The remarkable thing is that the administration is desperately trying to provoke public violence, and despite their best, most cruel and oppressive efforts, the Twin Cities haven't given them even ten seconds of video footage to frame protests as "riots," or to frame ICE agents as "under assault," unless you count having their feelings hurt when they go into a Target.
St. Paul himself would be proud of what the cities are doing. Keep resisting.
Extremely troubling, and intentionally so. They want to provoke unruly protests, angry activists, etc. I don't know the best way to respond, but the fact that they want spectacle, anger, confrontation, makes me think anger & confrontation are not the right response. Civil disobedience can be quiet and dignified.
I have mixed feelings. There is something inspiring, to me at least, about the ways that regular people are standing up to the federal agents. There's clearly a threshold of violence and chaos that will invite a backlash if too many people cross it, but there may be room for a certain degree of angry confrontation as long as it doesn't look like people are starting the fight.
Yeah I have mixed feelings too. But keep in mind that many people in this country see things very differently, and have an inherent respect for law enforcement and really don't like to see them disrespected. I have more moderate views, and I've definitely seen videos of people standing up to them that I like. Like I said, civil disobedience can be dignified, the more they are shown to be the aggressors, the more effective the resistance.
True. There is also a not small group of people quite right of center that don't like violent federal government overreach; Ruby Ridge comes to mind. The horror and spectacle of what's happening in Minnesota likely hits some reactive hot buttons across the political spectrum.
I’m not close enough or invest sufficiently to know the reality on the ground. Some of the images I’ve seen from the Twin Cities area show incensed mobs of protesters at a hotel / business. I won’t go as far as violent but intimidating or obstructionist. I think the protesters need to consider the perception their actions create to yield productive not counterproductive outcomes.
Well said. I’m starting my seventh decade on the earth and I never thought I’d live long enough to see people being stopped at random on the street and asked for their “papers.”
I just want to say that people shouldn’t lose faith entirely. This has been driven by an outlaw government. It is still roughly a 50-50 split between democrat and Republican in the electorate. Trump and his ilk will go eventually. The country is still the country it was before him and despite all the lingering problems there’s still tremendous potential and opportunity for improvement.
I’m not usually in the business of optimism, but in this case it’s at least worth considering.
As a border hawk whose midwestern hometown was torn apart by the Ferguson riots, I have a markedly different outlook than your brother, but appreciate the fly on the wall context as well as his earnestness. What is his vision, if he's discussed it, for a reasonable and sustainable migration system moving forward? As others have argued, it seems to me like the scenes from Minneapolis would be a lot less ugly if local law enforcement were allowed to cooperate with the feds in handing over fugitives. It's been difficult to avoid the impression that most of the protesters hope to essentially end all enforcement of immigration laws.
This is nuts. You’re looking at everything other than the obvious brutality and liberalism of this administration. What does Ferguson have to do with it? What does my brother’s preferred immigration policy have to do with it, or the views on open borders of the protestors? This is about not sending in federal troops to an American city to terrorize people and put on a spectacle of brutality. Everything else is utterly secondary.
Perhaps I inadvertently misworded something... had not intended to offend, but to find some common ground and room for compromise in this hyperpolarized discourse. I do find what's going on in Minneapolis intensely troubling, but then again I've found a number of other things intensely troubling for years. The cynical and all-but-lawless theater going on does genuinely remind me of the opportunistic narratives around Ferguson as more or less the start of this age of civil strife as mediated by smartphone.
Many millions of Americans were disturbed over three plus years by the footage of border chaos. I don't think we'd be seeing the ugly abuses of ICE at present (which I hate to see and hope cease immediately) without the ugly abuse of our asylum system over the past number of years. America is in desperate need of an immigration compromise to find a stable, legitimate equilibrium. I advocate for a compromise legalizing millions of the people illegally present in the United States in exchange for border security and interior enforcement taken more seriously than has been the case for decades. That is why I ask about your brother's preferred immigration policy: shouting "ABOLISH ICE" does nothing to deescalate the situation or advance a viable compromise, and I want people of good will to come together to figure out how to move forward, since the abuses of neither Trump nor Biden are acceptable or have any legitimacy.
I have no doubt of you or your brother's best intentions, please extend me the same courtesy!
My educated guess is that my brother is in the vicinity of your proposal. As far as I know he's not an open borders guy. I'm certainly not.
In my perfect world, we'd have plenty of immigration, because I have a hard time seeing what actual problems it's creating for our society, particularly given the declining birth rates among native born Americans and the problems that low fertility is creating for a lot of other developed countries without the kind of immigration we have.
That said, I certainly a) believe in an orderly, lawful immigration system, which it seems like we didn't have for a few years, and b) I recognize more than a certain amount of immigration seems to create a political backlash that is destabilizing (ie what we're seeing now). We don't live in my perfect world. Enough feel differently about the right levels of immigration and it's not politically responsible to ignore their preferences.
So yes, let's compromise. We have the right to control our borders and decide who does and doesn't come here. We're probably always going to have more illegal immigration than most other places because we're a desirable place to be, and it seems almost as utopian as the open borders people are to imagine that we can keep everyone out who doesn't have permission to immigrate without doing immense damage to other values we hold dear. But clearly we can control more than the Biden people did.
I also don't have any problem with the notion that the Biden immigration policy (or lack of policy) is somewhat responsible for this over-reaction. Nor with the idea that various excesses of the woke era produced a backlash.
I just don't want to get into a situation where we act as though one justifies the other, in either direction. This is awful, what we're seeing now. I want to be able to full throatedly condemn this as profoundly illiberal and contrary to core American principle and then also, when appropriate, condemn illiberal shit from the left. I don't want ICE and Homeland Security occupying my city, asking people for their papers, harassing people who have the wrong skin color, etc., and I don't see anything wrong with the people in the Twin Cities telling them to get the fuck out.
Americans tend to be generous and sentimental people, so much so as to have often been a source of frustration for those of us who believe that a tighter border is good for the American working class. So long as the cultural narrative around immigration was mainly "these friendly people with accents want to work hard, become Americans and make America even better," most normies were inclined to look the other way when it came to illegal immigration. It was a catastrophic error for immigrant advocates to switch primarily to a narrative of "infinite immigration is a righteous form of reparations punishing white people for their shameful history" while emphasizing that many immigrants would receive preferential treatment under affirmative action. It was in that narrative context that Biden opened the floodgates to 10 million migrants, and broad swathes of progressive media were positively gleeful about it. That alarmed a lot of people who'd been sanguine about illegal immigration into seeing it as an existential threat. One sad irony of that is that most illegal immigrants really do tend to fit closer to the friendly hard workers paradigm as opposed to identitarian ideologues, but the advocates who claimed to speak for them badly misrepresented them.
