It was clear after the killing of Renee Good on Jan. 7 that “Operation Metro Surge” — the Trump administration’s pretextual immigration crackdown in Minnesota — was a failure. Far from cowing the people of Minneapolis, Good’s death at the hand of an ICE officer stiffened their resolve and led even more Minnesotans to join the fight against the president’s masked paramilitaries.

A less fanatical White House might have used that moment to stage a tactical withdrawal, to pull back on the assault and recalibrate in the face of stiff resistance. But in the actually existing Trump administration, immigration policy is dictated by rigid ideologues. They met Good’s death with insults, slander and the promise of further repression.

Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called Good a “deranged lunatic.” Vice President JD Vance said that her actions were “an attack on law and order” and “an attack on the American people.” He also said that the officer who shot Good was protected by “absolute immunity.” (He later backtracked from this claim, insisting instead that he said the opposite, video evidence notwithstanding.)

We know what happened next. On Saturday, officers with Customs and Border Protection detained, beat, shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old I.C.U. nurse who had been observing and filming ICE and C.B.P. operations. Like Good’s death, Pretti’s was caught on camera, and like Good’s death, it was egregious. Images and video of Pretti’s killing exploded on social media. Before the White House could even respond there were protests on the ground, demands for accountability, calls to abolish ICE and palpable discontent from across the political spectrum. And when the administration did address the killing, it returned to the same lies and distortions it used to try to discredit Good.

“This individual went and impeded their law enforcement operations, attacked those officers, had a weapon on him and multiple dozens of rounds of ammunition, wishing to inflict harm on these officers, coming, brandishing like that,” Noem said, as if video of the confrontation did not exist. Similarly, Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and accused Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota of “flaming the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportation of illegals who invaded the country.”

By Sunday, officials in the Trump administration had begun to backpedal. By Monday, they were doing everything they could to appease the public’s anger. First, administration officials announced that they would remove Gregory Bovino, the highly visible field commander for Customs and Border Protection, from the area. Homeland Security said it would remove some C.B.P. agents from Minnesota, and President Trump said that he would withdraw ICE officers as well. “At some point, we will leave,” he said. “We’ve done, they’ve done, a phenomenal job.”

This was no longer a defeat; it was a rout. Not only had the White House failed to achieve its strategic objective — both the mass removal of immigrants from the Minneapolis area and the suppression of the administration’s political opponents through force and the fear of force — it had also lost significant ground with the public on its most favorable issue.

When Trump took office last January, he had a net eight-point advantage on immigration according to an average computed by the pollster G. Elliott Morris. Now he has a net 10-point disadvantage. Individual polls show an even starker decline: Trump is 18 points underwater on immigration, according to the latest poll from The New York Times and Siena University. Sixty-one percent of respondents also said the tactics used by ICE have gone too far. And Trump’s overall approval has dropped below 40 percent in recent polls from YouGov, Reuters and The Economist.

The president is so clearly in retreat in the wake of Pretti’s death — especially coming as it did on the heels of Good’s — that even congressional Democrats have abandoned their usual defensive posture for something more aggressive. Senate Democrats have promised to filibuster an upcoming funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security if it doesn’t include a serious effort to rein in ICE and C.B.P. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who leads Democrats in the House, has pledged to impeach Noem if she doesn’t resign. There are signs, too, of infighting within the administration. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem said in remarks reported by Axios, referring to Miller.