MINNESOTA BECOMES ONE AGAINST ANTI-IMMIGRANT ENFORCEMENTS

ICE (United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is originally a federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the aims of the agency is stated as enforcing immigration laws and protecting national security. It was formed in 2003, and I believe the backlash it has gotten has never been more. With the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by Donald Trump in 2025, ICE will be allocated with more funding than any federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history, and more than the federal prison system. I think, it perfectly displays how ICE has gotten more prominent in the U.S. political scene recently.

Recent ICE operations under the Trump administration have reignited an old debate in the U.S.: not how many people are deported, but how the state exercises its power while doing so.

For those of you who follow the news on a regular basis, it is inevitable that you have already seen the news on Liam Conajo Ramos - the 5-years-old who was captured by ICE, with controversy around the state of the guardians - and the shooting of Renee Good. These news, as horrible as they are, indicate a much larger issue on the current policies ran by the current Trump administration. When you check the numbers of the annual deportations of U.S. governments, the trend is highly challenging to read due to global crises like Covid-19 pandemic. Also for Bush, Obama and Biden administrations, it is harder to read the numbers and their trends due to the fact that neither ICE nor other executive branches worked in less of a “structure” compared to the status quo. It seems that the real problem Americans have with the doings of ICE and Trump administration is not the number of deportations but the way they do it. Highly contradicting the Fourth Amendment - stated in the previous page - the violence ICE spreads is without judicial warrants. The problem is that the administrative warrants can be signed by ICE officers which means the executive branch gets their permission from the executive branch itself.

It is not hard to understand why this is a problem for someone who is familiar to political science. Will the average American understand the difference? Perhaps.

The other main problem is that Americans are highly concerned about the case of profiling in the arrests of ICE. Again, if you are following the news, you can see that ICE goes after many U.S. citizens who are people of color. This raises the question in intent of their doings and shows a clear-cut sign of what the Trump administration actually goes for here. Make America great again, am I right?

On January 23, a vast network of Minnesotans stood away from work, schools and stores to protest the anti-immigrant policies. Some protests were already going on since the brutal shooting of Renee Good on January 7, however the Friday outrage - despite the thermometers showing subzero degrees, hitting -24°C - showed dedication on the American protesters’ side. January 23 was not just a protest but it was also a general strike, you cannot keep yourself from loving the combination of these two: a clear showcase of why people are stronger than any government or economical “force”. But considering the Minneapolis General Strike of 1934, I would suggest they have the muscle memory for it. The moral crescendo of the protests was reached at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where a diverse coalition of clergy - including priests, imams, and rabbis - sought to physically halt the "deportation flights" scheduled under the new federal surge by forming human chains to block the access roads to Terminal 1. Their willingness to face mass arrest signaled that the opposition had transcended traditional political activism to become a broad-based moral movement. By putting their bodies between the state’s machinery and the families being deported, these religious leaders directly challenged the administration’s "national security" rhetoric, replacing it with a powerful counter-narrative of "human sanctity" that resonated far beyond the frozen tarmac of Minnesota.