With the Border Secure, Federal Immigration Enforcement Should Go Where They’re Invited
With the border closed, the White House should concentrate immigration enforcement in cities and states which welcome assistance and shed a light on the pitfalls of sanctuary cities
The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents in Minneapolis demand a full, transparent investigation. Any use of deadly force by law enforcement must be scrutinized with rigor and independence. However, beyond that legitimate inquiry lies another truth we cannot ignore: By provoking and interfering with law enforcement operations, certain activist groups — and the elected officials who echo them — are creating conditions that endanger everyone involved.
The tragedy in Minneapolis did not occur in a vacuum. It unfolded amid a wave of inflammatory rhetoric that casts immigration enforcement officers as villains rather than public servants. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has called ICE agents “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.” California Governor Gavin Newsom has backed laws that strip ICE of privacy protections granted to other federal agencies. Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan urged citizens to “put your body on the line” to obstruct federal activity. These statements, however symbolic, send a dangerous signal: That physical confrontation is a legitimate form of political expression.
In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker and much of the state’s Democratic establishment have likened Trump and his supporters to Nazis. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has dismissed Trump as a “terrorist,” accusing his supporters of longing for a pre–civil rights era. Johnson and his longtime ally, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates, have gone further — comparing ICE enforcement actions to slavery. Why aren’t reporters pushing back? Such rhetoric trivializes the suffering of actual victims of slavery and the Holocaust. It’s a slap in the face to the Black community.
Like Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey — both struggling to contain scandal over the alleged theft of nearly $9 billion in pandemic relief funds — Pritzker’s moral outrage conveniently distracts from Illinois’ economic stagnation, high taxes, rising outmigration, and ballooning pension liabilities. It also advances his national ambitions as a self-styled leader of the “Trump resistance.” For Johnson, the rhetoric rallies his activist base at a time when frustration with Chicago’s crime, fiscal instability, and failing schools is growing. The result is careless language that inflames rather than informs, leaving the public primed for conflict.
The cost of demonizing federal law
Immigration policy is fair game for debate. Nevertheless, equating ICE with the Gestapo crosses a moral red line. The Gestapo, the Nazi regime’s feared secret police, was designed to monitor and eliminate opposition or resistance to Nazi rule. ICE enforces federal immigration laws passed by Congress and removes noncitizens, many of whom have criminal convictions or serious charges. The comparison is not only historically false — it’s morally grotesque. Worse, it implies that violence against ICE officers may be justified, because in that framing, resistance to “evil” becomes a moral duty.
This distortion has migrated from social media into mainstream discourse. Late-night hosts and high-profile influencers now joke about ICE as modern-day storm troopers. Polling shows that roughly half of Democratic voters consider Donald Trump a “fascist,” with some extending that label to anyone involved in federal enforcement. That kind of rhetoric is not harmless. The attempted assassinations of Trump and conservative activists such as Charlie Kirk highlight how political demonization can push unstable individuals toward violence.
The result is a feedback loop of anger. Activists — and the media outlets that amplify them — require constant conflict to sustain attention and funding. Federal officers become props in a performance of moral resistance. Yet the reality is that violent standoffs involving ICE are concentrated in a handful of jurisdictions. Nearly two-thirds of these confrontations have occurred in just nine of the nation’s 3,143 counties. More than 40 percent took place in only three cities — Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. That concentration tells us something important: This isn’t a national phenomenon but the product of local political cultures that valorize defiance.
Before Trump: The law-and-order Democrats
It wasn’t long ago that mainstream Democratic leaders — including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and even Bernie Sanders — spoke candidly about the need to reduce illegal immigration and secure the border. During the Obama years, the administration carried out more than 3 million removals — more than under any prior president. Immigrant-rights groups called him the “Deporter in Chief.” His priorities were clear: Remove convicted criminals first and coordinate with local law enforcement through programs such as “Secure Communities,” which shared fingerprint and arrest data with federal immigration databases.
