeks here, see what he could come up with, and now it seems like it may have been an overkill in Minnesota. So we're going to discuss that coming forward. I'd love to hear from you at 1-800-684-3110. We've got some calls coming in already. Give me a call right now if you'd like to be on the air. We're opening up this conversation.

Again, Jordan's going to be joining us a little bit later. And also, the ACLJ is really hard at work. We've got a lot of news to cover. I've only got 30 seconds in this, but we have so much to cover. I'm looking at what I should have been pitching you and I didn't do it. I'm going to do it when we get back. I'm going to tell you all the news that's going on in the world of the ACLJ and why you need to get involved.

There's a great way also for you to interact. Of course, that's going to ACLJ.org. There's a lot of incredible content in there. None of it's behind a paywall. Whether it's this show, whether it's our legal work, all of it's available to you at no cost. And that's because people like you support the work of the ACLJ. Many of you are ACLJ Champions, those that give on a monthly basis. So do that today at ACLJ.org. We'll be right back with more on Sekulow.

Logan Sekulow: Welcome back to Sekulow. Phone lines, like I said, are open at 1-800-684-3110. I want to kick this off actually by you hearing from Tom Homan himself. Of course, we are reporting the news here, the breaking news, that they have decided to withdraw about 700 ICE agents from Minnesota, specifically from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Again, I think that number should be a bit of an eye-opener of what was happening here. And maybe this is why you have someone like Tom Homan come in because 700 is only about 20% of the workforce, of the ICE workforce, that is there currently on the ground.

If you were to ask me how many ICE agents were there, I don't know if I would have given you 700 for just this one individual market. So then you bring in somebody who maybe knows a bit more about how all of this works, like Tom Homan, and he can go in and in a very President Trump kind of way and refine the mission, actually get things handled and do it in a way that's efficient. We have some calls coming in. We're going to take some of those at 1-800-684-3110, but I want to start off with you hearing directly from Tom Homan himself.

Tom Homan: We want to get these men and women home. They've got a job to do at home. I think we've come a long ways. I actually, yesterday afternoon, I was sitting with my chief of staff, I am actually amazed at the cooperation and agreements we've already talked about and the willingness to work with us. We're doing better than I ever thought we would, seriously. And I'm excited about getting back to the business of enforcing immigration law without arresting people for 111, for interference and impeding.

We just want to do what we've done for 30 years, 40 years. I've been doing this for 40 years. We want to get back to doing the job, and that's what we're planning on doing. And we're not—I want to keep this because I keep hearing it and hearing it and hearing it—we're not surrendering the President's mission on a mass deportation operation. If you're in the country illegally, if we find you, we'll deport you. But this is about targeted enforcement operations, and that's what we're going to be doing.

Logan Sekulow: I think you're going to have a lot of people breathe a sigh of relief when you hear someone like Tom Homan in there. And when he says specifically this is the President's mission, I think that's also the signal that if you think for some reason he's bucking the system or is changing the way President Trump or the Trump administration wants this handled, President Trump pays attention to what's going on in the world. He's reading the room. He's reading the temperature. Midterm elections are coming up.

There's a lot happening right now. He sees that this has become a splintering moment for a lot of people. Specifically, the deaths of Americans, whether you believe as a listener or a watcher of this show, whether you believe that they were justified or not, it did create a moment of tension going, these are American citizens. These are people who were just demonstrating, who both have been shot to death in the streets by ICE agents. That's a fact.

I'm not saying one way or the other whether you believe they were justified in the shooting or they were not justified in the shooting. There were still dead Americans because of this situation. So you send in Tom Homan. He looks at everything with his team and decides we don't need 10 agents for every person that we are trying to get out of Minnesota. Maybe we can do that with one to three. And you see this deduction. You see a room being read. Do I think that there'll be people who say this is not enough on both sides? Absolutely. And we've got plenty of those calls coming in that say that.

Will: Well, and I want to hear from people as well that see it on YouTube, see it on Rumble saying this is a sign of weakness, that this is capitulating to the left, which I tend to disagree with. Remember, there's still going to be 2,000, according to Tom Homan, agents there. This is just the first step in drawing down because, in his opinion, there should have never had to have been 2,700-plus agents there to begin with if there was that cooperation between the state partners and the federal enforcement arm.

