The Anti-ICE Insurgency

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

 

There’s a low-grade anti-ICE insurgency in Minnesota.

 

To be sure, to adopt the media’s argot from the BLM riots of 2020, it is a “mostly peaceful” insurgency.

 

It doesn’t involve guns or bombs, but other tools of coercion and intimidation meant to make it impossible for the federal government to enforce the nation’s immigration laws in the state.

 

What makes the anti-ICE activity different from conventional protest is that it seeks to directly interfere with law enforcement operations, and what makes it different from standard rioting is that it is semi-organized (see Haley Strack’s report on ICE Watch) and has a clear political goal.

 

ICE officers are operating among a hostile population, significant elements of which consider them an occupying force and are determined to expel them.

 

This is “Free Palestine” for the anti-ICE crowd.

 

The agitators seek, most immediately, to make it more difficult or impossible for ICE to do its job and, over the longer term, to generate images that play as ICE overreach and undermine enforcement politically.

 

Already, progressives have made much of ICE agents being masked — an expedient forced upon the officers by the potential of getting doxed. So what the anti-ICE agitation itself caused is portrayed as a sign of ICE’s lack of legitimacy and justification for more anti-ICE agitation. For the anti-ICE forces, this is a virtuous circle.

 

The death of Renee Good works in the same fashion. She went out of her way to confront ICE and created the predicate for the tragedy, which has been used to propagandize against ICE and mobilize more people to do what she did. Insurgencies feed off their martyrs.

 

Apologists for the agitators say, as Ilhan Omar did on Face the Nation last weekend, that they are only recording ICE officers and holding them accountable. This is nonsense. The activists almost always have cameras, true, but they are obstructing ICE vehicles, yelling at ICE officers, and, if the opportunity arises, trying to “de-arrest” people.

 

Even CNN has reported on the physical attempts to stop arrests.

 

And, needless to say, banging on the windows of, and trying to break into, hotels where it is believed ICE officers are staying is not an exercise in transparency and accountability.

 

The point of all of this is to create an atmosphere of violent intimidation and make every step ICE takes in the city as painful as possible. We’ve seen officers forced to flee threatening crowds that badly outnumber them.

 

If this is the work of “legal observers,” as the euphemism has it, the Proud Boys at the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville in 2017 were just “historic preservationists.”

 

Jacob Frey says that the activists are protecting their city and looking out for their neighbors. It shouldn’t be considered an attack on Minneapolis, though, to remove illegal immigrants, many of whom have committed crimes in addition to their immigration offenses.

 

In no other context would Frey be claiming this. If, say, the FBI arrests gangbangers in Minneapolis, it’s not an assault on the Twin Cities — in fact, the opposite. As for neighbors, anyone arrested for any crime is someone’s neighbor. Just because the guy stealing hubcaps or dealing drugs lives in a neighborhood doesn’t mean he gets legal immunity, or his neighbors get to try to prevent law enforcement from going after him.

 

Often the “neighbors” that the activists are supposedly protecting are other activists who have gone out of their way to interfere with ICE and have been detained. They aren’t shielding innocents, but fellow agitators who have committed crimes — it’s lawlessness on top of lawlessness.

 

In Trump’s first term, “the resistance” was an over-the-top term that applied to the fervent opposition to Trump, including massive street protests that were obnoxious, but lawful. In Minnesota now, “the resistance” is a more apt phrase.

 

What we’re seeing is an often-lawless campaign to make conditions intolerable for ICE and force it — literally force it, through coercion and threats — to get “the f*** out” of Minnesota.