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This forum basically presents the cause of protests in Minneapolis as "blue tribe doesn't want immigration policy enforced". If this claim is controversial, I can back it up by linking several comments from last week saying as such, so I hope you don't feel strawmanned if you're broadly anti-protestor.
I want to present the claim that what ICE is doing in Minneapolis is inefficient at its stated goals, broadly unlawful/lawless, and disproportionate. I'm going to steelman the cause of the protestors - why it's good to go around notifying others of ICE's presence, making noise, and generally annoying them. I'm not going to support any form of unlawful action with this post, as I think it's wrong and unwise for one's personal safety to get into fights with law enforcement - but I'm going to explain why 10,000 people took to the streets in Minneapolis on Friday.
I'm using Gemini to get stats for this post, but all of the writing is entirely my own. Many of the examples I take are drawn from a recent twitter thread
In 2025, there were roughly 15,000 violent crimes in the entire state of Minnesota. Let us assume all of them occurred in Minneapolis, all of them were committed by a different illegal immigrant who was immediately released on bail or sentenced to ten minutes by liberal activist judges and then released, and all of those illegals reside in Minneapolis today. 170 murderers, 2159 rapes, 2836 robberies, 9826 aggravated assaults, all of them committed by a different illegal immigrant who is now at large in Minneapolis.
ICE has deployed approximately 3000 federal agents to Minneapolis. Supposing ICE is in fact, after the bad guys, they should probably be done by now, because they only had to arrest five people each in order to get all of the highly criminal illegals out.
The problem is, they keep wasting their time by engaging in completely lawless and unbelievable actions. These have a few flavours:
a) Firstly, as shown in many videos, ICE takes time out of their day to stop and question, photograph, detain, and arrest people for blowing whistles near them, yelling at them, and generally being annoying. I sympathize that these agents have some legitimate fears of the public, there are bad dudes who want to hurt cops. But it seems uncertain that any of these actions are actually intended to promote their safety, rather than intimidate protestors. Take a look at what started the entire Alex Pretti confrontation - they pepper sprayed a woman for what purpose, with what justification?
b) Secondly, the current immigration enforcement protocol seems to act on people who prosecutorial discretion should be utilized for, and has very consistently in the past, and then the government doesn't even bother to defend its acts to judges. Take this case, wherein we have a highly sympathetic detainee - but someone who nonetheless, I acknowledge, ordered removed many years ago, but not yet removed. That said, the government's position to the judge isn't even that they should do this, are allowed to do this, or want to do this - they literally offered no argument as to why she shouldn't be released. No, seriously, they submitted a three sentence response that said "we have no argument to present" - and then didn't just release the person themselves, without being ordered to? Why not? For what purpose does the government take actions that it does not represent to a court that it agrees with? For what purpose does the government require judges and court costs to issue orders to make them take actions that they have no argument to oppose?
Here's another case, this one directly out of Minnesota. Again, ICE should have plenty of evil criminals and pedophiles and whatnot to chase down - how and why do they have the time to go get this guy who appears to be causing no issues, other than being illegal? I understand that in the minds of many, that is sufficient, and that anyone who's illegal should be deported - ok, but what is pursuing that goal worth? Is it worth sending agents of the state to chase people down? The optimal level of any crime isn't zero, there are costs in lives, time, and tax dollars to enforce any law, and sending the government door to door for this guy is an insane waste of resources.
c) Thirdly, many of ICE's immigration enforcement actions are beyond "prosecutorial discretion should be used" - and thus, making the case for protest more important - they are actually lawless and illegal themselves. Take this case out of Minnesota. Let's assume that whatever this minor criminal history described is, it's highly objectionable, and this guy should be deported. You cannot just detain and deport someone with a pending application for lawful permanent residency, who is otherwise following the rules. If you want to deport him, you should file the paperwork to adjust his status, and give him a chance to contest it. This one is even more egregious - forget the tearjerking identity of the person arrested, just focus on the facts. This person applied for refugee status on entry, was vetted, and granted refugee status. The position of the administration, contrary to the law, appears to be that they can just arrest and detain anyone foreign present in the United States, even if they followed the rules. This is utterly lawless. Suppose that the Biden administration made a terrible mistake, and this woman is in fact a Burmese spy or a fugitive war criminal - how likely is it that figuring that out requires physical detention without warning? Has DHS actually raised a national security concern here? No - they're simply sweeping up whomever they can find, arresting people with valid paperwork, who entered lawfully, on the basis that the government has decided it wants to re-think prior decisions. This policy is illegal, cruel, arbitrary, and capricious. This is what ICE is doing in Minnesota - illegally kidnapping lawful migrants. If this alone is not worth taking to the streets to protest, what is?
d) Fourthly, and most importantly IMO, there are much better mechanisms to get to where ICE wants to go. We already have a surveillance state for the IRS that involves essentially all banking institutions and Paypal. Why won't Congress pass any number of measures that would criminalize, fine, and prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants? If the economic opportunity were much more limited, nobody would jump the border if they couldn't feed themselves after! This would have immediate negative consequences for mostly red states, however, it would likely gut their economies in short order.
