Why Conservatives Defend ICE

The Department of Homeland Security, communicating with the public through its official account on X, sent an ominous message last week: “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”

What ensued, as you might expect when a heavily armed security agency announces an operation in terms typically employed by comic-book-movie villains, was chaos. ICE agents, many of them masked, went on to detain citizens and noncitizens alike. They threatened and sometimes employed violence, provoking widespread protests.

Republicans have deplored the mayhem in Minnesota. But they don’t hold the agency that set it off responsible. Instead they’ve condemned the protesters and the Democratic politicians who encouraged them. When President Trump undertakes a policy or goal that the rest of his party cannot bring itself to endorse, his allies’ usual move is to attribute a different and more noble motivation to him, while shifting the blame to his opponents. So it is in Minnesota.

“The scenes of destruction and damage taking place in Minneapolis are abhorrent. This violence cannot be tolerated. Unfortunately, our state leaders’ inaction and support of these violent riots are failing every Minnesotan and putting law enforcement’s lives at risk,” wrote House Whip Tom Emmer, a Minnesotan. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “want the crazy,” Representative Byron Donalds charged.

In this view, the people who “want the crazy” are not the ones posting wild threats in all caps, but the ones saying things like this, from Walz: “What Donald Trump wants is violence in the streets. But Minnesota will remain an island of decency, of justice, of community, and of peace. Don’t give him what he wants.” Scott Jennings, the CNN talking head and potential Republican Senate candidate for Kentucky, replied, “‘Minnesota will remain an island.’ Walz cannot be more explicit - this buffoon believes he is seceding from the Union. We are well into Insurrection Act territory.”

[David Frum: Why Vance committed so hard to the Minneapolis shooter]

Referring to Minnesota as an “island of decency” and to other virtues is not even a subtle secession threat, let alone an “explicit” one. Yet the Jennings perspective is pervasive among Republicans. Even Republicans who sometimes refrain from endorsing the president’s most unhinged demands seem to believe that the ICE protests have no legitimacy and that Minnesota’s Democratic officials are, if not outright criminals, bad actors.

Some protesters have in fact adopted confrontational tactics—in one awful instance, they stormed a church and disrupted a service to confront a pastor who works for ICE. But the Republican argument is not merely that the protests have occasionally gone too far. It is that the protests are themselves the core problem, and Walz’s specific suggestion that Minnesotans record agents’ actions is escalatory, if not illegal.

Walz “is courting more ugly incidents,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page scolds. “The President has the legal authority to unleash ICE, and the agents are doing what they are told to do. The way to defeat the Trump policy is at the ballot box, not by obstructing agents in violation of the law.” National Review’s Noah Rothman argues, “What Walz is advising his citizens to do is likely to result in more violence and, potentially, more death.” Zachary Faria writes in the Washington Examiner, “What you have with ICE agents in Minneapolis is people exercising the lawful authority to detain illegal immigrants and, on the other end of that, anyone interfering with federal law enforcement actions.”

The premise underpinning this argument is that ICE is acting legally and in the service of legitimate immigration-enforcement goals. That assumption is difficult to square with on-the-ground reporting. The shooting death of Renee Nicole Good is the most high-profile incident, but the Journal found that the episode “shares characteristics with others the Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire”—tactics that violate law-enforcement protocol.  

The New York Times reported on a couple driving home from a basketball game who were attacked with tear gas. The Associated Press found footage of agents brutalizing a man they had pinned to the ground. A group of local police chiefs told reporters that their officers, while off duty, were stopped with guns drawn solely based on their skin color. After a toy-store owner criticized ICE in a television interview, its agents raided the shop and conducted an audit. Multiple attorneys have claimed that their clients are being held incommunicado, in plain violation of the Constitution.

What’s more, the administration’s accounts of ICE’s actions have repeatedly proved untrue. The administration accused Good of steering her car directly into the ICE agent who shot her. But a New York Times video analysis demonstrates both that Good’s car was steered away from the agent, and that the agent fired shots into the car from a safe distance. Just a week after Good’s death, agents in Minneapolis shot a Venezuelan man in the leg. The administration claimed that the man provoked the shooting by assaulting ICE agents with a deadly weapon, but that was also contradicted by video evidence.

[Gal Beckerman: Minnesota had its Birmingham moment]

These episodes do not appear to be exceptional. A judge reviewing evidence of ICE’s conduct concluded, “The record adequately illustrates that the defendants have made, and will continue to make, a common practice of conduct that chills observers’ and protesters’ First Amendment rights,” and another judge wrote that Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino was “outright lying” under oath about his methods.

The context behind all of these actions is a barely disguised desire to reverse the demographic changes of the past half century. DHS regularly shares white-nationalist memes. Trump has described Somalia in such terms as filthy, dirty, and disgusting, and its people as being “low IQ.” His immigration agenda appears to be aimed not so much at enforcing the law as attacking categories of people he believes do not deserve to live in the United States, irrespective of legal status.

The president has unleashed something akin to an occupying army that feels entitled to brutalize the population and routinely ignore the law. For those communities quaking in terror, simply waiting three years for a new president is not sufficient. Violence is not the answer, but calling out Trump for fomenting it, and advising Minnesotans to record agents on the streets, seems like a measured response.

Conservatives are making the same error they made during the civil-rights era, when outlets such as National Review dismissed protesters as criminals. It is fair enough to give law enforcement some benefit of the doubt, but treating its actions as presumptively legitimate even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary gives license to the sort of despotism that is staring us in the face.