No disagreement here. I was never an open borders guy. Seemed wrong both substantively and strategically. But I don't see how that leads to the conclusion that the Trump administration needs to take a by-any-means-necessary approach to a crackdown. It's not an existential crisis, and wasn't when Biden was president. I'm sure it *seemed* like one to many people, but they were wrong.
So now that Trump is in power, and numbers are way down, where's the crisis that necessitates the kind of response we're seeing in the Twin Cities? I don't see it. Even if you think the police should cooperate with ICE (which I don't, but still), there's no crisis. This seems very much about punishing a vulnerable target, trying to generate fear, leaning into the issue around Somalis who committed fraud, etc.
When you start from the standpoint that any excess from the right is the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of mismanagement by the left, you absolve yourself of any responsibility towards moral action and oversight of that action. You de facto remove the potential for any red lines that you would not countenance crossing, because after all, the left is really to blame here.
What would your red line be? What’s the thing that would make you withdraw support for this administration and, with whatever reluctance, support the alternative? If there is nothing, then you’re lost.
You’re a thoughtful guy, and I believe you are genuinely troubled by this violence and the rhetoric. But I think you’ve blinded yourself in the search for intellectual comfort on this topic.
I don't think my standpoint is that *any* excess from the right is the unfortunate consequence of mismanagement from the left. If we're looking at an issue like military appropriations or something, I don't blame the left for that. But migration is a unique issue that the words "right" and "left" don't quite contain. Traditionally, both the left and the right were divided on immigration with each side having a populist wing that wanted tighter border control. The populist sides never had as much money or as big a megaphone as the sides that wanted more cheap labor, and were structurally disadvantaged until the Internet leveled the playing field. At the same time, private sector organized labor became a much less significant constituency for the Democratic party and its populist wing largely defected to Trump in 2016. So the fact that Republicans are now associated with being strict on immigration and Democrats as being very lax regarding borders is historically quite recent.
From my perspective as someone who wants tighter borders (and who more or less left the Democratic party over the issue), the loose border side has been abusive for many years by violating the 1986 compromise, which was supposed to be a one-time amnesty for a few million people in exchange for going after employers who hired illegal labor so that the problem would not recur. The promised enforcement didn't really materialize as promised (due to bipartisan negligence) and twenty years later the loose border side wanted to pass another amnesty, this time for 12 million people. I was open to legalizing some fraction of that 12 million, but only after several years of rigorous enforcement (in particular targeting employers) to demonstrate that Washington was acting in good faith. When Obama was in office, he made a show of being tough on the border in order to try to help pass the amnesty for the 12 million, and when he failed to do that acted administratively "by pen and phone" to try to impose as much "comprehensive immigration reform" as possible without Congress. Trump got elected in 2016 in large part due to backlash against the establishment for ignoring how middle America felt about migration issues. Biden didn't have to stick with Trump policy, but what he did was unprecedented and inappropriate beyond measure.
So when you ask what my red line is, I don't know and hope to never find out. I've disagreed with Trump 2.0 on a bunch of things, but I can't assess him in comparison to a prospective Bartlet administration, only to what I expect the Harris administration would have looked like: open borders, DEI on steroids, a European-style censorship operation, efforts to pack the Supreme Court, soaring energy costs, etc. In that context, I don't regret having supported Trump even as I've been surprised and disappointed by some of the policy departures from his first term.
Ivy is a sick fuck. He acts like a nice guy and then goes into his “see no evil” routine about left-wing activists and Columbia University when he sees masked agents of the state shooting people in the head and grabbing citizens off the street and beating the shit out of them. It can never be ICE’s fault, or that of the nakedly authoritarian administration he helped vote back into power. Some people are just cowards. It helps explain how seemingly descent people end up going along with atrocities in once free societies. He’ll continue to try as hard as he can to avoid seeing what’s right in front of him so he doesn’t have to acknowledge that he made a terrible mistake. This loser even supports AFD, the new German Nazi party. As long as you’re willing to deport immigrants, he doesn’t care if you want to put all the Jews back in camps. He’ll just pretend not to see it or blame it on progressive activists. We used to talk on here sometimes. He was pretty polite and patient when I’d go off on him. Then Trump returned to power and it quickly became clear that he’d try to rationalize just about anything with weasel expressions like “tit for tat.” So I told him he was garbage and that his recently deceased mentor Bill Moyers would be ashamed of what he’s become. So he muted me. Good riddance.
I wouldn't assume such a unified position on immigration policy among so many thousands of people. Writing and interviews I've seen with Twin Cities residents shows many who are not especially "political" but who were moved to action by outrage at the abuses they're seeing first-hand. And from my own engagement in a very liberal area (Burlington, VT) I can say that even here, it's a tiny minority of people who want to end all immigration enforcement.
Unfortunately, one result of this administration's practices is to foreclose any productive discussions of that or other policies.
I try to consistently make a distinction between normies who pull the lever for Democrats while holding basically mainstream views versus people who make their livings as professional progressives or otherwise are immersed in activism who are pulled along by social media mobs.
I came up on the left and most of my friends and family are still on the left, most of them are good well-meaning people trying to be polite and say the right things and "keep up with the joneses" as far as what's considered enlightened in polite company. Those aren't necessarily negative qualities, but can render progressives somewhat vulnerable to ideological programming, whether from news outlets considered prestigious or increasingly now to maximally inflammatory video clips, often presented under false context.
The rapid preference cascade against woke excess these past few years suggests that much support for wokeness was cosmetic, but how did it surge into a decade of dominance in the first place? Plenty of my progressive friends and family will acknowledge now that Biden-Harris immigration policy was both reckless and politically stupid, that gender transitions for minors might be extreme, that the 1619 Project might have been a little dubious, and so on, but where was their critique when speaking up might have dinged their social standing? I can believe that maybe they quietly had misgivings, but at the time they chose to go along to get along.
So I agree with your point that even in Burlington, Vermont only a fraction of progressive voters would likely personally make the argument to end all immigration enforcement, but I'm not sure how much that really matters considering how many of them have something of a "Blue No Matter Who" attitude. Welcoming in something like 10 million impoverished migrants was the Biden-Harris administration's top domestic priority, considering how much political capital was burned on it, and there's every reason to assume the next Democratic president will cast open the borders in their inauguration day, just as Biden did. Why would the next Democrat not just give the big donors and most passionate activists what they want, as the squeaky wheels in the coalition, rather than respect the quiet sensibilities of people not speaking out? Particularly since, at the end of the day, those voters would likely support an Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib- type candidate even over the most inoffensive John Kasich Republican?