And so when you start to look at this as well, when you saw how out of control it got, when you saw even the raid on the church by the leftist agitators and that led to the arrest, it got so out of control that, as he even said, a lot of their arrests then were them detaining people that were obstructing the law enforcement instead of even the core mission. Tom Homan here is being able to get back to the core mission, making sure that they can focus on getting the illegal criminal aliens detained and out of the country, as he said.

So I think that's important to show here. But I think also, instead of looking at Tom Homan as someone who's capitulating by taking 20% to 25% of agents out that he no longer feels are necessary because of the steps that you are seeing from the local leaders—and I want to play byte two from Tom Homan here in a second. But once again, at the same time, you could say the same if you were on the left. Oh, this is capitulation from Tim Walz, from Attorney General Ellison, because they are now allowing him to take criminal aliens at the place where it's the safest for them to do it.

We want ICE out completely. So whenever there is some sort of meeting in the middle, when it's such a charged political moment like we see here, I feel like you're going to have people on both sides that are going to make that an issue, say, how dare you, how dare you capitulate. Instead, I am happy that this could potentially lead to safer immigration enforcement, not just for the officers, for anyone that decides that it's their cause to get out there and obstruct and impede and try to do all the things that they've been doing. I don't want to see more people hurt, whether it be an American citizen that's a civilian or law enforcement. But let's go ahead and play byte two, because I think this is really telling that the people that were obstructing the whole time were the leaders, and now all of a sudden, they're not doing it anymore.

Tom Homan: And I want to thank the sheriffs, the governor, the AG. I think we're in a lot better place than we've ever been in. We never had this kind of cooperation at this level. And I'm not leaving until we get all done. But I'm happy to say I'm extremely pleased with the leadership team and their outreach to the sheriffs, to the state, to the chiefs. I've talked to many of them. I didn't talk to all of them, but I plan on talking to every one of them before I leave and thanking them for their cooperation.

Will: Logan, I think once again people should call in if they think that what Tom Homan is doing is capitulating. Let us know why. 1-800-684-3110. Hopefully, when you hear him, you don't feel that way. But also at the same time, this is the guy that the former Secretary of Transportation Castro had said has a heart of darkness. This was the ultimate evil for the Democrats, Tom Homan. And now you start to see that whenever they find a new evil, another more evil person because they demonize every single person on the right and in the Trump administration, that oh, well, he sounds actually like the rational one.

It's because you never were listening to begin with. When he is wanting to enforce the laws of this country, it's not because he has a heart of darkness or is an evil person. It's because he wants to enforce the laws of the country. That's what he's done his entire career. That's why he was given commendations under administrations like Barack Obama's because these are serious people. And when you hear these words, I don't see them as a capitulation at all. I see it as him knowing how to efficiently run this system and wanting to do it more efficiently. And I think that's what we're looking at here.

Logan Sekulow: Let's take a caller or two. Let's go to Bill in Wyoming. Bill, you're on the air.

Bill: Yeah, okay. Thanks for taking my call. Just to let you know, if things go right, I'll probably be able to give a few extra bucks this month.

Logan Sekulow: Fantastic. Thank you so much. We appreciate that. Of course, no pressure.

Bill: And I'm sorry, I'm going to have to apologize, but I kind of am doubtful about what the left will do because I kind of think that they may try and actually turn this against the administration and say, hey look, we're much more powerful. The administration just really doesn't know what to do, and if they do do it, they're Nazis or something like that. What's your opinion?

Logan Sekulow: Bill, I mean, look, I think that you can never doubt that anyone in politics will use any moment or any what you'd say quote-unquote sign of weakness, which I see a lot of people saying that in the comments, for their own political gain. So of course, that's the truth. That could be used against them. However, I do see it a little bit differently, which is I don't see everything as politics black and white here and go, well, if this is what's best for the country, best for business if you will, great.

Let them use it, we'll see what happens. But I think what you'll hopefully see is that maybe this could actually be a moment where Americans can remember that we can work together.

