There was another immigration enforcement-related incident in Minneapolis on Wednesday, as an ICE officer reportedly shot a Venezuelan national fleeing from a traffic stop in the leg, after the officer was allegedly beaten with a broom stick and/or a snow shovel. Why Minnesota, and not Texas, Florida, or Tennessee, where more than a third of all ICE arrests in the first five months of Trump II took place? Listen to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and you can decide for yourself. It’s important, because the mullahs in Iran are taking their cues from what’s happening.

DHS’s Duty to Enforce the Immigration Laws — Especially Against Criminal Aliens

Recently, I analyzed a June opinion from DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the department’s law firm, which is tasked with (among other things) interpreting often vague statutory pronouncements.

After poring through numerous disparate provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), OLC concluded that DHS — and ICE in particular — has a duty to identify, detain, and arrest aliens who came here illegally and to prosecute them civilly (for deportation) or criminally (with eluding inspection).

Respectfully, neither you nor I need OLC’s assistance to understand the requirements section 236(c) of the INA imposes on ICE in arresting and detaining criminal aliens, because the statute is clear on its face.

It states that DHS “shall take into custody” specified criminal aliens when those aliens are “released, without regard to whether the alien is released on parole, supervised release, or probation, and without regard to whether the alien may be arrested or imprisoned again for the same offense”.

In other words, ICE must arrest criminal aliens the moment they are released from local, state, or federal criminal custody, because Congress framed that obligation in no uncertain terms.

And then there’s section 241(a) of the INA. It requires ICE to detain aliens under final orders of removal for 90 days pending deportation, which the statute refers to as the “removal period”.

Pointedly, section 241(a)(2) provides that ICE “shall detain the alien” during the removal period and, what’s more, continues: “Under no circumstance during the removal period shall [DHS] release an alien who has been found inadmissible ... or deportable” on any criminal removal ground (emphasis added).

Still, the Biden administration ignored the arrest and detention mandates in both sections 236(c) and 241(a)(2) of the INA, preferring instead to allow nearly all those criminal aliens to roam free.

The states of Texas and Louisiana sued Biden’s DHS to force ICE to take those criminal aliens into custody, but the late administration refused, with DOJ fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to ensure that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas would be able to refuse to take custody of dangerous criminal aliens.

In a July 2023 opinion, the justices held that even states lacked the necessary standing to challenge the executive branch’s refusal to comply with the arrest and detention mandates in sections 236(c) and 241(a)(2) of the INA.

Consequently, criminal aliens continued to roam free — or at least they did until January 2025.

Two things happened that month to change this dynamic: (1) Donald Trump returned to the presidency and almost immediately reversed Biden’s criminal alien non-detention policies; and (2) Congress passed and the newly returned president signed the “Laken Riley Act”.

The Laken Riley Act is likely the most important but poorly understood bill Congress has passed to address the issue of alien criminality in nearly three decades.

By empowering state attorneys general to challenge criminal alien releases in federal court, it put teeth into the criminal alien arrest and detention requirements in those two sections in the INA.

In other words, ICE no longer has a choice when it comes to arresting and detaining criminal aliens; after Laken Riley, it must take those aliens into custody.

The Foolishness of “Sanctuary” Policies

The Center for Immigration Studies defines “sanctuary jurisdictions” as:

cities, counties, and states [that] have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.

“Detainers” are formal requests ICE sends to federal, state, and local officials with custody of criminal aliens to hold those aliens until ICE officers can pick them up, or at a minimum to let the agency know when those aliens are being released so officers can take custody of them in “secure” settings (like jails and prisons) where the aliens have been screened for weapons (like guns, knives, and blunt instruments).

It’s arguable as a legal matter whether sanctuary jurisdictions have the authority to ignore detainers, but in any event it’s reckless for those states and localities to not comply with them, for two reasons.

First, even if a sanctuary wants to protect its “immigrant communities” (the standard justification for such policies), shielding criminal aliens from ICE arrest and deportation doesn’t advance that goal.

Most alien criminals live in immigrant communities and commit most of their offenses there. And while I am all about forgiveness and rehabilitation, most released criminals return to a life of crime, and I can prove it.

For nine years, DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics tracked more than 400,000 state prisoners after they were released from custody in 2005, publishing the results in 2018.

Those 400,000-plus released prisoners were rearrested an estimated two million times during that nine-year period, and 44 percent of them were arrested at least once during their first year after release. Additionally, 34 percent were arrested in the third year after release, and even by year nine, nearly a quarter (24 percent) were arrested again.

Most aliens may not be criminals, but criminal aliens are criminals and pose a high risk of reoffending. But if they are deported, they won’t be committing their future crimes here.

And deporting those criminal aliens before they reoffend means fewer victims — particularly in immigrant communities — while also saving state and local taxpayers the costs of investigating those now-prevented crimes and for prosecuting, detaining, and incarcerating those criminals again.

Second — and this is key to understanding what’s happening in Minneapolis — ICE officers wouldn’t have to fulfill their statutory obligations by going into communities to find criminal aliens if sanctuaries just complied with detainers and handed them over to ICE.