The normies would not speak up against the radicals because they were afraid of the radicals. I can understand the fear of speaking out. They knew very well what these people were capable of. Lives were ruined.
But that fear should have made them question what they were supporting. Why walk into the privacy of a voting booth and marking the box for the very people you are afraid of? I don’t understand why anyone would do that.
I have rarely seen anyone characterized the situation that you describe as accurately and reasonably and thoughtfully. Thank you very much for this. I’m going to save it.
I have some in-laws who are mindlessly and uncritically progressive about everything and it’s impossible to push back against. It’s just bulletproof to any kind of factual argument. Very distressing at times. A little bit Manchurian candidatey.
Almost nobody wants to end all immigration enforcement. Its a boogey-man concocted by people who know that what Trump is doing is deeply un-American and immoral. They lack the intestinal fortitude to confront this fact so instead cowardly resort to “whataboutism.”
In the exact same way as the "It will be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the Pentagon needs to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber" bumper stickers that people used to put on their cars in the 1980's. Its sloganeering that never ended up manifesting in actual policy. Defense spending may not be as big a % of GDP as its been in the past, but its still a huge budget line item.
Aside from the first few years of Biden's term, the annual number of asylum seekers to the US had been remarkably stable. The Biden years are the outlier.
I will acknowledge that my years covering academia likely exposed me to a disproportionate number of people who genuinely want to abolish the immigration system entirely in comparison to the general public, but the sentiment that pretty much all migrants should presumptively be allowed to enter the country and eventually get a path to citizenship and be able to bring over family members if they don't commit a major felony has become pretty standard among progressives and libertarians. It's not much exaggeration to say that someone like David Bier of the Cato Institute wants to bring deportations down to double or single digits per year.
It really shouldn’t be that hard to see that the opposition to what’s going on in Minnesota has less to do with an idealogical commitment to open borders than it does just the sheer idiocy of enforcing immigration policy in the way Trump has chosen to do. Even if one is an immigration hawk, what Trump is doing is absurdly stupid:
He announces where ICE surges are going to be ahead of time on social media.If your goal is to round up people breaking the law, you don’t tell them days in advance where you’re going to be. This is beyond brain-dead.
His sycophants like Stephen Miller publicly announce that there is “absolute immunity” for ICE agents. Yeah, the one thing Americans really love is government agents descending on their neighborhoods and operating with impunity. Great move; ICE’s popularity is sinking like a stone.
Enforcement entirely through executive action. Everything Trump is doing with ICE can be undone with the stroke of a pen. Doesn’t it strike immigration hawks as problematic that at a time when the Republicans control the house, senate, and WH that there is literally zero legislation going through that could codify a more hawkish immigration policy into law? And isn’t it telling that common sense proposals, like making e-verify mandatory for hiring can’t even pass a Republican majority house and senate? For crissake we have a federal minimum wage. But we can’t have a federal standard for verifying employment eligibility? It just shows how unserious Republicans are on this issue. Key constituencies (agriculture) depend on illegal immigrant labor so they won’t vote for laws that would actually make a difference.
Instead we get performative BS like this. It’s pathetic and stupid and smart people can see this. And it has nothing to do with support for “open borders.”
It’s reasonable to expect that citizens have the right to exercise their first amendment rights which include civil disobedience which is not punishable by the death penalty. It’s also reasonable to expect ICE agents to follow the law. They do not have the right to illegal search and seizure, or breaking vehicle windows or abducting people and dumping them miles away from where they picked them up. We can reasonably expect these things before we even begin to discuss differences in immigration policy.
But one has to wonder if the Republicans really want to enforce immigration either.
You'll recall S. 744 - the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, from the ‘Gang of Eight’ in 2013. A bill that passed the Senate 68 to 32 with strong bipartisan support. The bill would have toughened security at the southern border and made it harder for employers to hire migrants who had entered the U.S. illegally while providing legal status and a path to citizenship for millions of such migrants who had resided in the U.S. for many years (Dreamers).
Speaker Boehner refused to bring it to the floor for a vote because it did not of a majority of Republican support in the house.
Or the bipartisan border security bill of 2024 where the Democrats gave up even more of their demands (Dreamers) and was on track to pass, but was DOA due to Trumps insistence it be rejected by the House so he could use immigration as a campaign issue.
“They do not have the right to illegal search and seizure, or breaking vehicle windows or abducting people and dumping them miles away from where they picked them up.”
Well, I wish they wouldn’t do these damn things, but unfortunately, it is very possible that under the law they do have the right to do some of these things. Or at least be able to get away with it. My lawyer wife says they may be able to check people on the street without probable cause. Some law that was passed that allows it. I need to research it better.
I've been an activist on migration issues for twenty years now, and have a different outlook on the various attempts at "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" over the decades.
Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan signed a bipartisan immigration compromise that legalized roughly three million illegal immigrants in exchange for a bunch of new policies to punish employers hiring illegal labor. It was supposed to be a one-time deal solving the problem once and for all, and I would have supported it at the time. But after a couple of years the enforcement measures gradually dwindled away and the population of illegal immigrants boomed despite what Washington had promised.
By the time George W. Bush tried to push his comprehensive bill in 2007, the numbers had grown to something like 12 million, four times the amount who had been legalized 20 years before. I don't think zero illegal immigrants entering is a reasonable expectation, but three or four million would have been less eye-poppingly inappropriate evidence that the promised workplace crackdowns were no longer taking place in any serious way. The first time I ever called my congressman and senators was to beg them to oppose that bill. I had no issue with some fraction of the 12 million receiving legalization, but only after a number of years of good faith enforcement going after crooked employers and eroding the 12 million down to a more reasonable figure. It was obvious that the legislation was a bait and switch designed to deliver all of the amnesty and very little of the promised enforcement, just like before.
The 2013 bill was the same pig in slightly different lipstick. Again, there was no reason to expect the security measures or interior enforcement would ever seriously materialize, particularly after Obama torpedoed his credibility on border issues by unilaterally imposing DACA despite repeatedly stating that he had no legal authority to do so (DAPA a couple years later was even more egregious). I am not anti-Dreamer, but don't want anyone in the U.S. illegally to be legalized until security and enforcement are being handled as promised. Maybe 68 Republican senators could be bribed or seduced to back that disingenuous legislation, but the grassroots were hell-set against it. Once again, I called my congressman every day and rejoiced when the bill went down. I have always supported a legitimate compromise on immigration and the legislation was a dishonest attempt for one side to get all that it wanted.
