Flooding Minneapolis With ICE Agents Backfires - Rob Horowitz
Rob Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
Flooding Minneapolis With ICE Agents Backfires - Rob Horowitz
Flooding an American city with an outsized force of masked and heavily armed agents four times as large as the city’s own permanent police force was bound to be problematic. This is especially the case because many of the ICE agents have no experience working in an urban environment, nor adequate training in de-escalation techniques.
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The resistance to this unprecedented federal intrusion by Minneapolis residents and officials was also completely foreseeable and understandable. The Trump administration did not single out Minneapolis for this unprecedented level of ICE activity because of any compelling public safety reason; the city does not have a particularly high number of undocumented residents nor a high crime rate.
Minneapolis was selected to advance the administration’s racially tinged political narrative about Somali fraud, painting a whole ethnic group with a broad negative brush based on the actions of a few of its members. In fact, about 95% of Somalis in Minnesota are citizens, most of whom were born in the United States, according to census data.
The Trump administration compounded its original sin of targeting Minneapolis for this high level of crackdown on a paper-thin pretext by its poor and nakedly political handling of the aftermath of the shooting and killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent. In the hours following the shooting witnessed by most of the nation on video, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem rushed to judgment, exonerating the agent and calling Ms. Good, a mother of 3, a domestic terrorist without supplying any evidence to back up either of those assertions. President Trump and other members of the administration echoed this framing.
Even worse, the Justice Department then declared that there would be no investigation in this case, contrary to the usual practice in these kinds of law enforcement officer-involved fatal shootings. This triggered the resignations of 5 senior members of the civil rights division--the division that usually takes the lead in conducting this type of investigation. Instead, the Trump Justice Department ordered the Minnesota US Attorney to investigate Renee Good’s widow to identify any radical ties, resulting in at least 5 prosecutors in that office resigning, including the prosecutor heading up the fraud investigation.
Along the same lines, the Justice Department has now begun a criminal investigation of Mayor Frey and Governor Walz in a flailing and baseless attempt to intimidate. As Governor Walz aptly responded, “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.”
As for the shooting itself, law enforcement experts, including former NYC police commissioner and Los Angeles police chief Bill Bratton, point out that, at a minimum, the federal agent failed to adhere to best practices for how to approach a vehicle when he stepped in front of it, and whether the shooting was justified is at least an open question. In other words, this incident called for an investigation, not the whitewashing and victim-blaming engaged in by the administration.
The American public isn’t buying the administration’s take either. A majority of voters (53%) say the shooting was not justified, while only a bit more than 1-in-3 (35%) believe it was justified, according to a Quinnipiac poll. Similarly, nearly 6-in-10 (56%) Americans call the shooting an "inappropriate use of force," while only about 1-in-4 (26%) say the shooting was an “appropriate use of force,” according to a CNN poll.
More broadly, only 4-in-10 (40%) voters approve of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws, while 57% disapprove, finds Quinnipiac. In a related and telling poll result, only about 3-in-10 (31%) Americans say ICE enforcement actions are making cities safer, while about 5-in-10 (51%) say these actions are making cities less safe, reports CNN.
This has all further driven down President Trump’s overall approval rating on immigration---once one of his signature political strengths--to 42%, according to a CBS News poll. Nearly 6-in-10 (58%) Americans now disapprove of his performance on immigration.
Americans witnessing overly aggressive ICE tactics on the streets of Minneapolis, including breaking car windows and forcibly removing people as well as the shooting of Renee Good, thanks to the videos supplied by residents serving as witnesses, are telling President Trump in no uncertain terms that these actions go way too far. As we eventually did in Vietnam, it is time for our stubborn commander-in-chief to declare victory and withdraw before even more damage is done.