MINNEAPOLIS ­— On Greg Bovino’s last day as a roving U.S. Border Patrol commander, protesters gathered outside the hotel where the 55-year-old was rumored to be staying. Night had fallen and the temperature was well below freezing. The demonstrators had convened to say goodbye in the loudest and least restful manner possible.

They banged on pots, pans, and drums in the falling snow; shouted into megaphones; and blew into their orange emergency whistles — a shrill call that’s become synonymous with the Trump administration’s assault in the Twin Cities.

From the building’s fourth floor, a group of men looked down on the raucous crowd, drinks in hand. They appeared to be off-duty members of Bovino’s locally despised detail. One of the men turned, set his can down, dropped his shorts, and shook his bare ass at the protesters before giving them the finger. Not long after, local police and state troopers wielding wooden clubs overtook the crowd. Several arrests were made.

“All that we know at this moment is that they’re swapping out personnel. That doesn’t tell us anything about policies.”

The motivations for the send-off stemmed from masked federal agents running wild throughout Minnesota for the past two months, and from the trail of civil rights abuses, constitutional violations, and violent videos left in their wake.

The most recent insult was the killing of Alex Pretti. On Saturday, federal immigration agents shot the 37-year-old dead in the street while he attempted to help a woman whom they had shoved to the ground.

In the wake of the killing, Bovino claimed that Pretti, who worked as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” despite abundant and immediately available evidence to the contrary.

On Monday, amid a wave of national outrage that even had some Republicans questioning the heavy-handedness in Minnesota, Bovino was removed from his unusual “commander-at-large” position and booted back to California. He will reportedly retire soon.

The local relief at Bovino’s departure is easy to understand. What is far less clear is how much of a change his replacement, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, will bring.

“There’s been no changes in legal filings, no withdrawing claims, no admissions that people are being detained without cause,” University of Minnesota law professor........

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