The whole reason ICE is in Minneapolis has nothing to do with criminal illegal immigrants. The federal government has decided that it wants to send poorly trained, armed, and disguised agents to a city, to intimidate and cause chaos. Those who condemn the protests miss the point - the point is to show that they're not intimidated! And this is why various administration figures spend their time slandering protestors, because the goal isn't to arrest (Criminal/Illegal/Previously Prosecutorially Discretion Tolerated, pick a combo) people, or even to reduce the number of illegal immigrants living in the USA. If that were the goal, there are cheaper, faster, easier methods that don't risk the life of any agents, unless you think Tyson Foods executives are going to shoot at federal agents if their HQ gets raided. The entire operation is political theater, not a sincere attempt at policy enforcement, and utterly illegitimate from conception.
Two other arguments that I see made frequently here are:
a) All of this is necessary because of Sanctuary Policies that the Police Don't Co-Operate with DHS, so ICE Must Go Looking For The Criminals. Why don't they hang out outside the county jail and question people on their immigration status there on their release? Why don't they hang out at the courthouse - recall, a judge was just convicted of obstruction for preventing ICE from arresting someone at a hearing, they can sit in the gallery and question everyone's immigration status at the end of every hearing! You would be much more likely to arrest people guilty of criminal acts if you did this, than going door to door and getting into fights with protestors.
b) If nobody protested or interfered, then there would be much less chaos - aren't you giving Trump what he wants? Largely, no - Trump recognized pretty quickly once he watched the Renee Good video that it was regrettable and would hurt his poll numbers and his statements reflect that. Furthermore, no, I think it's good and justifiable that people protest when the state decides to waste tax dollars and commit illegal acts while acting like an occupying force rather than servants of the public! My least favourite (former) congressional representative makes the point rather well here. The behaviour of the feds, to inefficiently pursue questionable goals of questionable legality with strongarm tactics is to blame. It is the sign of a healthy, engaged citizenry that ten thousand people decided to go out in extremely cold temperatures and make their voices heard, peacefully.
The surge was specifically for the Somali daycare fraud, because “half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen.” There are 100,000 Somalis in Minnesota, many of them illegal. This is a punitive expedition and I could not support it more. Minneapolis allowed this crime to go on for years because Somalis are a D voting block and provide political donations to D. This is punishment against both the Somali community and the corrupt political establishment of the state. The news is complaining about “innocent” Somalis being detained for days, which likely means that the targeting of the community is working. The more Trump punishes, the most investment leaves the state. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/surge-in-federal-officers-in-minnesota-focuses-on-alleged-fraud-at-day-care-centers Noem says 10k have been arrested in the Minneapolis area, so the surge is working, to some degree. It’s not like this is some conservative conspiracy theory. Per NYT: https://archive.is/NNG45
Returning to your post,
What do you expect us to do with this? Errors happen all the time, in everything. There were five train derailments in Spain last week, do you think there was a conniving transportation officer trying to fertilize the land with innocent Iberian blood? You need an argument rooted in statistics if you’re alleging that ICE is (1) concerningly incompetent or (2) evil. There is literally nothing we can do with these isolated cases.
Okay? They are human too. If someone harasses their local bus driver they are liable to be punched in the face. We aren’t Sparta, we don’t have endless pithy and stoical military elites to fulfill every social need.
It seems to me that ICE is the least effective way to punish Minneapolis if you consider that a worthy goal. Mass prosecutions, withholding federal money and so on surely would be vastly superior to following a policy that seems to be cratering your own popularity, is not serving to make you more credible on your top issues and will fade into mist at best when you leave office.
Both of those things are being done. I think what Trump has to do instead is go all-in on videographic propaganda. His opponents are cherrypicking the most emotionally-potent videos of death they can find and then exaggerating the details. So he needs to find the most emotionally-potent video of death he can find and then exaggerate the details. I’m sure his team can find a high fidelity video of an innocent American crying in a pitiable way while gruesomely slain by an illegal alien. He just needs to martyr-maxx these videos constantly, as no human has infinite mental bandwidth for tragedy. It’s literally been more than a decade of Democrats leaning into martyr-maxxing, Trayvon and Floyd etc. The best they could find was a
busgrainy video of aRussianUkrainian woman being killed, which isn’t really effective. They need to study how martyrs function in social ecosystems and then have their own, because it’s like a zero-day vulnerability on the public’s psyche at this point, just easy mode for Democrat persuasion.I'm pretty sure this happened during Biden's run. Part of the reason it probably worked is that there was no counter-narrative of dead American citizens.
The other thing is: the border is no longer as relevant now that Biden isn't actively paroling people. Stories of recent migrants showing up and wrecking things are naturally going to drop in number and salience.
My impression is, for better or worse, Americans don't have coherent ideas about immigration enforcement. Or not enough of them do to form a coherent policy. His approval on his strongest issue has been dropping, it just seems like people didn't like chaos at the border but once that was resolved the urgency just dropped off.
Trump using ICE to go after what are almost certainly populations of citizens (take it up with past Presidents!) in a hostile city because of topical scandals is a high-risk, low-reward strategy if you assume that a lot of people simultaneously don't like border chaos but also don't want to be mean or deal with random ICE raids.
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