By Michael Williams, CNN
(CNN) — While White House border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday morning the federal immigration surge in Minnesota would be ending, state officials were facing tough questions about the circumstances that led to that crackdown in the first place.
Those officials, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and the state’s corrections commissioner, Paul Schnell, in turn blasted the Trump administration for the way it has conducted itself in their state.
The testimony devolved into yelling matches between Ellison and two Republican senators who accused him of contributing to the violence in Minnesota and suggested he should be jailed over its expansive fraud scandal.
And later, top immigration officials in the Trump administration faced another round of questioning over last month’s killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good and the tactics of immigration officers working in their agencies.
Here are some takeaways from a busy day in Washington and Minneapolis as the deadline for the Department of Homeland Security’s funding draws closer:
Homan says monthslong surge is coming to a close
Homan, whom the administration placed in charge of its operations in Minneapolis after Pretti was killed last month, said during a press conference on Thursday that the surge in Minneapolis that began in early December would soon be ending.
“I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude,” Homan said.
At its height, about 3,000 federal officers were deployed as part of Operation Metro Surge in what was the largest immigration enforcement operation in the country’s history. The surge has led to weeks of protests, tense confrontations between protesters and officers, the killings of Pretti and Good by officers and attempts from the administration to paint both as terrorists who wanted to harm law enforcement.
Homan said Thursday that a small footprint of officers would remain.
The announcement was welcomed by Democratic officials, including Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and lawmakers both in Congress and the state legislature.
Walz said the surge did serious economic damage to the state and said he would seek repayment.
“The federal government needs to pay for what they broke here,” Walz said Thursday morning. “You don’t get to break things and then just leave without doing something about it.”
And while Homan was speaking in Minneapolis, top Minnesota officials testifying in Washington said the damage had already been done.
Ellison on the defensive
Testifying in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Ellison said the surge had “caused real harm to our state.”
The Democratic attorney general asked that members of the committee exercise their oversight powers to compel several reforms within federal law enforcement, including requiring ICE provide full documentation of arrests and detentions conducted by its agents, allow oversight access into its detention facilities, and require that state and federal investigations into the deaths of Good and Pretti be conducted in tandem.
Ellison accused the government of inventing different pretexts to justify the surge, but said it wasn’t really about the fraud scandal that the administration cited before sending law enforcement to the Twin Cities. Instead, it was about carrying out President Donald