Are Sanctuary Politicos Stupid or Lying?

Governors and big-city mayors are advised by police chiefs and commandants on law-enforcement issues, most of whom have degrees in criminology and/or social sciences.

Take Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara. He holds a graduate certificate in Criminal Justice/Law Enforcement administration from the University of Virginia, has a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice from Rutgers, and attended the FBI National Executive Institute.

Logically, he knows all about criminal recidivism and the public-safety costs of shielding fugitives from law enforcement, and has briefed his boss, Mayor Frey, on those subjects.

In addition, I’ll assume he’s familiar with ICE’s duty under the INA to take criminal aliens off his streets and the complementary roles of federal and local law enforcement agencies in our federal system.

And yet, he stood right next to Frey on January 7 when the mayor told ICE: “Get the f*** out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here.”

Chief O’Hara was also standing next to Frey on January 14, as the mayor discussed the latest shooting and contended:

We are in a position right now that we have residents that are asking the very limited number of police officers that we have to fight ICE officers on the street. ... We cannot be at a place right now in America where we have two governmental entities that are literally fighting one another. Why are we put in this position?

That is “literally” the definition of a “civil war”, and if Mayor Frey is so confused about why his city is “in this position” that even Chief O’Hara can’t explain it, I can.

Minneapolis, and Minnesota generally, is “in this position” because state and local elected officials there “literally” either don’t understand anything I explained above about ICE’s duties and responsibilities under the INA and federal law or they *do *understand and are deliberately lying about what ICE is trying to accomplish.

Which is it — stupidity or deceit?

Because if Mayor Frey’s constituents are asking him to use his police force to “fight ICE officers on the street”, their pleas may harken back to when Walz called those officers “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo” or when the mayor himself claimed in early December that the agency’s “activities are largely built around terrorizing people”.

Both those statements, and others made by that duo and countless other sanctuary politicians, were either born of stupidity or premised on a simple political calculation premised in deception.

Contrast Texas, Florida, and Tennessee

In late July, CBS News reported: “A majority of ICE arrests in Trump’s first 5 months took place in border and Southern states”.

According to the outlet, of the more than 109,000 ICE arrests between Trump’s return last January and June 27, 23.2 percent occurred in Texas, 11.1 percent were in Florida, and 2.7 percent were carried out in Tennessee.

Think back to the spring and early summer. Do you remember when the mayors of Miami, Orlando, Dallas, and Nashville were claiming residents had demanded local cops duke it out with ICE officers on the street?

Me neither, because that never happened and isn’t happening today, either, even though immigration enforcement continues apace in the Sunshine, Lone Star, and Volunteer states.

To explain why there are no angry crowds hounding ICE officers around that those cities, consider the findings of a Trump-unfriendly source, the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI).

In December, PPI explained:

Local jails and police departments are key to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda because they facilitate ICE arrests of people who are already in police custody.

...

As one might expect, states that mandate local collaboration with federal law enforcement often have higher levels of ICE arrests, with places like Tennessee, Florida, and Texas among the most extreme examples.

In mathematical terms, those states are Minnesota times negative one when it comes to immigration enforcement. They welcome ICE into their jails to arrest criminal aliens, while Keith Ellison (D), attorney general in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, issued an opinion — 16 days after Trump returned — finding that Minnesota jails couldn’t hold criminal aliens on ICE detainers.

As importantly, elected officials in Texas, Florida, and Tennessee aren’t actively vilifying ICE officers — out of stupidity or perfidy — like Frey and Walz are. They understand that DHS has a duty to enforce the law and that ICE enforcement makes their communities safer; consequently, I don’t have to call either their collective intellect or motives into question.

The Mullahs Are Watching

You may not know it, but Iran is on the brink of a real civil war, with tens of thousands of protestors taking to the streets nightly seeking the overthrow of the government of the Islamic State and the mullahs responding with violent repression.

On January 12, government officials in Tehran summoned European diplomats to show them what was labelled “armed terrorists” (the protestors) “engaging security forces” loyal to the current government.

As Iran International reported:

The film segued into scenes from the deadly shooting of a Minnesota woman by US law enforcement agents last week and superimposed quotes by US President Trump on the disputed incident in which Trump says she was a “professional agitator.”

When President Reagan, channeling John Winthrop, referred to the United States as “a shining city on a hill”, he partially meant to express his love for America and also to explain that ours was a model other nations looked toward.

Respectfully, I’d prefer not to have the mullahs emulating anything happening in Minneapolis right now. Riling up the throngs with empty threats and violent rhetoric may play well in Hennepin County, but it’s corrosive to the body politic — to say nothing of the fates of truly repressed people abroad.

ICE has a clear duty to enforce immigration laws, and while sanctuary jurisdictions arguably have the right not to assist the agency, they plainly can’t turn their cops against immigration officers. ICE can’t “get the f*** out of Minneapolis” and fulfill its clear statutory duties, and the sooner the mayor realizes, or admits, that fact, the better.