Ahead to the Previous. Minnesota Shootings Have GOP Congressman Trying to George W. Bush for Solutions
As sure as night follows day, the moment a Republican president starts to make headway against an entrenched and intractable problem, you can count on members of the GOP House and Senate caucuses to break ranks and run to curry favor with the other side.
I’d be the last to claim that the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s execution of President Trump’s order to uproot massive communities of illegal welfare grifters hasn’t been ugly. It has. But the ugliness is not due to disorganization; it is because the Trump administration is facing an organized insurgency within so-called “sanctuary cities” in which an organized cadre recruits foot soldiers for direct action against immigration agents while local officials, including judges, harass and demonize everyone trying to enforce the law.
BACKGROUND
The Anti-ICE Demonstrations Look More Like Mao’s ‘People’s War’ Doctrine Than Civil Disturbances – RedState
Investigation Reveals Far-Left Networks’ Rapid-Fire Coordination Put Pretti in Harm’s Way – RedState
Anti-ICE Signal Chats: Walz Administration Implicated, Foreign Funding Revealed – RedState
This is not a difficult concept to grasp.
However, it is beyond the reach of some GOP representatives.
Republican Representative Mike Lawler (NY-17) took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to demand that the Trump administration cease its current efforts to enforce immigration law. In an essay initially titled “Opinion | Mike Lawler: Minneapolis Deaths Show America Needs a New Immigration Plan – The New York Times,” now retitled to “G.O.P. Congressman: We Need to Wake Up After Minneapolis,” he advocates getting along with Democrats and adopting warmed-over ideas from the George W. Bush presidency as a way forward.
His premise is:
The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this month were tragic and preventable. No matter where you stand on immigration enforcement, the shootings show that what the country has been doing is not working.
This is not even close to the truth. The shootings of Good and Pretti were preventable, but once they made the decision to physically confront federal agents, and in Good’s case, attempt to run one down, they also made the decision that the statement they were making and the social media clicks—who can forget Good’s “partner” encouraging her to resist arrest and “drive, baby, drive”—were worth their lives. Pretti made a conscious decision to bring a firearm to a planned physical confrontation with federal agents. I say planned because Pretti tried to free another pro-illegal immigration activist from federal custody, and multiple outlets are reporting that Pretti had suffered a broken rib in a previous scuffle with federal agents. Yes, he had every right to carry, but the Second Amendment is not a talisman that protects you from poor decision-making.
As to it not working, the data say that the immigration enforcement effort in 2025 has been a huge success. The only metric that says it is not working is the reaction of organized protesters in a handful of cities.
Lawler seems to want us to believe that the last couple of decades didn’t happen. Yes, he acknowledges Joe Biden’s deliberate policy of open borders: “During President Joe Biden’s term, lenient border policies and foolish state and local laws offering shelter and benefits to illegal immigrants resulted in millions of migrants entering the United States, overwhelming our cities, our legal and public education systems, and our social safety net.” He doesn’t mention the impact of billions of dollars in fraud kicked back to Democrat politicians or the fact that we are now discovering that illegal aliens registered to vote in federal elections is the norm, not the exception.
Probably the most dishonest part of the essay is his presumption that collaboration between immigration agents and local authorities in jurisdictions like Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, and Seattle is as simple as a handshake. “Collaboration among federal, state and local law enforcement officials might have prevented some of the chaos in Minneapolis.”
In the last 2 years, Minnesota jails failed to honor more than 800 ICE detainers, according to ICE records I obtained thru FOIA (#7 in the country). https://t.co/WTpDyZehtz https://t.co/OsqLaaMdiR
— Jessica Vaughan (@JessicaV_CIS) January 26, 2026
He says this despite acknowledging that local officials are greatly responsible for whipping up public resistance to immigration enforcement; “Irresponsible politicians have increased the danger by delegitimizing ICE — with some calling to abolish it — and standing behind sanctuary city policies that restrict necessary cooperation between immigration enforcement officers and state and local police.”
Other than unicorn farts and fairy dust, I don’t see how we get from overt, active hostility to immigration enforcement to holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” The only way this should end is for Trump to use the power of the federal government to enforce federal law, just as George Washington did during the Whiskey Rebellion and Dwight D. Eisenhower did in Little Rock. And as President Trump failed to do in response to the George Floyd riots.
One of the more exotic ideas put forward is that the investigation into the Pretti-Good shootings is that Minnesota authorities should have some role in the investigation: “Collaboration should start now. The F.B.I. and state and local departments should together investigate the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. A transparent and accountable process that protects the rights of everyone involved, including the deceased and their families, would ensure all relevant evidence is collected and bolster the public’s confidence in immigration enforcement and our justice system.”
