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Posted on 01/15/2026 8:49:19 PM PST by SeekAndFind
After three hours of parsing American case law, for once I share Donald Trump’s exasperation. See, many a naif, including yours truly three hours ago, would have thought the Democrats’ “sanctuary cities” unconstitutional. A sanctuary city instructs its local police force to cease all co-operation with federal immigration agents.
The constitution’s supremacy clause dictates that federal law overrules local law, just as rock crushes scissors in the hand game. For subjurisdictions to offer refuge from big meanie federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the aptly cold-hearted sounding ICE) should not, legally, be possible.
It’s possible. The work-around is the 10th Amendment’s “anti-commandeering doctrine,” which prevents the feds from directly telling local and state law enforcement what to do. While state and local police may not actively interfere with ICE, they can throw a wrench into operations through sheer passivity; after all, when you simply watch someone drown, you haven’t really done anything. Asked to turn over foreign criminals for deportation, a police officer may constitutionally respond, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener: “I would prefer not to.”
Yet local law enforcement refusing to cooperate with ICE isn’t in the interest of a polity’s own citizens. Deporting criminal aliens makes residents safer. Releasing prisoners into the general population makes tracking them down more dangerous for ICE agents, who are then more likely to nab “collateral damage” immigrants swept up in the operation but with no criminal record. A reputation as a sanctuary draws inordinate numbers of illegal migrants eager for shelter from arrest, thereby overburdening local social services.
What’s especially rich? In the feds-vs-the-states tussle over who controls immigration, Joe Biden’s administration sent federal Border Patrol agents to remove razor wire from the banks of the Rio Grande and floating barriers from the river. Both had been placed by the Texas National Guard in “Operation Lone Star,” a state initiative to frustrate illegal crossings from Mexico.
In other words, Biden’s federal government reserved to itself alone the right not to enforce federal immigration law. Wrap your head round that.
Inconsistent exercise of the supremacy clause isn’t new. For years, multiple states have decriminalized cannabis, in direct violation of federal law. The Drug Enforcement Administration has turned a blind eye. The precedent for sanctuary status is unfortunate.
The very word “sanctuary” serves as propaganda for the open-borders crowd. The churchy association evokes Christian virtue. A “sanctuary city” conjures visions of innocents fleeing brutal predators and cowering in a house of God, while courageous clergy promise to defend them. The tag smacks of righteousness, casting the law of the land as cruel and illegitimate.
Which brings us, inevitably, to Renee Good, whose very last name, by coincidence, captures the spirit of recent anti-ICE protests, one of which cost her life.
Like many compatriots last weekend, I watched multiple videos of the incident in Minneapolis from various angles. After blocking the road to ICE agents, Ms. Good was ordered to get out of her SUV. She opted instead to get the hell away, maybe hitting an agent with her front bumper, or maybe not. And then she got shot. I remain neutral on a precise sequence of events that was over in seconds.
Even if lethal force was technically justified, the homicide is a political black eye and will only make the agency’s deportation program harder. You don’t want to inflame such a movement with martyrs. For a taste of the current anti-ICE gestalt, check out the Philadelphia sheriff’s post-Good press conference, in which she smeared its agents as “made-up, fake, wannabe law enforcement” and threatened to arrest any such agents entering her city: “You don’t want this smoke!” (See glossary under “civil war.”)
Even efforts to punish sanctuary cities by withholding federal funds have been strictly curtailed by the courts. Nevertheless, Republicans introduced a slew of bills last year targeting the same bête noire: “No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities,” “Stop Dangerous Sanctuary Cities,” “No DOT Funds for Sanctuary Cities,” “No Student Visas for Sanctuary Cities.” Clearly, even for our taciturn lawmakers, locales claiming to be impervious or even inimical to American immigration law are infuriating.
I’m afraid US immigration law has been violated with impunity for so long that even politically moderate Americans don’t believe their country has the right to kick anyone out. Sanctuary cities have been litigated, and a barrage of Trump administration lawsuits on the matter are pending.
Meanwhile, a blizzard of presidential executive orders aimed at sanctuary jurisdictions have been titled with the usual subtlety: “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders” and “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens” – to little avail in the likes of New York and California.
Unenforced laws aren’t laws; they’re merely notions, or phantasms. Moreover, rounding up folks and making them go home is overtly inhospitable. It doesn’t seem nice. But many a law that Americans want enforced doesn’t prioritize niceness. Locking rapists in small rooms isn’t nice either, yet you’ll not see social movements mobilized to object that this generates a climate of “fear” for violent sex offenders. By contrast, activists often cite the fact that enforcement of US immigration law creates “fearfulness” in immigrant enclaves as reason enough for ICE to call it quits.
The culture of sanctuary in Democratic polities has convinced people such as Renee Good that thwarting ICE is doing God’s work. Americans broadly support secure borders, but in reality, they’re consistently uncomfortable with the nitty-gritty of serious immigration enforcement. Sure, these raids aren’t pretty; they’re not meant to be.
Internationally, videos of ICE sweeps advertise that Biden’s the-more-the-merrier era is over. That said, Renee Good clearly didn’t deserve to die and was hardly a “domestic terrorist,” as the Secretary of Homeland Security absurdly asserts. But her ilk’s interference in ICE operations only increases the likelihood that immigrants and protestors alike will get hurt.
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It's not clickbait, he really said it.
Minneapolis — Far-left extremists interrogated a driver who they surrounded and made prove he wasn’t with DHS. They tell him to rent a non-SUV in order to not be targeted.
Video at link on X
CJ Pearson @Cjpearson X video 0:41
Tim Walz welcomed Minnesota high school students for a "walk out" in protest of ICE at the state capitol building.
It quickly devolved into them fighting each other.
Because of course. 🤣
Must have been emotionally meaningful for him, reminding him of leading his men in battle, holding the weapons of war he would later set down after he made it through the deadly fighting. Which never happened.
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