By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
Minnesota officials should call off the mob
If Minnesota officials don’t like President Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, maybe they should do more to tamp down the insurrectionary activity in their state. After an ICE officer was violently attacked by two illegal immigrants while making an arrest and shot one assailant in the leg in self-defense, anti-ICE activists — predictably enough — rioted.
In response to the unprovoked attack on the officer, Mayor Jacob Frey blasted ICE. Imagine, he implored, if your city “was suddenly invaded by thousands of federal agents that do not hold the values that you hold dear.”
Minnesota elected officials might want to consider whether portraying federal law-enforcement officers as an alien invading force is the best way to convince President Trump that he shouldn’t resort to the Insurrection Act. They sound like Confederate officials complaining about, say, the 20th Maine Infantry showing up within the city limits of Richmond, Virginia, circa 1863. But they can’t help themselves — this is how they think.
A state representative named Liish Kozlowski thought the new shooting provided more evidence that ICE officers “are not here for public safety or for fraud or for the well-being of anybody, but to hunt and harm us.”
Prior to the latest incident, Gov. Tim Walz implored Trump to “end this occupation.” This mindset is why the elected leadership in the state has justified and encouraged a low-grade anti-ICE insurgency. It doesn’t involve guns or bombs, but other tools of coercion and intimidation meant to make it impossible for the federal government to enforce the nation’s immigration laws in the state.
ICE officers are operating among a hostile population, significant elements of which consider them an occupying force and are determined to expel them. This is “Free Palestine” for the anti-ICE crowd.
Apologists for the agitators say, as Ilhan Omar has maintained, that they are only recording ICE officers and holding them accountable. This is nonsense. The activists almost always have cameras, true, but they are obstructing ICE vehicles, yelling at ICE officers and, if the opportunity arises, trying to “de-arrest” people.
The point of all of this is to create an atmosphere of violent intimidation and make every step ICE takes in the city as painful as possible.
If this is the work of “legal observers,” as the euphemism has it, the Proud Boys at the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville in 2017 were just “historic preservationists.”
Jacob Frey says that the activists are protecting their city and looking out for their neighbors. In no other context, though, would the mayor make this claim.
If, say, the FBI arrests gangbangers in Minneapolis, it’s not an assault on the Twin Cities — in fact, the opposite. As for neighbors, anyone arrested for any crime is someone’s neighbor. Just because the guy stealing hub caps or dealing drugs lives in a neighborhood doesn’t mean he gets legal immunity, or his neighbors get to try to prevent law enforcement from going after him.
Often, the “neighbors” that the activists are supposedly protecting, by the way, are other activists who have interfered with ICE and been detained.
In Trump’s first term, “the resistance” was an over-the-top term that applied to the fervent opposition to Trump, including massive street protests that were obnoxious, but lawful. In Minnesota today, “the resistance” is a more apt phrase.
That’s why the Insurrection Act is in play. It is an antiquated law with a vague trigger, allowing the president to use active-duty military forces and federalized National Guard troops to quell “unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages.”
If Trump goes there, it would be a big deal. It would be better, first, to try to provide more protection for ICE officers with other law-enforcement assets and, better still, if Minnesota could turn off the anti-ICE insurgency.
Jacob Frey famously told ICE to “get the f*** out of Minneapolis.” Now, he should tell the agitators to get the f*** off the streets.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2026 by King Features Synd., Inc.