If Minnesota Democrats want to put this Immigration and Customs Enforcement trouble behind them, all they have to do is ensure that the state cooperates with federal immigration authorities instead of hiding behind hysterical rhetoric and deflection.
The reason ICE is out in full force in Minneapolis is that state Democrats prevent full cooperation with ICE. Minnesota claims that it does fully cooperate with ICE because the state’s prison system notifies ICE when illegal immigrants are to be released in order to coordinate their deportation. Therefore, Minnesota cooperates.
APPEALS COURT PAUSES RESTRICTIONS ON ICE TACTICS IN MINNESOTA
This ignores the fact that Minnesota law deliberately prevents counties from honoring ICE detainer requests. The state prison system cooperates, but county jails are forbidden from detaining illegal immigrants based solely on ICE detainer requests. Counties must opt in to a deal with ICE to hand over criminal illegal immigrants, according to Attorney General Keith Ellison. That means that county jails in 80 of Minnesota’s 87 counties, including all of its largest counties, are not honoring ICE detainer requests, which Minnesota state Democrats are pretending is now just some local problem.
That makes Minnesota a sanctuary state, no matter what Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) asserts to the contrary.
Nothing is stopping Minnesota from changing its state law and mandating that localities honor ICE detainers, as multiple Republican states have already done. Instead, Minnesota had erected barriers to deportations in its state and actively sabotaged ICE deportation efforts by whipping up mobs of liberal activists to harass ICE officers and even interfere in ICE operations.
DEMOCRATS MOVE TO STOP ICE FROM WORKING WITH LOCAL POLICE NATIONWIDE
You do not see these massive controversies in Texas, Florida, or Georgia. All of these states have large illegal immigrant populations (according to estimates), but all of them cooperate with ICE and don’t have politicians screeching that ICE is a modern-day Nazi organization. It really is that simple.
But Minnesota will not do that, because Democrats do not support deporting illegal immigrant criminals. If they did, they would already be fully cooperating. Democrats in Minnesota (and elsewhere) use state law to make deportations more difficult and do everything they can, legally and rhetorically, to undermine immigration enforcement. Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and every other Minnesota Democrat can whine about ICE all they want, but this is the battle that they have chosen to fight, all because they can’t just admit that criminal illegal immigrants deserve to be deported, regardless of whether they are in a state prison or a county jail.