The open-borders lobby spent a lot of money to create the impression that the 2024 Lankford bill was tough and serious and that the majority of Republicans who opposed it only did so they could use immigration as a campaign issue, I can't blame you for buying into that narrative. However, I was following that bill as it was being drafted and was 100% against it long before Trump weighed in. The bill did give the White House some solid tools to shut down the flow, but only once numbers reached the torrential scale that had suddenly become normal under Biden-Harris; in effect, the bill was an attempt to embed in statute those unprecedented numbers as the new status quo. And beyond that, the administration wasn't using the tools it already had to stop the flow (as it proved when it suddenly stopped the flow in Spring 2024), so there was no reason they would utilize any additional tools the bill gave them. The bill was a stunt trying to eliminate immigration as a campaign vulnerability, not any sort of bona fide effort at compromise.
I do agree with you that, from the perspective of someone trying to protect the American labor pool, neither party has proven very interested in reaching a serious compromise. Both parties have historically been too willing to look the other way when it came to employers of illegal immigrants, and ICE's brutal street theater is to some extent a distraction from Trump not going after poultry processing and other low-rung jobs that it's true that not enough Americans want. Those people should be legalized, even as we take steps to make sure that gesture does not incentivize and encourage ever more people to come.
I share a lot of your disgust at the worst video clips coming out of Minneapolis, but for me it's in the context of the worst video clips that came from the border 2021-24, with thousands of totally unvetted unknowns flooding into the country every day. Both profoundly upsetting and unsettling as to the future of our country.
Appreciate the thoughtful reply. I guess all I can say is that when it comes to an immigration bill, it seems to me the perfect shouldn't have been the enemy of the good. That is probably the best we were ever going to get in this big, conflicted country. It would have been far better to legislate *something*, rather than end up where we are now.
I've often wondered if the country might have been better off had Mitt Romney won in 2012, not because I'm a Romney fan but because it would have demonstrated to my generation of millennial progressives that pendulums swing in politics and compromise is always necessary. Unfortunately, the lesson many of my peers took from Obama getting reelected even after the tea party wave of 2010 was that Democrats had achieved a lock on the presidency and thus the Supreme Court, and would soon be able to implement whatever they wanted by executive order. So all of their muscles for compromise and negotiation and having a basic theory of mind for their opposition atrophied away with the presumption that the opposition was irrelevant.
In that light, part of me wishes the 2007 bill had passed because it was closer to a real compromise than the bills in 2013 or 2024. But at the time, not knowing how much more extreme and polarized our politics would become, it looked a lot closer to the sow's ear than the silk purse.
Swarming an area with thousands of ICE officers to exacerbate tensions is not a reasonable or sustainable migration system. For those interested in an optimally effective deportation program for the country as a whole, there is absolutely no reason to defend the operation taking place in Minnesota right now.
Obama was able to deport millions w/ most of the same cities being sanctuary cities unable to work with the police.
But yes, I'm sure it might go smoother for ICE if they were also manhandling people working at Target or Uber drivers.
If there are scenes that look like they're out of a bad movie satirizing East Germany as far as asking for people's papers and men in masks threataning them, it's up to border hawks like you to loudly oppose it and no longer support politicians who support it to convince people like me that not every current pro-ICE person basically wants a Stormtrooper squad in every American city.
The bulk of Obama's "deportations" were a mirage. His administration conflated incidents of people being turned away at the border with what would colloquially be considered deportations from the national interior under the vague category of "removals." The numbers weren't technically inaccurate, if misleading, and were ginned up to try to help pass the 2013 "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" bill, which itself was not a good faith effort at a legitimate compromise.
Which is why it's also a mirage to envision the Biden-Harris immigration policy as a fundamental departure from Obama's precedent. Both were fundamentally aiming to extend citizenship to as many warm bodies as possible while rendering enforcement cosmetic and rare.
I agree that the scenes coming out of Minneapolis are troubling and distasteful to say the least. It's not remotely how I'd approach the issue and I do think this overreach threatens to delegitimize baseline border security and interior enforcement among persuadable moderates. It would make far more sense to do unpredictable worksite checks in places that aren't dense blue enclaves with lots of underemployed activists around, and rely on the power of the purse to incentivize more cooperation from sanctuary jurisdictions in terms of transferring over convicted felons with active deportation orders, plus go after the employers even more than the migrants; as rational actors many will leave if the job opportunities dry up.
I should add that the daily scenes of border chaos with thousands of impoverished migrants endlessly streaming in were equally as troubling and distressing to many millions of Americans, and arguably a form of intimidating civic violence. I don't think the ugly spectacle coming out of Minnesota can be understood outside of that border state context. Progressives have an uphill climb persuading people that they don't intend to reimpose the migration free-for-all of 2021-24.
Does your vision for a “reasonable and sustainable migration system moving forward” include sending masked federal agents in such large numbers that they more than double the local police force in a major metropolitan area?
You lack such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the U.S system of government is designed that its flat out un-American. You may not agree with it, but states declining to assist in the enforcement of immigration laws - which are federal, and therefore the responsibility of the federal government to enforce - is a power that states have. This is by design and how the founders intended. What they did not intend was an executive branch that could direct armies of masked thugs into states to commandeer local law enforcement.
Has it ever occurred to you that this is only happening in the places where the degree of resistance approaches the level and tenor of obstruction and is on the edge of sparking violence? Perhaps toning down the tone of the heightened resistance would result in toning down the response. We, all of us, you and the government authorities are in the end just human beings doing what we feel called to do.
The authoritarian bullshit is that a flagrantly corrupt Democrat political machine is using illegal immigration and massive theft of tax dollars to increase power. The Democrats have been dog whistling for violence against ICE and then fooling people into pretending that ICE has no right to defend themselves from the violence. Sorry, but if you choose to defend a corrupt insurrection then you have chosen the wrong side.
My city has been invaded by illegal immigrants, just like every city in America. The dodge of talking about immigration is long since expired. The enforcement is lawful. The insurrectionists hate Trump and the law far more than they love America.
Minnesota has been colonized by anti-American illegal immigrants. Liberating Minnesota will not be simple. The brainwashed Minnesotans will resist far longer than they should.
I don’t think this would be your reaction if a Democratic administration was deploying federal troops in this way, in your city. We can argue about immigration, but this is authoritarian bullshit that no freedom loving American should have anything but loathing for.
Sending love back to Jonathan.
The remarkable thing is that the administration is desperately trying to provoke public violence, and despite their best, most cruel and oppressive efforts, the Twin Cities haven't given them even ten seconds of video footage to frame protests as "riots," or to frame ICE agents as "under assault," unless you count having their feelings hurt when they go into a Target.
St. Paul himself would be proud of what the cities are doing. Keep resisting.
Extremely troubling, and intentionally so. They want to provoke unruly protests, angry activists, etc. I don't know the best way to respond, but the fact that they want spectacle, anger, confrontation, makes me think anger & confrontation are not the right response. Civil disobedience can be quiet and dignified.
