By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, February 13, 2026
The Trump administration has announced that it is
abandoning its “surge”—you’ll remember that term from the Iraq War—in
Minneapolis. Other
than two dead Americans, millions and millions of dollars in economic losses,
and the further erosion of trust in armed federal agencies, what exactly
has been accomplished?
“As a result of our efforts here, Minnesota is now less
of a sanctuary state for criminals,” said
border czar Tom Homan, who remains on the job because he is dumb enough to get
recorded taking a $50,000 bribe but is still somehow not quite as dumb as
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Like most of what one hears from senior figures in the
Trump administration, that statement is a lie and is, in fact, something closer
to the opposite of the truth: The policy result of Donald Trump’s imbecilic
decision to respond to a Medicaid fraud case in Minnesota with the Border
Patrol and ICE will be that Minnesota and Minneapolis are left with a deepened
commitment to their sanctuary policies, convinced—as many other states and
cities surely will be—that the price of active cooperation with the black-masked
goon squads, thugs,
bullies,
incompetents,
and Wehrmacht Generalfeldmarschall
Rommel cosplay dorks entrusted with enforcing our immigration law is just too
high.
And at least one observer who had been very skeptical
about the wisdom of so-called sanctuary city policies is now a little more
sympathetic to those arrangements—and surely I am not the only one. In Virginia—a
state in which the 11-member House delegation is split almost evenly between
Republicans and Democrats, a state that was happy to elect Glenn Youngkin but
that has rejected Donald Trump three times in a row—lawmakers are considering
new rules that would restrict federal immigration enforcement there, limiting
where arrests can be made, for example, and putting restrictions on the wearing
of masks. Virginia is not alone: New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and New Mexico
are all looking at putting new restrictions on cooperation with federal
immigration enforcers. Even in Texas, where sanctuary policies are (pending a
final court ruling) forbidden by state law, cities such as San Antonio have
made it clear that they will offer only the minimum
level of cooperation required under law.
The Trump administration not only has made sanctuary
policies more popular—the administration has, through its abuse of
power, made those policies better policies. A world in which federal
immigration law is enforced judiciously and thoroughly by properly trained
professionals is a world in which it makes a great deal of sense for mayors and
governors to make it easy for federal authorities to pick up illegal-alien
felons being discharged from prison, to deport validated gang members illegally
present in the United States, etc. But we live in a world in which thousands of
masked gunmen were deployed by the president and his sycophantic DHS secretary
as a punitive act of partisan political theater: Minnesota has a relatively
small population of illegals, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the
population, and the fraud scandal that preceded the surge had nothing to do
with illegals—but it did happen in a state in which the feckless governor was
Kamala Harris’s VP nominee and where there are a lot of black people with
Muslim names. Donald Trump is no respecter of the truth in general, but that is
doubly so when it comes to black people with Muslim-sounding names: Ask Barack
Obama. J.D. Vance is no respecter of the truth in general but doubly so when it
comes to black people with any kind of names: Ask Springfield,
Ohio.
(No, I do not think J.D. Vance is a racist—he is a moral
coward who knows that Haitian refugees in Ohio have no political power in spite
of their being present in the country lawfully.)
Trump probably will use his pardon powers to prevent
federal cases against Jonathan Ross (who killed Renee Good) and Jesus Ochoa and
Raymundo Gutierrez (who killed Alex Pretti), but Trump cannot prevent
state-level cases against those men from proceeding eventually, and he may not
be able (or may not judge it to be in his self-interest) to prevent all federal
action against them, or to protect those who have lied about—or, possibly, have
altered or destroyed evidence in—those cases. Ross, Ochoa, and Gutierrez
are very possibly headed to prison at some point and, while it may not yet be
top of mind, they may find themselves in the not-too-distant future considering
how they want that to go. Those men all have stories to tell. One suspects that
none of those stories will fortify public trust in federal authority or in
Donald Trump and his grotesque little junta.
After the excesses of the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd
riots and suffocating political environment that came out of that upheaval, the
perennial-protest left was on its back foot. No more: Trump has saved the
left-wing piqueteros from their own worst tendencies, emboldened and
empowered them, and—critically—handed them a political victory. Expect to see
the Minneapolis model adopted in cities across the country as this panicky and
incompetent clutch of fools lurches from crisis to crisis to midterms to 2028.
Minneapolis has shown the left what works, seeing off Trump & Co. with very
little more than a bunch of whistles, some worn-out protest chants, and just
enough political discipline to keep
downtown businesses from having to put plywood on their windows. Not since
Trump saved Mark
Carney and the Canadian Liberals from all but certain electoral defeat have
we seen such an own goal from the retired game show host and quondam
pornographer who serves, incredibly enough, as president of these United States
of America.
All that drama, and we still don’t have basic immigration
stuff like mandatory E-Verify.
Kind of makes you wonder what it was all about, doesn’t it?
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