ICE breakers: The morality of immigration enforcement itself is being challenged |
The protests against federal immigration enforcement rocking Minneapolis are frequently framed as a matter of tactics and prudence. Is what the Trump administration is doing strictly necessary to uphold the law? Are the personnel who have been deployed to the area enhancing or undermining public safety? Is this a good use of government resources? Are the new agents and officers being surged to Minnesota properly trained?
These are all important questions, especially after two American citizens have been fatally shot in confrontations with federal immigration authorities. But the showdown in Minneapolis also raises more fundamental questions about the legitimacy of immigration enforcement and whether the winners of the 2024 elections will be permitted to govern.
Many of those who have taken to the streets to protest the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol in their predominantly liberal state harbor deep convictions that these authorities are there to enforce racist and immoral laws. They believe they are unjust in a way that requires resistance and rebellion, not persuasion or legislative remedy. A significant number of mainstream Democrats are beginning to suspect that these activists are right, even if they may not be ready to go quite as far in their public rhetoric.
But a few of their elected officials are getting close. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank,” Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) told reporters at a press conference. “Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Walz was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024, not a fringe figure. The U.S. Holocaust Museum denounced his comments.
Some of this is inseparable from people’s feelings about President Donald Trump, compounded by anger over the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. For a decade now, many Trump opponents have styled themselves as the Resistance, bringing suburban moms and college-educated retirees together in an unlikely common cause with antifa to thwart what they see as fascism stalking the land.
For his part, Walz could certainly argue that his comment about Minnesota children “hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside” was a reference to the shootings by agents of the federal government rather than the removal of illegal immigrants. But Minnesota’s sanctuary policies themselves, like those adopted by numerous other liberal jurisdictions, imply our immigration laws and their strict enforcement are illegitimate. And it is precisely those policies that have drawn the federal response at the center of this conflict.
“What we see all over the country, save a few sanctuary cities like Minneapolis, is we see cooperation and support,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Meet the Press on the same day Walz invoked Anne Frank. “We deport 10 times the number of illegal aliens out of Texas than we do out of Minneapolis. Why do we hear nothing out of Texas about any of the same problems that we have in Minneapolis? I’ll tell you why. Because in Texas, we have the cooperation and support of local law enforcement so that we........