I have mixed feelings. There is something inspiring, to me at least, about the ways that regular people are standing up to the federal agents. There's clearly a threshold of violence and chaos that will invite a backlash if too many people cross it, but there may be room for a certain degree of angry confrontation as long as it doesn't look like people are starting the fight.
Yeah I have mixed feelings too. But keep in mind that many people in this country see things very differently, and have an inherent respect for law enforcement and really don't like to see them disrespected. I have more moderate views, and I've definitely seen videos of people standing up to them that I like. Like I said, civil disobedience can be dignified, the more they are shown to be the aggressors, the more effective the resistance.
True. There is also a not small group of people quite right of center that don't like violent federal government overreach; Ruby Ridge comes to mind. The horror and spectacle of what's happening in Minnesota likely hits some reactive hot buttons across the political spectrum.
I’m not close enough or invest sufficiently to know the reality on the ground. Some of the images I’ve seen from the Twin Cities area show incensed mobs of protesters at a hotel / business. I won’t go as far as violent but intimidating or obstructionist. I think the protesters need to consider the perception their actions create to yield productive not counterproductive outcomes.
This is vile, and I'm glad Jonathan is documenting it.
My prayers (and many others') go to the God of peace and justice, for peace in Minneapolis and justice for all.
Well said. I’m starting my seventh decade on the earth and I never thought I’d live long enough to see people being stopped at random on the street and asked for their “papers.”
I just want to say that people shouldn’t lose faith entirely. This has been driven by an outlaw government. It is still roughly a 50-50 split between democrat and Republican in the electorate. Trump and his ilk will go eventually. The country is still the country it was before him and despite all the lingering problems there’s still tremendous potential and opportunity for improvement.
I’m not usually in the business of optimism, but in this case it’s at least worth considering.
Your brother should be an author, too, if he isn’t already. Tell him at least one literary agent says so.
I'll let him know!
As a border hawk whose midwestern hometown was torn apart by the Ferguson riots, I have a markedly different outlook than your brother, but appreciate the fly on the wall context as well as his earnestness. What is his vision, if he's discussed it, for a reasonable and sustainable migration system moving forward? As others have argued, it seems to me like the scenes from Minneapolis would be a lot less ugly if local law enforcement were allowed to cooperate with the feds in handing over fugitives. It's been difficult to avoid the impression that most of the protesters hope to essentially end all enforcement of immigration laws.
This is nuts. You’re looking at everything other than the obvious brutality and liberalism of this administration. What does Ferguson have to do with it? What does my brother’s preferred immigration policy have to do with it, or the views on open borders of the protestors? This is about not sending in federal troops to an American city to terrorize people and put on a spectacle of brutality. Everything else is utterly secondary.
Perhaps I inadvertently misworded something... had not intended to offend, but to find some common ground and room for compromise in this hyperpolarized discourse. I do find what's going on in Minneapolis intensely troubling, but then again I've found a number of other things intensely troubling for years. The cynical and all-but-lawless theater going on does genuinely remind me of the opportunistic narratives around Ferguson as more or less the start of this age of civil strife as mediated by smartphone.
Many millions of Americans were disturbed over three plus years by the footage of border chaos. I don't think we'd be seeing the ugly abuses of ICE at present (which I hate to see and hope cease immediately) without the ugly abuse of our asylum system over the past number of years. America is in desperate need of an immigration compromise to find a stable, legitimate equilibrium. I advocate for a compromise legalizing millions of the people illegally present in the United States in exchange for border security and interior enforcement taken more seriously than has been the case for decades. That is why I ask about your brother's preferred immigration policy: shouting "ABOLISH ICE" does nothing to deescalate the situation or advance a viable compromise, and I want people of good will to come together to figure out how to move forward, since the abuses of neither Trump nor Biden are acceptable or have any legitimacy.
I have no doubt of you or your brother's best intentions, please extend me the same courtesy!
My educated guess is that my brother is in the vicinity of your proposal. As far as I know he's not an open borders guy. I'm certainly not.
In my perfect world, we'd have plenty of immigration, because I have a hard time seeing what actual problems it's creating for our society, particularly given the declining birth rates among native born Americans and the problems that low fertility is creating for a lot of other developed countries without the kind of immigration we have.
That said, I certainly a) believe in an orderly, lawful immigration system, which it seems like we didn't have for a few years, and b) I recognize more than a certain amount of immigration seems to create a political backlash that is destabilizing (ie what we're seeing now). We don't live in my perfect world. Enough feel differently about the right levels of immigration and it's not politically responsible to ignore their preferences.
So yes, let's compromise. We have the right to control our borders and decide who does and doesn't come here. We're probably always going to have more illegal immigration than most other places because we're a desirable place to be, and it seems almost as utopian as the open borders people are to imagine that we can keep everyone out who doesn't have permission to immigrate without doing immense damage to other values we hold dear. But clearly we can control more than the Biden people did.
I also don't have any problem with the notion that the Biden immigration policy (or lack of policy) is somewhat responsible for this over-reaction. Nor with the idea that various excesses of the woke era produced a backlash.
I just don't want to get into a situation where we act as though one justifies the other, in either direction. This is awful, what we're seeing now. I want to be able to full throatedly condemn this as profoundly illiberal and contrary to core American principle and then also, when appropriate, condemn illiberal shit from the left. I don't want ICE and Homeland Security occupying my city, asking people for their papers, harassing people who have the wrong skin color, etc., and I don't see anything wrong with the people in the Twin Cities telling them to get the fuck out.
Americans tend to be generous and sentimental people, so much so as to have often been a source of frustration for those of us who believe that a tighter border is good for the American working class. So long as the cultural narrative around immigration was mainly "these friendly people with accents want to work hard, become Americans and make America even better," most normies were inclined to look the other way when it came to illegal immigration. It was a catastrophic error for immigrant advocates to switch primarily to a narrative of "infinite immigration is a righteous form of reparations punishing white people for their shameful history" while emphasizing that many immigrants would receive preferential treatment under affirmative action. It was in that narrative context that Biden opened the floodgates to 10 million migrants, and broad swathes of progressive media were positively gleeful about it. That alarmed a lot of people who'd been sanguine about illegal immigration into seeing it as an existential threat. One sad irony of that is that most illegal immigrants really do tend to fit closer to the friendly hard workers paradigm as opposed to identitarian ideologues, but the advocates who claimed to speak for them badly misrepresented them.
No disagreement here. I was never an open borders guy. Seemed wrong both substantively and strategically. But I don't see how that leads to the conclusion that the Trump administration needs to take a by-any-means-necessary approach to a crackdown. It's not an existential crisis, and wasn't when Biden was president. I'm sure it *seemed* like one to many people, but they were wrong.
