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After Border Patrol agents killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti during a physical altercation on the streets of Minneapolis last weekend, Donald Trump has understood the backlash among Democrats as cause enough for concern that the president has beckoned his political opposition to the negotiating table. In a span of one week, Trump has recalled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her chief consigliere Corey Lewandowski from overseeing Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota; demoted the pair’s preferred “commander at large,” Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino; sent border tsar Tom Homan to the Twin Cities in their stead; and personally liaised with Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to broker a deal for immigration enforcement, as well as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to keep the government open.
Regardless of the details surrounding Pretti’s killing, Democrats have finally managed to turn Trump’s greatest statistical strength in his job on immigration into a net liability, with his net approval on the issue finally underwater by double digits. Democrats could use the inflection point not only to score a practical victory in common-sense compromise but also to liberate the party from the legacy of former President Joe Biden’s aggressively and unapologetically open borders policy.
TIANA LOWE DOESCHER: SANCTUARY STATES PROTECT RAPISTS AND MURDERERS AT THE EXPENSE OF ABUELA
Instead, senior Democrats seem keen not only to triple down on the Biden agenda, but also to embrace some light nullification of federal law in the process.
Trump initially proposed that state and local law enforcement allow federal officials to deport criminal illegal immigrants in jails and prisons, with the tacit concession that the administration scale back the sweeping raids that are more likely to ensnare otherwise “noncriminal” aliens. This ostensible compromise is more or less what the White House has already been doing for over a year in non-sanctuary states such as Iowa and South Dakota, where nearly 6 out of 7 Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests occur in jails and prisons, not workplaces or in the community. As I’ve explained before, the sanctuary policies that bar DHS from local jails and prisons protect the criminal illegal immigrants that 80% of the country wants to deport at the expense of necessitating the wide-net raids that disproportionately risk the deportation of the otherwise noncriminal migrants that only half the country wants to deport. While Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller and the dogmatically restrictionist faction of the GOP don’t see a difference between deporting a criminal illegal immigrant with multiple DUIs or an assault conviction under his belt versus the gainfully-employed abuela who hasn’t gotten a speeding ticket in 20 years of illegal residency, voters do differentiate between them, and that means that Trump does as well. And while his overall approval rating has a high enough floor that he doesn’t have to panic unless inflation roars back, Trump is worried enough by the polls to understand that Americans are too emotionally wed to whatever optics they see on TV to rationally understand that enforcing federal law isn’t as easy as saying you’ll do so.
But Democrats, eager to run so far to the Left that they make Trump look moderate, not just within his own party but within the American political spectrum, have evidently learned nothing from 2024. And with the calls of sitting members of Congress to abolish ICE outright, which was not even responsible for the Pretti killing, it seems the party hasn’t even learned from 2020.
Walz and Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner have both equated federal immigration officials to literal Nazis, and the feckless Frey proudly insisted that “Minneapolis does not and will not enforce federal immigration laws.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) debuted the new national party line that a compromise to collaborate with the feds would be to hand over only those criminal immigrants with judicial warrants, meaning that aliens charged with state crimes such as rape would remain protected by sanctuary jurisdictions.
What all of this gets here is that while Trump is trying to negotiate a deal on how he can enforce federal law with some level of local collaboration to prevent collateral damage, Democrats are embarking on a dangerous gambit to nullify federal law entirely.
The anti-commandeering doctrine dictates that the federal government cannot force states to enforce federal law, but the supremacy clause similarly asserts that states cannot nullify or obstruct the federal government in enforcing the supreme law of the land. Because “compromise,” by definition, requires actual concessions from both sides, Trump is asking Democrats to sacrifice some of their right to refuse to collaborate in federal law enforcement — that would be, voluntarily honoring detainers and pinging ICE when an illegal immigrant is charged with any crime unrelated to immigration — in exchange for the federal government conceding the raids that the Miller faction love because they result in the mass deportation of other noncriminal migrants.
Democrats, of course, are allowed to reject this deal, but then the Constitution very clearly bars them from actively prohibiting local collaboration, penalizing those who do collaborate, and actually impeding federal officials in any real way.
Recall that the whole negotiation is not about a legislative package changing federal law, but rather the strategy of how to best enforce the existing law. Trump tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform in his first term, offering the legal codification of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and protections for nearly 2 million Dreamers in exchange for reforms to the diversity visa lottery and chain migration and funding for Trump’s border wall, and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) blew it up. Because the law is the law and the federal government has the right and duty to enforce it, the only negotiation is how to enforce the law in a way that is nice enough that our social media-addicted electorate won’t be driven to apoplexy.
Trump seems to understand that this is a purely voluntary negotiation, but Democrats do not. In a glossy feature published by the Atlantic on Wednesday night, Walz asked whether his state is “a Fort Sumter,” claiming “it’s an armed force that’s assaulting, that’s killing my constituents, my citizens.”
The problem is that, in the civil morality plays between the federal government enforcing the law and the states trying to nullify it, Minnesota is the bad guy, embracing an archetype ranging from the Confederacy to Kim Davis.
Recall that the only reason Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered U.S. armed forces to descend on Fort Sumter was that, unhappy that the federal government was clearly gearing up to assert that “states’ rights” did not include the right for humans to own other humans, Southerners violently seceded from the Union, which then fought to try and keep it together.
In cases when the federal government has had to intervene with the threat of a gun to enforce federal law, the states have usually had no less sympathetic a cause. President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act to deploy the Army to begin the disgracefully overdue desegregation of Arkansas with the enrollment of the Little Rock Nine in a previously whites-only public school.
And guess what? Federal forces injured at least two civilians in the process, and they were damn right to do so.
VIDEO: FALLOUT FROM ALEX PRETTI’S DEATH
Liberals and leftists would be wise to replace “basic enforcement of federal immigration law, potentially restricted to only criminal illegal aliens” with some other federal right they like, such as gay marriage. After the Supreme Court ruled that marriage equality, like racial civil rights, is the law of the land, U.S. Marshals literally put Kim Davis in jail after she attempted to nullify federal law and deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
The courts correctly demanded that Davis comply with federal law or resign. In Walz’s ridiculous metaphor, he is Davis — both Kim and Jefferson — arguing that a state’s right includes the right to defy federal law. That is false. Minnesota can refuse to enforce it, but otherwise stand back and let the feds do their jobs, or Walz can accept a nice deal from Trump to focus on criminal immigrants and try to keep the noncriminal aliens off the federal radar, but there is no secret third option that isn’t just a straight-up nullification of federal law. If Democrats are delusional enough to think voters are hungry for a complete 180 back to the lawlessness of the Biden open border, then they’ll inevitably entertain the sort of violent obstruction of federal law that can only be described as an insurrection.