We know from the investigation into George Floyd’s death how such a movie ends. In the words of the “Queen of Hearts” in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” the process would be, “Sentence first–verdict afterward.” Empirical evidence was disregarded out of respect for the feelings of the “community.” An innocent man is serving what amounts to a life sentence because of the results-oriented justice found in Minneapolis. Involving Minneapolis police, who would be terrified of finding the shootings justified in the current political climate, in the investigation would be disastrous. At best, there would be a split finding with the federal government invoking the “Supremacy Clause” to strip Minnesota of its right to prosecute any of the agents involved in either shooting. At worst, some big-brained thinker in the administration would have the agents thrown to the wolves to preserve the veneer of “collaboration.”
Lawler’s policy solutions give one the impression that he simply has not been paying attention to the immigration issue at all, up until he wrote this op-ed.
“After tensions have calmed, Congress can then piece together the rest of an immigration plan that settles the issue. Along with building on Mr. Trump’s border policies, a realistic plan would provide a path to legal status — not citizenship — for long-term illegal immigrants without criminal records. This path would be rigorous and fair, and it would aim to keep families together. Fair means those who benefit would face mandatory work requirements, forgo public assistance and pay fines and any back taxes they might owe.”
Guys, we are back to George W. Bush’s “comprehensive immigration reform” laid out in his 2007 State of the Union speech. Remember this:
- No Amnesty. Workers who have entered the country illegally and workers who have overstayed their visas must pay a substantial penalty for their illegal conduct.
- In Addition To Paying A Meaningful Penalty, Undocumented Workers Must Learn English, Pay Their Taxes, Pass A Background Check, And Hold A Job For A Number Of Years Before They Will Be Eligible To Be Considered For Legalized Status.
“You cannot fully enforce the border so long as people are trying to sneak in this country to do jobs Americans are not doing.”
In that same speech, Bush says the idea that we can deport 10-11 million illegals is not workable. According to DHS statistics for 2025, some 622,000 actual deportations have been carried out. These are real deportations, not the fake Obama deportations that classified someone turned back at the border as deported, no matter how many times they were caught. Illegal crossings have cratered to record lows, tens of thousands of illegals are in detention pending deportation, and over 2 million illegals have self-deported. Perhaps President Bush suffered from a lack of imagination or ambition.
I’ll tell you why Lawler’s proposal doesn’t work. Any “long-term illegal immigrants” have engaged in identity theft of some sort. To pay taxes and to successfully complete an I-9 form for hiring, they need some sort of tax identification number. When ICE raided a meatpacking plant in Omaha (see Major ICE Raid at an Omaha Meat-Packing Plant Reveals an Unfortunate Truth – RedState), and arrested 74 of the 140 employees, they found that 100% of the illegals had passed the E-Verify validation. Each one of those illegals had an identity belonging to an American.
The very fact that we would give illegals a safe harbor, and, by the way, we can “keep families together” in Haiti, Guatemala, Bangladesh, and China just as well as we can in the United States, would act as a magnet for another Bidenesque wave of migrant convoys motivated by the hope that if they maintain a sufficiently low profile, that they will eventually be rewarded by permanent residence. And don’t be fooled. Permanent residence will inevitably translate into citizenship. If we don’t have the guts to expel people openly violating our immigration laws, we will not have the bollocks to prevent them from becoming citizens.
Lawler is not alone.
Rand Paul’s solution to illegal immigrants in the US: they get to stay but they don’t get welfare or citizenship. pic.twitter.com/AVlNPSSHPT
— Rothmus 🏴 (@Rothmus) January 27, 2026
The fact is that President Trump and his administration have begun cleaning out the Augean stables that are our immigration policy. Part of that has to be the deportation of every illegal immigrant and holder of an illicit green card, as well as the denaturalization and deportation of anyone who lied or married their brother to obtain citizenship. Jurisdictions that resist the way Minneapolis has must be crushed. The networks organizing the insurgencies we have seen in several cities, and the officials running interference for those insurgencies, must be brought to account. We must begin treating the NGO funded civil unrest as a national security problem, not a police problem; see Anti-ICE Signal Chats: Walz Administration Implicated, Foreign Funding Revealed – RedState.
In short, Lawler is proposing the same old warmed-over policies that have failed the nation since the Reagan administration. He wants to reward lawbreaking and negotiate, from a position of weakness, with governors and mayors who’ve decided the federal writ does not run in their jurisdiction.
The answer is not what Lawler proposes. It is not Congress enacting some sort of slow-burning amnesty to create millions of new voters and welfare recipients and a never-ending flow of Third World migrants who will never assimilate. The answer is to enforce the law and support the men and women involved in that effort against all enemies: elected and non-elected.
As Stonewall Jackson said, “Never take counsel of your fears.” Guys like Lawler are working themselves into a lather worrying about the effect the immigration crackdown will have on the 2026 elections. If you hang tough and press on with the policy, the current difficulties will pass, and the administration and GOP can face voters having delivered on one of the key issues that gave it victory in 2024.
The other option is to adopt Winston Churchill’s famous critique of Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Pact, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” If the administration listens to the weak and tremulous voices counselling pulling back and changing the rules, they will have both the disorder in Minneapolis and a major policy failure that voters will not forgive.
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