So now that Trump is in power, and numbers are way down, where's the crisis that necessitates the kind of response we're seeing in the Twin Cities? I don't see it. Even if you think the police should cooperate with ICE (which I don't, but still), there's no crisis. This seems very much about punishing a vulnerable target, trying to generate fear, leaning into the issue around Somalis who committed fraud, etc.
When you start from the standpoint that any excess from the right is the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of mismanagement by the left, you absolve yourself of any responsibility towards moral action and oversight of that action. You de facto remove the potential for any red lines that you would not countenance crossing, because after all, the left is really to blame here.
What would your red line be? What’s the thing that would make you withdraw support for this administration and, with whatever reluctance, support the alternative? If there is nothing, then you’re lost.
You’re a thoughtful guy, and I believe you are genuinely troubled by this violence and the rhetoric. But I think you’ve blinded yourself in the search for intellectual comfort on this topic.
I don't think my standpoint is that *any* excess from the right is the unfortunate consequence of mismanagement from the left. If we're looking at an issue like military appropriations or something, I don't blame the left for that. But migration is a unique issue that the words "right" and "left" don't quite contain. Traditionally, both the left and the right were divided on immigration with each side having a populist wing that wanted tighter border control. The populist sides never had as much money or as big a megaphone as the sides that wanted more cheap labor, and were structurally disadvantaged until the Internet leveled the playing field. At the same time, private sector organized labor became a much less significant constituency for the Democratic party and its populist wing largely defected to Trump in 2016. So the fact that Republicans are now associated with being strict on immigration and Democrats as being very lax regarding borders is historically quite recent.
From my perspective as someone who wants tighter borders (and who more or less left the Democratic party over the issue), the loose border side has been abusive for many years by violating the 1986 compromise, which was supposed to be a one-time amnesty for a few million people in exchange for going after employers who hired illegal labor so that the problem would not recur. The promised enforcement didn't really materialize as promised (due to bipartisan negligence) and twenty years later the loose border side wanted to pass another amnesty, this time for 12 million people. I was open to legalizing some fraction of that 12 million, but only after several years of rigorous enforcement (in particular targeting employers) to demonstrate that Washington was acting in good faith. When Obama was in office, he made a show of being tough on the border in order to try to help pass the amnesty for the 12 million, and when he failed to do that acted administratively "by pen and phone" to try to impose as much "comprehensive immigration reform" as possible without Congress. Trump got elected in 2016 in large part due to backlash against the establishment for ignoring how middle America felt about migration issues. Biden didn't have to stick with Trump policy, but what he did was unprecedented and inappropriate beyond measure.
So when you ask what my red line is, I don't know and hope to never find out. I've disagreed with Trump 2.0 on a bunch of things, but I can't assess him in comparison to a prospective Bartlet administration, only to what I expect the Harris administration would have looked like: open borders, DEI on steroids, a European-style censorship operation, efforts to pack the Supreme Court, soaring energy costs, etc. In that context, I don't regret having supported Trump even as I've been surprised and disappointed by some of the policy departures from his first term.
Something tells me you aren't ever going to find your red line. It is always possible to justify just one more step on a path you're already on.
What would your red line have been to compel you to denounce Biden-Harris?
Ivy is a sick fuck. He acts like a nice guy and then goes into his “see no evil” routine about left-wing activists and Columbia University when he sees masked agents of the state shooting people in the head and grabbing citizens off the street and beating the shit out of them. It can never be ICE’s fault, or that of the nakedly authoritarian administration he helped vote back into power. Some people are just cowards. It helps explain how seemingly descent people end up going along with atrocities in once free societies. He’ll continue to try as hard as he can to avoid seeing what’s right in front of him so he doesn’t have to acknowledge that he made a terrible mistake. This loser even supports AFD, the new German Nazi party. As long as you’re willing to deport immigrants, he doesn’t care if you want to put all the Jews back in camps. He’ll just pretend not to see it or blame it on progressive activists. We used to talk on here sometimes. He was pretty polite and patient when I’d go off on him. Then Trump returned to power and it quickly became clear that he’d try to rationalize just about anything with weasel expressions like “tit for tat.” So I told him he was garbage and that his recently deceased mentor Bill Moyers would be ashamed of what he’s become. So he muted me. Good riddance.
I wouldn't assume such a unified position on immigration policy among so many thousands of people. Writing and interviews I've seen with Twin Cities residents shows many who are not especially "political" but who were moved to action by outrage at the abuses they're seeing first-hand. And from my own engagement in a very liberal area (Burlington, VT) I can say that even here, it's a tiny minority of people who want to end all immigration enforcement.
Unfortunately, one result of this administration's practices is to foreclose any productive discussions of that or other policies.
I try to consistently make a distinction between normies who pull the lever for Democrats while holding basically mainstream views versus people who make their livings as professional progressives or otherwise are immersed in activism who are pulled along by social media mobs.
I came up on the left and most of my friends and family are still on the left, most of them are good well-meaning people trying to be polite and say the right things and "keep up with the joneses" as far as what's considered enlightened in polite company. Those aren't necessarily negative qualities, but can render progressives somewhat vulnerable to ideological programming, whether from news outlets considered prestigious or increasingly now to maximally inflammatory video clips, often presented under false context.
The rapid preference cascade against woke excess these past few years suggests that much support for wokeness was cosmetic, but how did it surge into a decade of dominance in the first place? Plenty of my progressive friends and family will acknowledge now that Biden-Harris immigration policy was both reckless and politically stupid, that gender transitions for minors might be extreme, that the 1619 Project might have been a little dubious, and so on, but where was their critique when speaking up might have dinged their social standing? I can believe that maybe they quietly had misgivings, but at the time they chose to go along to get along.
So I agree with your point that even in Burlington, Vermont only a fraction of progressive voters would likely personally make the argument to end all immigration enforcement, but I'm not sure how much that really matters considering how many of them have something of a "Blue No Matter Who" attitude. Welcoming in something like 10 million impoverished migrants was the Biden-Harris administration's top domestic priority, considering how much political capital was burned on it, and there's every reason to assume the next Democratic president will cast open the borders in their inauguration day, just as Biden did. Why would the next Democrat not just give the big donors and most passionate activists what they want, as the squeaky wheels in the coalition, rather than respect the quiet sensibilities of people not speaking out? Particularly since, at the end of the day, those voters would likely support an Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib- type candidate even over the most inoffensive John Kasich Republican?
The normies would not speak up against the radicals because they were afraid of the radicals. I can understand the fear of speaking out. They knew very well what these people were capable of. Lives were ruined.
