For the third time in a week, Minnesota is making national headlines, and for all the wrong reasons. In a massive show of federal force against a resistant sanctuary metropolis, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deployed 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis-St. Paul in the largest immigration enforcement operation in the nation’s history. Against the backdrop of what federal prosecutors described as a nine billion dollar federal fraud scheme centered in Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community, agents have gone door-to-door investigating human trafficking, narcotics and gang activity, and surreptitious employment by illegal aliens.
Tensions, already high, erupted on Wednesday when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen protesting ICE enforcement in a residential neighborhood in Minneapolis. Bystanders filmed Good slowly driving her car around the neighborhood while her wife, standing outside the vehicle, repeatedly taunted agents. Good, ignoring commands from agents to get out of her car while her wife appears to be instructing her to “drive,” suddenly accelerated. An ICE agent standing in the vehicle pathway shot Good three times, resulting in her death.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described Good as a domestic terrorist who used her vehicle as a weapon to try to run down the ICE agent, who had previously been attacked by an illegal alien and required medical attention. For his part, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey hotly disputed what he described as the Trump administration’s “garbage narrative.” Both Democrat Mayor Frey and Democrat Governor Tim Walz demanded that ICE leave Minnesota, a primal scream echoed across the progressive left in Minnesota.
Meanwhile, a tug of war ensued between federal and state authorities over who should lead the investigation into the use of force resulting in Good’s death. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota disinvited state investigators from the probe, prompting Democrat state and local prosecutors to promptly announce they would conduct their own competing investigation into the actions of ICE agents whom Walz has described as “Trump’s modern day Gestapo.” Walz poured fuel on the fire by describing Noem as “judge, jury and basically executioner.”
None of this gives the citizens of Minnesota any confidence that justice will be served or that their own lawmakers are acting in their best interests. Indeed, it seems that Minnesotans are but pawns in a much larger battle between an administration that is desperately trying to make up for the sins of the past and the resistance, presently centered in Minnesota, that does not seem to care how many of its own people it sacrifices in service of a lost and most unheroic cause.
There is one question to be answered in the investigation of Good’s death under federal standards: did the ICE officer who used deadly force do so because it was necessary? In other words, did the officer have a reasonable belief that Good posed an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer himself or another person? Federal authorities are uniquely qualified, experienced, and staffed to answer that question. No competing state narrative need undermine a federal answer to the question presented.
ICE agents are in Minnesota precisely because it is the epicenter of a massive, and in some ways, unprecedented, fraud on the public fisc perpetrated in large part by a segment of the Somali diaspora. DHS federal agents, moreover, are doing precisely what the Constitution and laws of the United States empower them to do: investigating, detaining and preparing to expel illegal aliens who have no right to reside in the United States. Additionally, those agents are focused precisely on those aliens who have racked up serious criminal records including murder, sexual assault, and trafficking in humans, narcotics, and firearms. To attack those agents as Nazis or defend such criminal illegal aliens as victims of xenophobia is worse than ignorant: it is a dangerous lie.
No one else need die for such malignant fictions. Let ICE agents do their job peaceably. Let protestors exercise their First Amendments rights respectfully. And let us send back to their native lands with all deliberate speed and with due process every criminal illegal alien, as we should have been doing all these many years, before it became a border crisis from Mexico to Minneapolis.
