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I don't believe the whole conflict is about immigration at all. It's literally oprichnina vs zemstvo, court vs country, and both sides try very hard to pretend it's not.
As people have written many times, if Trump really wanted to tackle illegal immigration, he would've attacked the employers and made hiring them a massive pain in the ass. No need to box in the CEO's car with unmarked pickups, just a few raids on the largest warehouses until their payroll and time tracking systems are submitting worker data to E-Verify in real time.
Somalian scammers in MN are not affected by ICE raids at all, being either legal immigrants or citizens.
There are no droves of illegals in the Twin Cities. However, there are droves of activists and government officials that vocally hate Trump. The whole point of sending thousands of icemen there is to force them if not to bend the knee, but at least to acknowledge that they cannot resist the federal power.
That's why "oh, if only the jails and courts and PDs had cooperated with ICE, we would've avoided both deaths" is not an answer, the whole point of withholding cooperation and encouraging protests is to raise the stakes. So what if some people die in the process? The tree of
libertyfederalism yadda yadda.I agree that both sides playing chicken is a bad outcome, but not because it will create an army of brownshirts personally beholden to Trump. It's upsetting the balance of the states vs the DC worse than the commerce clause. It's not as bad as 1861 yet, but when the federal power flips blue again, no one will consider their hands tied. It will be easy to point ICE at Trump's biggest donors employing illegal immigrants in the red states. Why not arrest the next governor of Texas if he tries to defy the federal will again?
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