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The Democratic reaction to the Minneapolis shooting of a woman by ICE agents has had very little to do with the actual shooting itself. The reaction can best be understood through the Democratic Party’s commitment to open borders.
The woman, Renee Good, managed to place herself in the middle of the road, blocking ICE agents, when they approached her vehicle and gave her lawful orders to step out. Instead of doing that, she attempted to flee while one agent was grabbing onto her door handle and another agent was directly in front of her car. Video shows her actually striking the latter officer with her vehicle. That officer opened fire, fatally shooting her. By any available analysis, it was a justified shoot, made even more clear by the video from the cellphone camera that the ICE agent was holding.
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That did not stop Democrats from (literally) screaming bloody murder. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz compared this situation to the Civil War, implying that Minnesota was protecting the nation from President Donald Trump the same way Minnesota was protecting the nation from the Confederacy. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey repeatedly cursed at ICE and told ICE agents to “get the f*** out of Minneapolis.” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, taking a break from his criticism of Jewish New Yorkers, outright said that ICE committed murder.
This reaction is not about the shooting, though. It is all about Democrats thinking that ICE’s operations are illegitimate. Frey and Walz have made that clear as they argue that ICE is in Minneapolis to cause fear and create chaos. Minneapolis is estimated to have tens of thousands of illegal immigrants. Minnesota is a sanctuary state and does not honor ICE detainers, meaning illegal immigrants arrested by police for committing non-immigration related crimes are let free even if ICE places a detainer request on them. It is written into Minnesota law: “Minnesota law prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from holding someone based on an immigration detainer if the person would otherwise be released from custody.”
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The crux of the argument that Walz and Frey are making is not that ICE agents acted irresponsibly, but that they should never have been in Minneapolis in the first place. That is because they, like the mainstream Democratic Party, believe that illegal immigrants should not be deported (regardless of context) and that states such as Minnesota should be able to protect as many illegal immigrants from deportation as possible. ‘No human is illegal,’ as the activist saying goes. It is an open borders argument.
This logically follows Walz’s other public comments, where he called on the masses to rise up and protest alongside Minneapolis. “If you’re in Portland, or you’re in LA, or you’re in Chicago, or you’re wherever they’re coming next, stand with us,” Walz said. “Stand with us against this.” This is Walz effectively calling for more people to go out and disrupt ICE operations, which he views as illegitimate. The goal is to place ICE agents in increasingly volatile situations, like the one Renee Good placed them in, in hopes that it will be seen as too much of a hassle to do their jobs.
That is intensified by Democrats comparing ICE agents to fascist shock troops, which they have done repeatedly. Walz himself has called ICE agents “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo,” messaging to thousands of Democratic activists that ICE agents are evil, their actions illegitimate under the Constitution, and that they must be opposed in every way possible. The goal is to flood the streets with activists, impede ICE operations, and discourage ICE from carrying out these operations as they become increasingly surrounded by unhinged left-wing agitators.
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That is where the Democratic obsession with ICE agents wearing masks comes into play. Democratic legislators in multiple states have pushed forward proposals to ban ICE agents from wearing masks (even though those states don’t have the authority to enforce such a ban). Democratic politicians and pundits flock to cameras to criticize ICE agents for wearing masks. They are trying to shame ICE agents into unmasking or force them to do so, with vague arguments about accountability.
ICE is a federal agency, though, and that agency can itself be held accountable. The idea behind holding individual agents “accountable” through unmasking is that Democratic journalists and activists should be able to name and identify individual agents participating in these operations. Democrats want to have the implicit threat of being able to dox ICE agents, with the goal again being to discourage them from even taking part in these operations.
This is similar to the institutional targeting of agents under the Biden administration. You may recall the “whipping controversy” involving Border Patrol agents, where a Democratic staffer falsely accused agents of whipping Haitian illegal immigrants at the southern border. Then-President Joe Biden and his Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, both publicly attacked those agents, implied that they were racist, and said they “will pay.” The controversy was a hoax, as it often is, but neither Biden nor Mayorkas apologized to or defended the agents, and Biden had DHS prevent agents from using horses at the border, making their job more difficult.
If this fails to discourage ICE agents from doing their jobs now, the goal is to discourage them the next time a Democrat wins the White House. ICE agents know that a future Democratic president will unmask them, putting them at risk from the hordes of left-wing activists who want their names and faces to be public record. They know Democratic presidents will throw them under the bus to these very activists, as Biden did with the Border Patrol agents he falsely accused of whipping illegal immigrants.
This is the same public pressure shaming playbook that played out in Democratic cities during 2020, where police departments were set upon by their city’s leadership in the public sphere. Those police departments then saw a surge of early retirements in concert with falling recruiting numbers. If Democrats can’t stop ICE from doing much of anything now, they can pre-demoralize ICE agents so that the agency hollows itself out under a Democratic president who they know will hamstring their operations and publicly throw them under the bus at every opportunity.
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All of this is in service of the Democratic Party’s unstated goal of open borders. Democrats do not believe illegal immigrants should be deported and don’t believe it is a “crisis” when thousands upon thousands pour across the southern border every day. This is why “Abolish ICE” is increasingly becoming popular among Democratic politicians, why Democratic states and cities don’t want ICE present at all, and why they declare themselves “sanctuary” jurisdictions.
Democrats already ignore immigration law when they have the federal levers of power. The goal with the constant demonization of ICE agents is to undermine their operations, their staffing, and their morale. They want to make Republican enforcement of immigration law as weak as Democratic enforcement, with the goal being an immigration system that doesn’t function and leaves the border effectively open for all who enter.
