President Trump’s decision to reassign US Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino away from immigration enforcement in Minneapolis is a sensible move.

With Republicans already projected to lose the House and facing a real risk of losing the Senate in the November midterms, the White House is trying to defuse a growing political problem by removing a prominent figurehead.

Trump is also increasingly constrained by the polls. A recent Reuters/Ipsos survey shows that 53% of Americans now oppose his handling of immigration — a sharp reversal on an issue that once played to his strengths. Put simply, voters do not like it when Americans are gunned down in what appear to be avoidable circumstances. Repeated video footage of ICE and Border Patrol agents acting aggressively, and at times unconstitutionally, has only reinforced that view.

In that context, Bovino offered Trump a relatively cheap scalp — a visible concession to mounting public concern. He had cultivated a faintly ludicrous persona, styling himself as a Rambo-esque operator willing to do whatever it took to get the job done. He had already been censured by a federal judge for lying about an incident in which he fired tear gas canisters into a residential neighborhood.

Bovino’s rapidly inflating ego, signaled by his not-so-humble “@CMDROpAtLargeCA” X handle and rifle-wielding profile photo, may also have counted against him. Trump has little tolerance for deputies who acquire an exaggerated sense of their own power. By sending Bovino packing, the president signals that a more cautious enforcement strategy is on the way.

Yet there is a deeper political vein to this reassignment. Now deploying his immigration tsar Tom Homan to Minneapolis, Trump ensures he has a true loyalist and savvy political ally at the forefront of his immigration policy. He understands the politics are bad at the moment. And that understanding will have other prominent Trump immigration officials worried.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem foremost among them. Noem aggravated many conservatives by making patently false claims surrounding the shooting of Alex Pretti, describing him as a “domestic terrorist” without offering any evidence to support that claim. As the Washington Examiner reports, Noem and her aide Corey Lewandowski have provoked growing anger among Border Patrol personnel by attempting to push out senior figures seen as loyal to the law rather than to Noem herself. No wonder, then, that former press secretary Sean Spicer warned that her days were numbered.

But the key motive for Trump’s action here is his recognition that his administration appeared both out of touch with increasingly concerned public opinion, and willfully disregarding that public opinion. Astute to the shifting political winds, Trump is attempting to restore a semblance of credibility to his immigration policy. The message is that enforcement will continue, but without the theatrics that were beginning to undermine it.

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Tom Rogan is a national security writer at the Washington Examiner

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