They are here illegally.
It’s unnecessary to say who “they” are, which is a telling thing. It means everyone knows and everyone understands that the people referred to are immigrants who have no right to be here.
Broad understanding can metastasize into complacency, which makes it more important, not less, to repeat again and again — they are here illegally. This fact has been converted into a contentious assertion by a sustained left-wing campaign against the very notion of statehood, and by the wholesale abandonment of immigration enforcement by the unlamented former president, Joe Biden.
As a nation, we have come to talk too often about the presence of 15 million to 20 million foreign lawbreakers among us as though their sheer numbers and ubiquity justify themselves. But to survive as a country of laws requires general public agreement that the tidal wave of immigrants that flooded into the United States without any right to do so is not an irreducible fact of national life. It can and should be reversed.
National decline is a choice, and waiving laws that the majority wants enforced has become an element of America’s decline. That is a big reason why President Donald Trump was reelected: to reverse our downward trajectory. That’s what his Make America Great Again slogan stands for. He was returned to the Oval Office to restore the understanding that millions who should not be here must be removed.
This is acutely important following mass protests and two deaths in Minnesota, and Trump’s effort to de-escalate tensions. He is withdrawing some federal agents from the state and punishing senior federal officials who let the situation get out of control. This must not signal an abandoned commitment to the rule of law.
Trump is a transactional leader inclined to change course for political rather than principled reasons. If he tiptoes away from tackling illegal immigration with deportation, he will create severe moral hazard and sacrifice the foundation of his second term in the White House.
It may seem dreary to note that laws are decided by our elected representatives. But forgetting it will do profound damage. If we treat laws as the Left now insists, as though they may be ignored when an aggressive minority obstructs their enforcement, we will cease, as we approach our big birthday, to be the nation we have been for 250 years.
Democrats, allied with the militant Left, have, as I wrote recently, become the party of lawbreaking. The details of their coordinated efforts to prevent the enforcement of democratically chosen policies are astonishing.
A left-wing activist outfit called 50501 is organizing businesses to hide illegal immigrants in a network of safe houses and deliver them free food and attorneys to prevent their arrest and deportation. It dismisses democratic laws as though it were an absolute monarch, which is ironic given that it organized the “No Kings” demonstrations this year. It dispatches activists to swarm federal agents when they are trying to arrest immigrant criminals. That is what appears to have happened in the incident that led to the shooting death of protester Alex Pretti. This has become the norm, the modus operandi, of the Left.
And it is not just the far Left. It is an alliance with elected mainstream Democrats, people who want voters to give them power to make laws but who help organize resistance to law enforcement. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and party staffers in Washington, alongside Communist Party USA and many others, ask supporters to donate money to StandWithMinnesota.com, which coordinates resistance activists. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization, proudly proclaiming itself a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement, is another ally against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It has resorted to violence and calls on others to do the same.
These organizations and many like them are well-financed and highly coordinated. In alliance with Democrats, they reject the ultimate guardrail of democracy, which is acceptance by those who lose elections that the winning party must be allowed to govern. Democrats and the Left pretend that they are protecting democracy and freedom while doing the opposite, swarming federal agents and obstructing enforcement of the law.
The fatal consequences for democracy as much as for individuals such as Pretti and, before him, Renee Good, are a feature, not a bug, of leftism. Its members don’t want democracy; they want power and their opponents’ submission.
HUGO GURDON: DEMOCRATS — THE PARTY OF LAWBREAKING
They want to provoke the sort of responses that get people killed and thus discredit law enforcement and push the president into retreat. Their radical Alinskyite tactics include not simply helping illegal immigrants break the law, but also the persistent provocation of federal officers. They want violence. That is what the swarming is about. That is what their in-your-face screaming and video streaming are for. That is the purpose of the shrill whistles shrieking in the background of so many videos of ICE and Border Patrol operations.
They are all intended to generate stress and trigger angry, irrational responses from security forces. They are calculated to prevent order and good government. Order and good government produce immigration laws under which the citizens of a nation choose whom they want to allow in to live as their neighbors. Order and good government are antithetical to the Left’s purposes. Minneapolis is the result.