Take the W

Sometimes, Front-Page News Ends in Quiet Retreat

Did you ever notice that when a newspaper or magazine (when there were such things) decided to correct or retract a sensational front-page story, the correction would appear in small font at the bottom of page B23, or buried somewhere at the end of an issue?

I was reminded of this last week, when the Trump administration withdrew all but a handful of ICE and Border Patrol agents from Minneapolis after a multi-month surge that saw more than 3,000 of them dispatched to the city and two American citizens left dead. Said the president’s special representative, Tom Homan, “I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude. A significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue to the next week.”

While Operation Metro Surge was presented by the administration as a necessary step to removing “criminal, illegal aliens,” its genesis was the exposure of substantial fraud involving some members of Minnesota’s Somali community and federal benefits. That was the pretext for Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem to dramatically ramp up the federal presence in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

We all know what happened next: A significant portion of the city’s residents began a campaign of civic resistance — filming, following, and at times obstructing federal agents as they carried out arrests and deportations. That then led to the death of two protestors, which in turn led to a sharp decline in national support for federal action in the city. By the end of January, a majority of Americans, according to most polls, opposed the ramped-up enforcement efforts, and many Republicans privately and publicly called on the Trump administration to de-escalate. “The tragedy and chaos the country is witnessing in Minneapolis is shocking,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska wrote on social media. “ICE agents do not have carte blanche in carrying out their duties.”

The retreat of the administration is an unequivocal win for American democracy. Whether or not you support more draconian enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, the federal surge into cities over the past year has been almost all optics. In Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, the administration dispatched agents only to see the local populace resist the way enforcement was being carried out. One of the less-publicized aspects of these episodes is the degree to which local law enforcement strenuously objected to how the federal government was carrying out its policies. While local law enforcement around the country frequently cooperates with ICE on deportations — even in “sanctuary cities” there is some degree of coordination and communication — it’s notable that the made-for-YouTube surges alienated even these potentially willing partners.

The result is that in each of these cities the Trump administration has been forced to back down. What is perhaps most extraordinary is the inverse relation between the attention these surges received and how effective they were in actually detaining “illegal aliens.” The government claims that the Minneapolis operation resulted in 4,000 detentions, which is not insubstantial but came at a cost of several hundred million dollars after you add up hotel bills for the agents and lost revenue for the city. And it’s not as if there is an immediate deportation of these detainees; the vast majority will spend months in limbo before appearing before an immigration judge, where they may end up deported, or may not.

The fact is that these surges are an incredibly crude and ineffective way to deport people, even if they are an incredibly effective way to galvanize media attention and provoke angry and violent backlashes. Courts in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago routinely ruled against the government’s action, and courts in Minnesota have lambasted Homeland Security and forced accountability.

Instead of treating these episodes as “test cases” for martial law and Insurrection Acts to come, therefore, we should be treating them as clear examples of rejection of a set of tactics.

There may – and likely will be – crises around immigration enforcement and federal power in later episodes of the second season of the Trump Show. After all, the United States has routinely failed to institute new frameworks for our woefully out-of-date immigration system, which has left millions of people living in legal limbo, with promises of amnesty oscillating with promises of expulsion. Our collective inability year after year to deal with these issues legislatively has left a patchwork system and deep, unresolved divisions. That is not a product of Trump I or Trump II.

For now, at least, we should see this outcome in Minnesota as a win.