Will: Well, and once again, remember there are still 2,000 enforcement agents there. 2,000, which is probably more than many people would have thought were there originally, still remain. But at the same time, it all depends, Bill, what the goal is. If the goal is to own the left and to say we won, then yeah, maybe this is the wrong move of saying we can work together and just continue doing the same enforcement style, see more people most likely die because of the temperature that it was in Minnesota, the way that it was getting so heated and aggressive.

That would continue. You would see more tragic shootings both ways. You would probably see more law enforcement injured or killed as it continued to boil over as it was doing. Instead, here you're having someone say, hey, my mission isn't to win a political argument. It's to enforce the immigration laws. And I think I can do it better. And now they're working with me, so we are more efficient. We're not having to worry about as many protesters that we have to arrest for breaking the law. I feel like that's a win. They can say whatever they want, like look, they pulled out 700, but does it matter if the mission is still being accomplished? Doesn't matter to me.

Logan Sekulow: Next up, we're going to talk about a major victory in the world of the ACLJ and the world of our fight for life. It's been a little while since we've had some good news coming from the world of the fight for the unborn. But you're going to want to stay tuned for this as we continue to take on Planned Parenthood and you'll hear some big things that are afoot. Be a part of the show too, as Will said, 1-800-684-3110. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to Sekulow. Phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. I wanted to divert just a little bit. Of course, we're talking about Tom Homan pulling out about 700 ICE agents out of Minnesota, what that looks like, what the ramifications are, and what you think about that. That's fine, we're going to discuss that. But I did want to talk about the work of the ACLJ. It's the most important work of what we do here. Of course, the fight for life continues.

A couple years ago, you had the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Big victory for a lot of us and for a lot of you, because we've done the analytical data, that was kind of the end of the story for you. You decided that the fight for life wasn't something that you saw as an urgent threat because you saw it being overturned and returned to the states. And of course, we know certain states have had much stricter laws put in place, like where we are in Tennessee.

Then you have a state, obviously the more left-leaning states, that have gone maybe to the extreme, where they'll fly you in and they'll pay for everything, and they've become abortion havens. So we continue the fight. The fight keeps happening. But this is a really interesting one, and we have to kind of take a step and go, okay, well, what's their plan? What's that mean? But I believe we can start with it's a major victory, at least for now.

And that is, of course, you remember during the Big Beautiful Bill, when that was all being passed, one of the big sticking items was the defunding of Planned Parenthood, at least for a time being. And of course, that's been something that has been a big-ticket item if you will, in the world of politics. It feels like that's always something that is dangled in front of the voter, saying the American people will no longer have to pay for Planned Parenthood with their taxpayer dollars.

A lot of times it doesn't happen, and it's always a sticking point. And look, President Trump, as much as he has done a lot for the pro-life movement, this has been one of those issues that he has even used as a bit of a bargaining chip when debating what should go through and what shouldn't go through and what's better for American people. But in a really another unprecedented moment, Planned Parenthood decided that their lawsuit, which the ACLJ was involved in, against the Big Beautiful Bill's defunding of Planned Parenthood is no longer worth their time, and they have surrendered and withdrawn their lawsuit. Again, at least for the time being, ACLJ supporters, take this as a major victory, at least for now.

Will: That's right. And as you remember, there were several challenges to this funding provision, one from a non-Planned Parenthood abortion clinic. Then we had also—there's a challenge led by California, surprise, surprise, although they are fighting it in Massachusetts where this case stemmed from. So there are a couple other challenges out there. A lot of the early-stage challenges where we've been successful on appeals had to do with injunctions against this defunding portion of the bill.

So as of right now, they are defunded. But this was a shocking moment. This was very surprising because Planned Parenthood filed a voluntary dismissal notice in federal court in Massachusetts. And you have to sit here, as Logan said, and think, okay, what is their end game? One, big victory. They are no longer fighting. They no longer, at least from what you can kind of take from it, think this is a battle worth fighting in federal court. And so that is a big victory.

This hard work that ACLJ supporters have rallied around our organization and many others to push for this for a very long time, take the win. But here are the caveats and here's kind of where my analysis goes when I start thinking why. Why would they do this? One, remember one of the things that happened was the time frame of the defunding only became a year from being a permanent defunding.