Civil rights advocates criticized Obama’s approach as valuing “speed over fairness.” But few leaders of that era encouraged the public to physically obstruct federal officers. The norms of lawful advocacy still held. Even Tom Homan — who would later serve as Trump’s immigration chief — received the federal government’s highest civil service award from Obama in 2015 for his law enforcement work. The duties Homan carried out then are essentially the same duties branded “fascist” today. What has changed is not the law but the politics.
According to ICE’s 2025 Enforcement and Removal Operations report, most individuals detained or removed in recent years had criminal convictions or pending charges in addition to immigration violations. Yet disinformation continues to paint ICE as targeting ordinary families or law-abiding workers. That misconception fuels outrage, and outrage fuels confrontation. Encouraging people to challenge armed federal agents in the name of protest isn’t activism — it’s reckless endangerment disguised as virtue.
Manufactured outrage
Crowds chanting “resist fascism” in so-called sanctuary cities believe they are defending the oppressed. In reality, many are participating — knowingly or not — in an orchestrated cycle of exploitation. National political figures use protest to distract from policy failures. Media companies profit from clicks and conflict. Activist organizations born of post-2020 movements keep their coffers full and their profiles high. NGOs fearful of losing federal funding seek allies.
Other networks seek to delegitimize Western institutions. They are often dominated by socialists and radical ideologues who have replaced class-based politics with a rigid moral framework dividing society into permanent victims and villains — casting “white supremacy” as the root of almost every injustice. This “oppressed vs. oppressor” worldview is not a movement for justice but a modern-day Trojan horse: An inviting vessel through which destructive ideologies infiltrate Western discourse, weaken democratic institutions, and revive authoritarian ambitions.
Perhaps the starkest example of this moral inversion is the way far-left activists have folded Islamist movements into the “oppressed” camp, so long as they can be cast as victims of Western or Israeli power. In effect, the oppressor–oppressed narrative makes an exception for radical Islam, treating Islamist organizations as authentic voices of resistance — even when they promote misogyny, criminalize homosexuality, impose gender apartheid, and call for violence against religious and ethnic minorities.
This choreography is not accidental. The same networks that mobilize protests against ICE are largely silent about genuine dictatorships and atrocities—the Assad regime’s mass killings in Syria, Nigeria’s slaughter of Christians, or Iran’s crackdowns on dissent since 2019. The pattern is revealing: It’s less about human rights than about attacking Western democratic institutions for political gain.
A path toward sanity
It hardly matters that during the Biden administration an estimated 10 million migrants — many crossing illegally, some with criminal records — entered the country, according to recent border data. Today’s cause du jour is the treatment of illegal immigrants, with the far left and many in the mainstream media portraying every violent confrontation as a government assault on citizens, hoping for another George Floyd moment to ignite unrest.
The new Trump Administration would do well to recognize that enforcement works best where cooperation exists. With the southern border now largely stabilized, ICE should focus its efforts in jurisdictions that welcome federal partnership rather than those that manufacture confrontation. Local leaders who enact “sanctuary” policies to block cooperation with ICE should be held accountable when those choices produce preventable tragedies.
The answer isn’t more raids or more rhetoric; it’s transparency. The public deserves to know when the sanctuary policies of their elected leaders allow offenders to remain at large and reoffend. A national database tracking those cases would expose the real costs of political obstruction. Likewise, taxpayers should know which nongovernmental or activist organizations receive public grants while simultaneously encouraging defiance of lawful enforcement orders.
Protect those who follow the law. Expose those who profit from chaos. Offer federal partnership where it’s invited, and accountability where it’s refused. That is how we begin to restore sanity and safety to this debate. Every life lost in this escalating cycle of confrontation is a human tragedy. But if we continue to reward those who substitute outrage for leadership, we’ll see more of the same — more anger, more division, and more needless death. Leadership means preventing the next tragedy, not exploiting the last one.
