Protestor behavior is shaped by how ICE/CBP forces have assaulted MSP residents and canvassed neighborhoods door to door looking for any kind of immigrant, so of course protestors in this case who observed this apprehension attempt were applying their usual protesting activities, honking horns, etc. They of course didn't know that individual was a sex offender (IF that's really true - I'm not 100% buying an ICE officer's explanation) so this is not an example of an individual or group knowingly harboring a criminal or trying to stop the apprehension of a criminal.
ICE's primary job is immigration, obviously. The focus has primarily been on removing illegal immigrants with serious criminal charges, but there's absolutely no reason they shouldn't and don't apprehend and remove ALL people who are in violation of our immigration laws. That's their job.
But do you see where the problem is? What does removing ALL people who are in violation of our immigration laws accomplish? I would love to hear your justification. From what I can see, hard-working non-criminal immigrants and their families including children are being grabbed and detained, and this is doing nothing to reduce serious crime and murders. These are not hardened criminals and "the worst of the worst."
And when it's done at large in cities like Chicago and MSP, it's leaving communities scared and holed up and forcing businesses like restaurants to close. And in many places, entire labor forces detained (and the remaining workers no longer showing up for work) have shut down business and bankrupted famers who have lost their crop-harvesting workforce.
And the confrontative way they operate, going door to door, agitates communities especially because ICE/CBP forces are breaking windows and breaking down doors and grabbing individuals and where most of the time they have no judicial warrant and are only grabbing individuals based on color; and a lot of the time, they're grabbing legal residents and citizens, where they maybe release them days or weeks later with no apologies. Can you see how communities are going to feel attacked when they're being assaulted by a large armed force going door to door and terrorizing them?
And yes, being in the U.S. illegally is a civil offense where deportation/removal is the penalty, but past admins kept a lot of the action near the borders (mostly the southern border) and applied common sense policies such as being more lenient for example if there were U.S. citizen children involved.
Trump and his admin via executive orders (EOs) have expanded ICE and especially CBP domains to the interior and are applying their immigrant hunts to entire cities with large armed forces. Executive expansion that Congress could circumvent, but they won't dare.
Again, all this stuff is what is prompting citizens to rise up and defend their cities. They're technically laws but the way and to the extreme degree their being enforced is highly confrontative and tyrannical so you're seeing how that can motivate communities to organize and resist.
What's the end game? If the admin continues to ramp up via massive hiring enabled by the BBB and send in these larger armed ICE/CBP forces into major cities, mostly blue ones, you're soon going to have chaos and confrontation and devastated communities all over the country, likely in at least 8-10 cities. Is that the America you want to live in? And how is that not seen as largely political assaults and voter suppression?
And Trump, again via the BBB and numerous EOs, is doubling ICE detention centers annually to house hundreds of thousands immigrants in terrible conditions and when they do deport them, many times it's to dangerous 3rd-party countries. Plus there's a lot of stories about immigrant detainees being forced to work for $1/day so they can pay for their keep and food at the end of the week by handing that meager sum over to detention center guards. And isn't it nice that the huge prison / detention center companies - CoreCivic and GEO Group - are making $ Billions off these efforts along with giving a lot of $ back to Trump and Maga. And Trump keeps his retribution tour going.
I just don't see the net positive for America - I see brutality, invasions by armed aggressive forces, communities and families devastated, business shut down, a healthy amount of immigrants dying in the detention centers, major centers with real serious criminal and gang activities not having enough ICE/CBP officers to battle and apprehend these hardened criminal illegals because their forces instead are screwing around in blue cities with much lower immigration populations. It doesn't make any sense. And the cities they're going after already have declining crime stats. And again, what is being done to stop the real criminal activities around the country by gangs of illegals?
You reference laws, but it's the application and degree of force and the specificity of the actions in blue states only that is agitating and pissing people off.
abcnews.go.com
