MINNESOTA AND THE BATTLE TO CRIPPLE ICE. You’ve seen videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers struggling to apprehend illegal immigrants in Minneapolis and elsewhere around the country. Many of those immigrants have criminal records. The reason ICE struggles to detain them is that heavily Democratic jurisdictions, such as Minneapolis, specifically make it hard for immigration authorities to detain criminal illegal immigrants.
That’s the point of sanctuary laws — to erect a barrier between the illegal immigrant and federal immigration law. In a more normal world, when a person who is in the country illegally and who has committed another crime is released from jail, local authorities would notify federal immigration officials, who would then pick up the illegal immigrant and put them on the path to deportation.
Not in sanctuary jurisdictions. Their laws, passed by Democratic local and state governments, forbid local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. If ICE wants to deport a criminal who is in the country illegally, it’ll have to find them itself. That is what often leads to the scenes of ICE officers showing up in neighborhoods.
“There’s a very simple remedy to [the troubles in Minneapolis],” Republican strategist Matt Gorman said on Fox News Sunday. “Let state and local law enforcement let ICE into the jails to get the worst of the worst out. This is happening because [local authorities] are not cooperating … The goal of Democrats is to make all this enforcement as messy and as complicated as possible, so you get a lot of these scenes.”
Watching events in Minneapolis and other blue cities, if the goal of Democrats is to make ICE’s work “as messy and complicated as possible,” they have certainly succeeded.
Meanwhile, in Washington, a bitter debate about the future of ICE is underway and likely to intensify in the coming days as Congress attempts to pass a homeland security funding bill. Many Democrats see this as their opportunity to take a sledgehammer to ICE.
There is a hard core of progressive Democrats who have signed on to the “Abolish ICE” cause that flourished for a while in the first Trump administration. They are the usual suspects — Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Pramila Jayapal, and more. Many others want to “defund” ICE, by which they mean making crippling cuts in the agency’s budget. Others are demanding miscellaneous reforms.
On the other hand, some Democrats are afraid the momentum to abolish ICE will grow and become a liability for the party. The Searchlight Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank, recently said that while the idea of abolishing ICE might appeal to some in the party, “it means that you support getting rid of the agency responsible for enforcing immigration and customs laws, creating a lawless system where people who enter the country illegally can stay here indefinitely, leaving no agency charged with finding and removing them. This will, inevitably, incentivize others to come to the United States illegally.”
That seems undeniably true. When the time to vote comes, it seems likely there will be enough moderate Democrats to join with Republicans, who nearly unanimously support ICE, to get the bill through the House of Representatives. What will happen in the Senate when Democrats force the funding bill to get 60 votes to go forward is anybody’s guess.
Finally, anti-ICE activism in Minneapolis hit a new high, or low, with the invasion of a church service on Sunday.
Several protesters claimed they had a First Amendment right to barge into the service, interrupt worship with their yelling, and shut the church down. That’s not how the First Amendment works, of course; the First Amendment’s right to free speech does not allow protesters to cancel others’ First Amendment right to religious expression. In addition, the protesters, led by a “civil rights lawyer,” likely violated a law called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which was passed in 1994 to protect access to both abortion clinics and churches.
The FACE Act mandates fines or imprisonment for anyone who “by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.” That seems an exact description of what the protesters did.
BYRON YORK — MINNESOTA: FEDERAL LAW SHOULDN’T APPLY TO US
As clear-cut as that might seem, don’t look for much action from Minnesota authorities or their allies in the media. State Attorney General Keith Ellison called the church invasion an exercise of the protesters’ constitutional rights and, as far as the targets in the church were concerned, “something you’ve just gotta live with.” As for the press, the New York Times reported the incident under the headline “Protest at Minnesota Church Service Adds to Tensions Over ICE Tactics,” as if the problem at the church were ICE’s tactics, as opposed to the protesters’ invasion of the service.
Now, the Justice Department is looking into the church matter, while local officials search for further ways to obstruct ICE, and some Democrats in Washington seek ways to cut back or shut down the agency. The Battle of Minnesota goes on, both in Minnesota and in Washington, with no end in sight.