Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Amnesty
The working theory on the federal bench seems to be that every single person detained by ICE was detained either by mistake or contrary to law. They rule, nearly always, in favor of the detainees, ordering their immediate release. Once release occurs, Judges close the cases with no further proceedings, so it cannot be appealed. What is ICE supposed to do then? No conclusion has been reached on the validity of the individual person’s immigration status. If ICE moves to re-arrest, are we just going to do it all over again, Groundhog Day-style.
Cornerstone
In her prepared remarks at the town hall last night, Omar was calling for the abolition of ICE. Omar was the first politician I ever heard calling for the abolition of ICE, which she did at the special DFL endorsing convention that served her up on Father’s Day (June 17), 2018. On the second ballot the delegates selected her to be the DFL candidate to succeed Keith Ellison in Congress. I was there. Fifth District Democrats accredited me to cover the convention. Like slavery in the Confederacy, the abolition of ICE — i.e., illegal immigration — has now become the cornerstone of the Democratic Party.
Choose Civilization
I have tried many times to communicate how insane one of the fundamental principles of leftism really is: it requires us to deny fundamental truths. Human nature is something that is real. Evil exists and must be fought. There is a necessary cruelty required to maintain social order and ultimately civilization itself.
It may seem cruel to imprison people, but unless we do, cruelty itself wins. The choice isn't between empathy and kindness on the one hand and cruelty on the other. It is between controlled, limited cruelty and the breakdown of civilization itself.
The Fraud Queen
For one who began life in a Kenyan refugee camp, Ilhan Omar has done very well. Not only is she a darling of the Left, she is now—suddenly—wealthy. In the space of a year or two, she has gone from having virtually no net worth to having a $30 million fortune. Nice work if you can get it.
Ordinary Competence
Leftists have no regard for the First Amendment when it comes to core values like your ability to disagree with them. So it makes perfect sense that they invoke it in defense of their own criminal acts, including interfering with police operations, assaulting an officer with a motor vehicle, biting a portion of a finger off an ICE officer, resisting arrest, smashing windows and destroying vehicles, spray painting obscenities on other people’s property, and so on. These distinctions are not hard to draw, and a police force with ordinary competence is perfectly capable of seeing off the left-wing criminals.
Nice Try, Tim
One point of clarification: there has been some confusion, deliberate on the part of Tim Walz and others, about the cooperation that ICE is getting from local law enforcement. The confusion arises from the fact that most people don’t know the difference between a prison and a jail. Minnesota’s Department of Corrections—our state prisons—are cooperating with ICE and honoring ICE detainers when they have prisoners about to be released. But that is a very small number. It is the county and city jails, from which a much larger number of prisoners are released, that are not cooperating.
Suspend It All
Minnesota’s elected officials, led by Tim Walz, have not just failed to cooperate with ICE, they have effectively made it impossible to enforce federal law here. By making their state a jurisdiction where federal law does not govern—something we have not witnessed since 1861—they can be said to have effectively seceded from the Union. I think it would be entirely reasonable for the federal government to suspend all payments to Minnesota under all national programs—Medicaid, highways, education, everything—on that basis.
Expendable
My only other observation is that Pretti’s supporters, a group that includes every elected Democrat in Minnesota, do not take seriously the fact that interfering with law enforcement officers in the execution of their duties is a serious crime. That is exactly what the “protesters” in Minneapolis are doing, and yet Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Amy Klobuchar and the others are cheering them on and exonerating them from all fault. This is an extraordinary abdication of responsibility on the part of Minnesota’s elected leadership. It has led, so far, to two deaths.
Party of Fraud
For reasons you and I know instinctively, Democrats are defending a system that is throwing at least half of all the money that was appropriated to help people in need to fraudsters ripping off the system. The money goes to the fraudsters, to people overseas, and into the coffers of the Democratic Party and elected officials.
Now that it is getting exposed, Democrats are going nuts. The anti-ICE protests are at least partly about distracting from the fraud investigations, and partly to activate the thugs who are intimidating not just federal law enforcement officers, but the FBI agents and others digging into the systematic fraud.
It is impossible to overstate how corrupt the system is here, and how willing the Democrats are to use every lever of power, including the deployment of brownshirts, to keep the federal investigators away from their secrets.
Elmi to Omar
Sree Iyer fancies himself an inventor and out-of-the-box thinker. I don’t know about that. I won’t vouch for him. In the video below, however, I can say that he rightly directs attention to David Steinberg’s 2019 Power Line post “Tying up loose threads in the curious case.”
Iyer draws on David’s post to explain a strand or two in the tangled web of deceit woven by Omar to cover up her 2009 marriage to her brother. Would that Iyer could do for Omar what Nick Shirley has done for our local Somali daycare centers.
