Before this below-zero look at our dystopian future concludes, everybody will have an encounter with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for ICE seems to be everywhere all at once. It doesn’t feel like the home we are accustomed to, Minnesota that is. We feel beat up and angry. We feel put upon and wary, like strangers in a foreign place where we don’t know the rules and might be asked for our papers at the next corner.

I would frisk myself in vain. I don’t have papers. I have a driver’s license. I hope that will be enough. Sooner or later, I will have my encounter and I will have a driver’s license, a medical insurance card and a couple of dog-eared printed prayers. Will that be enough?

ICE needs to do what they are doing. I just wish it was more professionally accomplished. Track the egregious offenders, do your pre-game plan, take steps to know where they are, arrive unannounced, arrest them and then leave just as quietly. We’ll never know you were here. You won’t be wasting our time and we won’t be wasting yours.

The country needs its borders.

But men and women of ICE, you have a couple of glaring problems. One, your optics are horrible. I can tell you why.

You were poorly briefed and you find yourselves reacting to the dogfight you got yourselves into. It’s a safe bet that most people in the metro area don’t even believe in borders much less believe any human being is illegal. Have you studied our political class? They are rabidly pro-immigrant and believe illegality is in an inconvenient affectation of oppression, of rule-making by founders who they believe to be flawed and therefore held in contempt. Minnesota is unique. Minnesotans, at least those in the metro, are ideologically predisposed to believe that we are squatting on stolen land in the first place, which trumps any adherence to rules, propriety or respect for law enforcement. It seems you came to town wholly unprepared to deal with that. Thus, your flash-bangs and drawn guns and tear gas, all the horrible optics that put you on the news every night.

Your arrival also played spectacularly into the hands of the governor, Tim Walz. We have had billions of dollars stolen from us by fraudsters who crept into every agency of the state. Walz has been ineffective in stopping it. When this political reality at last dawned on him, he backed away from running for a third term. Your arrival – not your fault — has not only energized him but reignited his war of words with President Donald Trump. ICE has inadvertently handed Walz a bejeweled gift. Fraud has not only been taken off the back burner, it’s out on the porch cooling off and ignored.

Damn, we were almost free of him!

Most crucially, you were sent here by the most immoral and unethical president in U.S. history. ICE agents are viewed as the evil dark agents of Trump. Maybe outstate, ICE agents would get a howdy and a nice wave, but in the metro there is not a remote chance they will encounter anybody who says, “Nice job, guys.”

Our politics are our problem and only ours to solve. But you guys have to realize what you are dealing with. We’ve got armies of young mothers who can’t wait to sign up for neighborhood patrols. We’ve got professional leftist radicals who think nothing of disturbing a church service. We’ve got people who are breathing new life into the whistle business. The governor, mayors and city councils are encouraging resistance.

As I say, that’s our problem.

ICE, you can’t win here. Go back to headquarters and a draw up a new plan, one that doesn’t look like a violent version of the Keystone Cops.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

Related Articles

Letters: Fraud in Minnesota? Among the causes, a collective breakdown in conscience

Real World Economics: How the Fed ends, with a whimper

Skywatch: There’s a giant on the rise

Your Money: Helping children build healthy money habits

Working Strategies: Leverage your college career services