When I look at the ICE operation in Minnesota —— [SHOUTING] I don’t see an administration exercising strength. I see a White House that is panicking and that is losing. [HONKING, SCREAMING] I think that this aggression represents political weakness. It’s an attempt to shut people up, because what they’re saying and what they’re doing is actually impeding your ability to accomplish your goals. When you actually look closely at what’s happening in Minnesota, what you see are hordes of agents, a dozen people, 20 people, trying to execute a single arrest. And that is because an organized network of observers is working to prevent escalation and prevent violence. ICE can’t do anything without being followed, and that reduces the odds that they act in dangerous and aggressive ways. Minnesotans, in other words, are standing up for their communities and pushing back against ICE and the Customs and Border Protection in a real way that is preventing them from doing their worst. But if you zoom out from Minnesota and look at the national political picture, what you see is an embattled agency. ICE has never been more unpopular than it is right now. First, majorities of Americans in a recent YouGov poll, 53 percent, said that they did not think that the shooting of Renee Nicole Good was justified. 42 percent of Americans said that they would support the elimination of ICE as an agency. Abolish ICE has very quickly gone from what some may have considered the fringes of American politics to the mainstream. And short of ending the agency, there is majority support for slashing its funding, for putting restrictions on agents, for requiring them to remove their masks and show identification. [SHOUTING] The public, broadly, is just tired of what they’re seeing and want something to be done about it. And I think the administration knows that. I think the administration knows, I think the president knows they made a mistake in the initial aftermath of Good’s killing when they condemned her as a domestic terrorist. “This was an act of domestic terrorism.” And then we see things like the Department of Justice going to investigate Good and her wife and lawyers at the D.O.J. resigning in response. And so to save face, the administration has unleashed ICE on the people of Minnesota. It’s doing the only thing it seems to know how to do, which is to escalate with its aggression, under the idea that you can just shut people up if you kick them hard enough. But what we’re clearly seeing is that this approach doesn’t cause people to retreat. It causes them to dig in, to double down, to show more resolve in the face of what is plainly tyranny. ICE is not going to be able to suppress the people of Minnesota, and the administration isn’t going to win the political battle over this.
