Your move, Minnesota

The eyes of the country are on Iowa’s neighbors to the north as tensions over immigration enforcement reached a fever pitch in Minneapolis, Minnesota last week.

After a chaotic month marked by upsetting scenes of clashes between federal police and protesters who oppose detaining people living in the country without legal permission, President Donald Trump and officials in his administration signaled their intent to “de-escalate” the conflict. It’s a necessary step after confrontations have become increasingly violent, two anti-enforcement protesters in the last four weeks and the tactics of ICE and Border Patrol are being increasingly called into question.

Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Meaningful de-escalation won’t be achieved if Minnesota state leaders — and protesters — refuse to yield in terms of their own actions. Whether they will remains to be seen.

‘BORDER CZAR’ HITS THE RESET BUTTON

White House border czar Tom Homan, who on Tuesday arrived in Minneapolis to replace Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino as the head of operations in the Twin Cities, held a press conference Thursday to announce the beginning of productive discussions with Minnesota leaders including Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

“We didn’t agree on everything,” said Homan. “I didn’t expect to agree on anything. I've heard many people want to know why we're talking to people who they don't consider friends in the administration. Bottom line is you can't fix problems if you don't have discussions.”

Homan acknowledged that Minnesota state prisons already honor ICE detainers, w. Now, he said, AG Ellison has clarified that county jails in Minnesota may notify ICE of the release dates of “criminal public safety risks” so that ICE may take custody of those persons upon their release. Doing so, he said, is generally safer and requires less law enforcement as the arrest happens in a controlled environment.

But when that person is released into the community, Homan said, “what happens is now we’ve got to arrest somebody on his turf, who has access to who knows what weapons. Now we got to send the whole team out … then because of the hateful rhetoric and the attacks on ICE officers, now we got to send a security team behind the arrest team. So what could have been done with one person in the safety and security of jail, now we got 15, 16 people out there doing it.”

Homan said that if county and state officials can reach an agreement with the feds for more cooperation with jails, ICE would be able to “draw down” the deployment of federal officers.

“Matter of fact, I have staff from [Border Patrol] and from ICE working on a draw down plan.”

That doesn’t mean a complete halt to ICE operations in the area. But Homan is painting a picture of a scenario in which immigration enforcement can take place and peace and order is restored to the metro.

Walz, Frey and other Minnesota leaders would be fools not to meet the feds in the middle.

IRRESPONSIBLE ACTIONS ALL AROUND

All parties in the matter have acted less than responsibly in some form or another since Operation Metro Surge began in December.

The Trump administration is well within its rights — nay, its obligations — to deploy a giant cohort of federal officers to the Twin Cities for immigration enforcement rhetoric. Especially after the illegal immigration crisis that saw millions of migrants entering the country without permission during the previous administration.

Terms such “domestic terrorism” to describe the motivations of anti-ICE activists Renee Good and Alex Pretti — stated immediately after their deaths — was not the appropriate rhetoric for the administration to use. It has only provoked more chaos and protest, some of it violent.

Neither Good nor Pretti deserved their deaths. I wish very much that they did not happen.

But this column does not avoid acknowledging truth simply because it seems too sickening to bear. And the truth is that both made very irresponsible decisions in the days and hours and minutes and seconds prior to their deaths. Had they not chosen to insert themselves in those volatile scenes, Good and Pretti would still be alive today.

Despite two deaths amid the volatility already, protesters — some of whom easily fit the definition of “agitators — continue to raise hell in the streets of the Twin Cities metro area.

Some of their conduct is appalling: vandalizing hotels because they think ICE agents are lodging there. Forming mobs to accost private citizens who they mistake for plainclothes ICE agents. Harassing Border Patrol agents while they take bathroom breaks; storming into a church during a worship service.

It’s classic mob mentality — the madness of the crowd, wherein each person forfeits their own rational thoughts in favor of the irrational thoughts and whims of the herd. Take an irrational herd and pit it against a federal police force ready to use crowd control measures, and you get a dangerous scene that can devolve into mayhem in mere seconds.

The rational thing to do would have been to stay away. Walz chose the irrational, encouraging people to flock to areas to ICE enforcement activity and record the interactions to “bank evidence for future prosecution” of ICE and Border Patrol officers.

Walz described ICE as “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo,” and compared Minnesota children to Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager who kept a diary while spending two years in hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Frank was one of 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Walz earned a sharp rebuke from the U.S. Holocaust Museum for drawing “false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes.”

Rational would have been for Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to call for cooler heads to prevail. Frey chose the irrational, using a press conference held shortly after the shooting of Good to call for ICE to “get the f--- out of Minneapolis, we don’t want you here.” The following week, Frey claimed that city residents were asking the police force to “fight ICE agents on the street,” to which his own police chief reacted with raised eyebrows.

Frey said he reiterated to Homan that Minneapolis police don’t enforce immigration law. That’s correct. He also has been on the record for at least a year explicitly stating his city will not cooperate with ICE.

In other words, Frey doesn’t want smarter enforcement of laws against illegal immigration — he wants no enforcement.

But whether it fits Frey’s worldview or not, some people who are living here without legal status do commit crimes. Some of those crimes are heinous and involve victims. But unlike Good and Pretti, the public will never have occasion to say the names of most of those victims. The public won’t know they even exist.

Especially if the criminals get to remain at large because clueless people felt entitled to interfere with immigration officers’ attempts to detain them.

The Trump administration sent thousands of federal agents to root out those criminals. It’s been dicey, to say the least. So they’re hitting the reset button and pivoting to cooperation instead of chaos.

Now, Minnesotans and their leaders must choose between the same. Will they choose cooperation, or they choose chaos?

Comments: 319-343-8222; althea.cole.writer@thegazette.com