Maybe Planned Parenthood is thinking, instead of wasting money on a lawsuit which could go all the way to the Supreme Court and end up giving us precedent we don't like if the Supreme Court says, of course, you can defund, maybe they think we need to spend more money on midterm elections. Because we know that that's very important to them, and we know that Planned Parenthood through their action arm spends a lot of money on elections.

Logan Sekulow: And look, don't think that what's going on in Minnesota isn't also connected to the midterm elections. The writing is a bit on the wall. I don't want to be a doomsayer for you conservatives who are listening—obviously, that's probably the vast majority of the people that watch—but the odds are not good right now.

Will: That's right. And I think that if Planned Parenthood is looking and saying, okay, do we take the loss of funding for a year and maybe not have this continue on in court through the appeals process, maybe even to the Supreme Court, what if we just refocus where that money's going and we fight to make sure that we get as liberal of people elected as possible so that next time the funding is up, when that year expires, we can get more funding?

We can push back and get retroactive funding and push Congress to get to a point to give us what we want, which they have done for decades. They have used the American taxpayer as a piggy bank for so long, billions and billions of taxpayer dollars have gone to Planned Parenthood over the decades. And that's where I think that they probably lean. So take this as a win, but not as a time to quit fighting. This fight has to continue.

Logan Sekulow: It's a temporary win on the continual journey. And look, you see the ads. If you watch the news, especially if you watch not Fox, you'll see ads for Planned Parenthood running all the time. They are certainly funded a lot by donors and supporters. And maybe they, as Will said, they can take the temporary loss knowing what they're going to be heading into. And look, a lot of you have called in and we're going to take a lot of those calls coming up.

I want to make sure that you stay on hold. I'll even take some in the next segment here because the work of the ACLJ, like I said, continues. There's also a bit of an update, Will, we only got a couple minutes here, on that California school.

Will: That's right. We are filing this morning a brief actually to the Supreme Court on a school where California is forcing Christian schools to make Christian education optional. So effectively taking away the autonomy of the school. Private schools being able to make Christian education at these Christian schools optional. We are fighting back against that, obviously.

Logan Sekulow: California is getting wild here, folks. I mean, it feels like we are in a lawsuit with Gavin Newsom more than we are not. I mean, this is what, I feel like the third or fourth one that we've done just in the last 12 months. But these, when they start getting involved, not only in your kids' public schooling, fine, you know, that's part of what you get with public schools. You understand the issues. But when they start regulating really what goes on with the faith practices in your private schools, the ACLJ has got to get involved.

I think this should be an easy win, but we're in California, so unlikely it will be an easy win. If you rational people who watch this show were the people making that decision, I would go, of course, a private school, a private religious education can say whatever they want about faith, and yes, it's not necessarily optional if you decide to go to Christian education.

Will: Well, and that's why this is a brief to the Supreme Court, because the 9th Circuit upheld the state's position that they can force private schools to say you must let people come to your school and then opt out of the teaching and the message that's core to the education philosophy there.

Logan Sekulow: Why would you even be sending your kids there? Good schools. Good schools, but they're faith-based schools. There are plenty of private schools—not if Gavin Newsom has anything to do with it, Will. But there's plenty of private schools that are not prep schools, those kind of things. You can find them. Leave the Christian schools alone. We're going to get involved here at the ACLJ. We're taking the Supreme Court of the United States.

We can't do that without you. So I want to encourage you right now, when you're thinking about supporting where to put your funds, the ACLJ is a perfect place to do it. Go to ACLJ.org right now, make a donation, and if you can, I really want you to become an ACLJ Champion. People walk up to me on the streets, that's not like a hyperbole, people walk up to me on the streets and say, "Logan, I'm a champion." And I love to hear it. I love to see it happen.

Become a champion today. That's someone that gives on a monthly basis, a recurring donor, a member if you will, to the ACLJ. Helps us create an incredible baseline. Look, we got another half hour coming up. Some of you don't get us on your local stations, but we are broadcasting live, ACLJ.org, YouTube, Rumble, however you get your podcast, we are there. So be a part of the show. Jordan's going to be joining us in the back half. We'll be right back, less than a minute.