But that fear should have made them question what they were supporting. Why walk into the privacy of a voting booth and marking the box for the very people you are afraid of? I don’t understand why anyone would do that.
I have rarely seen anyone characterized the situation that you describe as accurately and reasonably and thoughtfully. Thank you very much for this. I’m going to save it.
I have some in-laws who are mindlessly and uncritically progressive about everything and it’s impossible to push back against. It’s just bulletproof to any kind of factual argument. Very distressing at times. A little bit Manchurian candidatey.
Certainly some of the footage coming out of Minneapolis is further cementing their minds shut.
I suspect we are out of the rational immigration policy debate zone at least for a while.
So our options are totally unaccountable ICE or open borders, even though very few Americans want either?
It certainly seems like that's what's on menu for the foreseeable future, alas...
Voting against Trump three times in a row is not very good evidence that someone will vote blue no matter who.
Almost nobody wants to end all immigration enforcement. Its a boogey-man concocted by people who know that what Trump is doing is deeply un-American and immoral. They lack the intestinal fortitude to confront this fact so instead cowardly resort to “whataboutism.”
We've all seen the yard signs stating that "No Human Being is Illegal," how else can that be interpreted?
In the exact same way as the "It will be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the Pentagon needs to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber" bumper stickers that people used to put on their cars in the 1980's. Its sloganeering that never ended up manifesting in actual policy. Defense spending may not be as big a % of GDP as its been in the past, but its still a huge budget line item.
Aside from the first few years of Biden's term, the annual number of asylum seekers to the US had been remarkably stable. The Biden years are the outlier.
I will acknowledge that my years covering academia likely exposed me to a disproportionate number of people who genuinely want to abolish the immigration system entirely in comparison to the general public, but the sentiment that pretty much all migrants should presumptively be allowed to enter the country and eventually get a path to citizenship and be able to bring over family members if they don't commit a major felony has become pretty standard among progressives and libertarians. It's not much exaggeration to say that someone like David Bier of the Cato Institute wants to bring deportations down to double or single digits per year.
It really shouldn’t be that hard to see that the opposition to what’s going on in Minnesota has less to do with an idealogical commitment to open borders than it does just the sheer idiocy of enforcing immigration policy in the way Trump has chosen to do. Even if one is an immigration hawk, what Trump is doing is absurdly stupid:
He announces where ICE surges are going to be ahead of time on social media.If your goal is to round up people breaking the law, you don’t tell them days in advance where you’re going to be. This is beyond brain-dead.
His sycophants like Stephen Miller publicly announce that there is “absolute immunity” for ICE agents. Yeah, the one thing Americans really love is government agents descending on their neighborhoods and operating with impunity. Great move; ICE’s popularity is sinking like a stone.
Enforcement entirely through executive action. Everything Trump is doing with ICE can be undone with the stroke of a pen. Doesn’t it strike immigration hawks as problematic that at a time when the Republicans control the house, senate, and WH that there is literally zero legislation going through that could codify a more hawkish immigration policy into law? And isn’t it telling that common sense proposals, like making e-verify mandatory for hiring can’t even pass a Republican majority house and senate? For crissake we have a federal minimum wage. But we can’t have a federal standard for verifying employment eligibility? It just shows how unserious Republicans are on this issue. Key constituencies (agriculture) depend on illegal immigrant labor so they won’t vote for laws that would actually make a difference.
Instead we get performative BS like this. It’s pathetic and stupid and smart people can see this. And it has nothing to do with support for “open borders.”
It’s reasonable to expect that citizens have the right to exercise their first amendment rights which include civil disobedience which is not punishable by the death penalty. It’s also reasonable to expect ICE agents to follow the law. They do not have the right to illegal search and seizure, or breaking vehicle windows or abducting people and dumping them miles away from where they picked them up. We can reasonably expect these things before we even begin to discuss differences in immigration policy.
But one has to wonder if the Republicans really want to enforce immigration either.
You'll recall S. 744 - the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, from the ‘Gang of Eight’ in 2013. A bill that passed the Senate 68 to 32 with strong bipartisan support. The bill would have toughened security at the southern border and made it harder for employers to hire migrants who had entered the U.S. illegally while providing legal status and a path to citizenship for millions of such migrants who had resided in the U.S. for many years (Dreamers).
Speaker Boehner refused to bring it to the floor for a vote because it did not of a majority of Republican support in the house.
Or the bipartisan border security bill of 2024 where the Democrats gave up even more of their demands (Dreamers) and was on track to pass, but was DOA due to Trumps insistence it be rejected by the House so he could use immigration as a campaign issue.
So now we are where we are.
“They do not have the right to illegal search and seizure, or breaking vehicle windows or abducting people and dumping them miles away from where they picked them up.”
Well, I wish they wouldn’t do these damn things, but unfortunately, it is very possible that under the law they do have the right to do some of these things. Or at least be able to get away with it. My lawyer wife says they may be able to check people on the street without probable cause. Some law that was passed that allows it. I need to research it better.
I've been an activist on migration issues for twenty years now, and have a different outlook on the various attempts at "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" over the decades.
Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan signed a bipartisan immigration compromise that legalized roughly three million illegal immigrants in exchange for a bunch of new policies to punish employers hiring illegal labor. It was supposed to be a one-time deal solving the problem once and for all, and I would have supported it at the time. But after a couple of years the enforcement measures gradually dwindled away and the population of illegal immigrants boomed despite what Washington had promised.
By the time George W. Bush tried to push his comprehensive bill in 2007, the numbers had grown to something like 12 million, four times the amount who had been legalized 20 years before. I don't think zero illegal immigrants entering is a reasonable expectation, but three or four million would have been less eye-poppingly inappropriate evidence that the promised workplace crackdowns were no longer taking place in any serious way. The first time I ever called my congressman and senators was to beg them to oppose that bill. I had no issue with some fraction of the 12 million receiving legalization, but only after a number of years of good faith enforcement going after crooked employers and eroding the 12 million down to a more reasonable figure. It was obvious that the legislation was a bait and switch designed to deliver all of the amnesty and very little of the promised enforcement, just like before.
The 2013 bill was the same pig in slightly different lipstick. Again, there was no reason to expect the security measures or interior enforcement would ever seriously materialize, particularly after Obama torpedoed his credibility on border issues by unilaterally imposing DACA despite repeatedly stating that he had no legal authority to do so (DAPA a couple years later was even more egregious). I am not anti-Dreamer, but don't want anyone in the U.S. illegally to be legalized until security and enforcement are being handled as promised. Maybe 68 Republican senators could be bribed or seduced to back that disingenuous legislation, but the grassroots were hell-set against it. Once again, I called my congressman every day and rejoiced when the bill went down. I have always supported a legitimate compromise on immigration and the legislation was a dishonest attempt for one side to get all that it wanted.
The open-borders lobby spent a lot of money to create the impression that the 2024 Lankford bill was tough and serious and that the majority of Republicans who opposed it only did so they could use immigration as a campaign issue, I can't blame you for buying into that narrative. However, I was following that bill as it was being drafted and was 100% against it long before Trump weighed in. The bill did give the White House some solid tools to shut down the flow, but only once numbers reached the torrential scale that had suddenly become normal under Biden-Harris; in effect, the bill was an attempt to embed in statute those unprecedented numbers as the new status quo. And beyond that, the administration wasn't using the tools it already had to stop the flow (as it proved when it suddenly stopped the flow in Spring 2024), so there was no reason they would utilize any additional tools the bill gave them. The bill was a stunt trying to eliminate immigration as a campaign vulnerability, not any sort of bona fide effort at compromise.
I do agree with you that, from the perspective of someone trying to protect the American labor pool, neither party has proven very interested in reaching a serious compromise. Both parties have historically been too willing to look the other way when it came to employers of illegal immigrants, and ICE's brutal street theater is to some extent a distraction from Trump not going after poultry processing and other low-rung jobs that it's true that not enough Americans want. Those people should be legalized, even as we take steps to make sure that gesture does not incentivize and encourage ever more people to come.
I share a lot of your disgust at the worst video clips coming out of Minneapolis, but for me it's in the context of the worst video clips that came from the border 2021-24, with thousands of totally unvetted unknowns flooding into the country every day. Both profoundly upsetting and unsettling as to the future of our country.
Appreciate the thoughtful reply. I guess all I can say is that when it comes to an immigration bill, it seems to me the perfect shouldn't have been the enemy of the good. That is probably the best we were ever going to get in this big, conflicted country. It would have been far better to legislate *something*, rather than end up where we are now.
I've often wondered if the country might have been better off had Mitt Romney won in 2012, not because I'm a Romney fan but because it would have demonstrated to my generation of millennial progressives that pendulums swing in politics and compromise is always necessary. Unfortunately, the lesson many of my peers took from Obama getting reelected even after the tea party wave of 2010 was that Democrats had achieved a lock on the presidency and thus the Supreme Court, and would soon be able to implement whatever they wanted by executive order. So all of their muscles for compromise and negotiation and having a basic theory of mind for their opposition atrophied away with the presumption that the opposition was irrelevant.
In that light, part of me wishes the 2007 bill had passed because it was closer to a real compromise than the bills in 2013 or 2024. But at the time, not knowing how much more extreme and polarized our politics would become, it looked a lot closer to the sow's ear than the silk purse.
For different reasons, I sometimes wonder that too.
Swarming an area with thousands of ICE officers to exacerbate tensions is not a reasonable or sustainable migration system. For those interested in an optimally effective deportation program for the country as a whole, there is absolutely no reason to defend the operation taking place in Minnesota right now.
Agreed that it's counterproductive to reaching any sort of reasonable compromise.
Obama was able to deport millions w/ most of the same cities being sanctuary cities unable to work with the police.
But yes, I'm sure it might go smoother for ICE if they were also manhandling people working at Target or Uber drivers.
If there are scenes that look like they're out of a bad movie satirizing East Germany as far as asking for people's papers and men in masks threataning them, it's up to border hawks like you to loudly oppose it and no longer support politicians who support it to convince people like me that not every current pro-ICE person basically wants a Stormtrooper squad in every American city.
The bulk of Obama's "deportations" were a mirage. His administration conflated incidents of people being turned away at the border with what would colloquially be considered deportations from the national interior under the vague category of "removals." The numbers weren't technically inaccurate, if misleading, and were ginned up to try to help pass the 2013 "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" bill, which itself was not a good faith effort at a legitimate compromise.
Which is why it's also a mirage to envision the Biden-Harris immigration policy as a fundamental departure from Obama's precedent. Both were fundamentally aiming to extend citizenship to as many warm bodies as possible while rendering enforcement cosmetic and rare.
I agree that the scenes coming out of Minneapolis are troubling and distasteful to say the least. It's not remotely how I'd approach the issue and I do think this overreach threatens to delegitimize baseline border security and interior enforcement among persuadable moderates. It would make far more sense to do unpredictable worksite checks in places that aren't dense blue enclaves with lots of underemployed activists around, and rely on the power of the purse to incentivize more cooperation from sanctuary jurisdictions in terms of transferring over convicted felons with active deportation orders, plus go after the employers even more than the migrants; as rational actors many will leave if the job opportunities dry up.
I should add that the daily scenes of border chaos with thousands of impoverished migrants endlessly streaming in were equally as troubling and distressing to many millions of Americans, and arguably a form of intimidating civic violence. I don't think the ugly spectacle coming out of Minnesota can be understood outside of that border state context. Progressives have an uphill climb persuading people that they don't intend to reimpose the migration free-for-all of 2021-24.
Does your vision for a “reasonable and sustainable migration system moving forward” include sending masked federal agents in such large numbers that they more than double the local police force in a major metropolitan area?
You lack such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the U.S system of government is designed that its flat out un-American. You may not agree with it, but states declining to assist in the enforcement of immigration laws - which are federal, and therefore the responsibility of the federal government to enforce - is a power that states have. This is by design and how the founders intended. What they did not intend was an executive branch that could direct armies of masked thugs into states to commandeer local law enforcement.
Also in Minneapolis. I support ICE and its efforts.
Has it ever occurred to you that this is only happening in the places where the degree of resistance approaches the level and tenor of obstruction and is on the edge of sparking violence? Perhaps toning down the tone of the heightened resistance would result in toning down the response. We, all of us, you and the government authorities are in the end just human beings doing what we feel called to do.
"Be treaded on, or be shot."
Thanks so much for sharing this.
Love you, Johnny! 413
The authoritarian bullshit is that a flagrantly corrupt Democrat political machine is using illegal immigration and massive theft of tax dollars to increase power. The Democrats have been dog whistling for violence against ICE and then fooling people into pretending that ICE has no right to defend themselves from the violence. Sorry, but if you choose to defend a corrupt insurrection then you have chosen the wrong side.
My city has been invaded by illegal immigrants, just like every city in America. The dodge of talking about immigration is long since expired. The enforcement is lawful. The insurrectionists hate Trump and the law far more than they love America.
Minnesota has been colonized by anti-American illegal immigrants. Liberating Minnesota will not be simple. The brainwashed Minnesotans will resist far longer than they should.
I don’t think this would be your reaction if a Democratic administration was deploying federal troops in this way, in your city. We can argue about immigration, but this is authoritarian bullshit that no freedom loving American should have anything but loathing for.