Ilhan Omar’s Dangerous Neo-Confederate Rhetoric

Much like the Confederate South attempted to nullify federal law ahead of the Civil War, Democrats have pulled out the stops to vilify the enforcement of federal immigration law. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Somalia, is the most recent figure to echo this dangerous rhetoric.

On Sunday, Omar demonized Immigration and Customs Enforcement as an “occupying force” and suggested that ICE has no authority anywhere except on the United States’ borders.

“Federal law enforcement is being sent as an occupying force into Minneapolis,” Omar said Sunday on MSNOW (the network too ashamed of its past to still go by the name MSNBC).

While she acknowledged that previous administrations had carried out immigration raids, she claimed they only deployed small groups of agents.

“There is no reason to be roaming the streets, stopping people, stopping cars, trying to go door by door in a neighborhood,” she said. “The American people know that ICE agents and border patrol agents have no jurisdiction over them. … They’re only supposed to interact with them if they’re crossing a border, or if they are doing something that relates to immigration and customs.”

Omar claimed that the Department of Homeland Security sent ICE “to create fear” and “terrorize our communities.”

She further claimed that the Trump administration is “looking for there to be deadly encounters so they can invoke the Insurrection Act and have martial law.”

An Occupying Force?

At first, Omar’s complaint seems reasonable. President Donald Trump’s ICE raids are unusual, and former President Barack Obama did deport people with fewer incidents.

But why is Trump sending ICE agents en masse into Minneapolis? In part because it is a “sanctuary city,” which means local law actually forbids law enforcement from providing too much help to ICE. In other words, if Trump does want to enforce U.S. immigration law, he can’t just send a couple ICE agents to help deport a few illegal aliens the local cops already identified.

Furthermore, Democrats themselves are responsible for the extreme hostility that ICE currently faces.

Federal agents have faced an unprecedented number of threats and attacks, coinciding with the Left demonizing the enforcement of immigration law.

Since Trump’s first term, Democrats and their allies have demonized the enforcement of immigration law. They condemned Trump for “putting kids in cages,” while he engaged in the same sort of immigration enforcement Obama carried out. They opposed Trump so vehemently that when President Joe Biden took over, he opened the border and actually imported illegal immigrants from countries like Venezuela.

When Trump came back in last year, closing the border and attempting to deport illegal aliens, the same left-wing groups that advised the Biden administration geared up to sue to prevent Trump from reversing Biden’s policies.

Meanwhile, Democrat governors like JB Pritzker of Illinois, or Gavin Newsom of California, or Tina Kotek of Oregon, openly say that immigration law should not be enforced in their jurisdictions. Democrats have even whittled away at America’s sovereignty by making my birth state of Colorado a “sanctuary state.”

Make no mistake: immigration law is a federal matter and attempts to nullify it on the state level directly echo the nullification crises before the Civil War.

The states rightly enjoy many powers not reserved to the federal government, but immigration law is a matter of American sovereignty. If we, as a democratic republic, cannot prevent illegal aliens from entering our country, and if we cannot prevent them from voting, we lose our self-determination as a country. Democrats say they don’t want this, but it is hard for me to interpret their open borders policies and opposition to voter ID laws as anything else.

The Left’s Shock Troops

Omar’s remarks would be bad enough if they occured in this context, but they also come days after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Trump was at war with his state. Walz suggested he would deploy the National Guard against “rogue” ICE agents.

When a reporter asked about the prospect of National Guard troops facing off against federal agents, Walz gave a chilling response: “We’ve never been at war with our federal government.”

In context, it seems he meant they’d never been at war before now.

None of us expects Walz, that shining example of virility, to get on a horse, unsheathe a sabre, and rush at ICE. Similarly, Omar isn’t exactly a modern-day Boadicea.

However, when Walz and Omar echo the old Confederate nullification arguments, they’re emboldening the protesters and agitators on the streets who try to stop ICE by force. They’re providing a permission structure for people like Renee Nicole Good to use their bodies or their vehicles to block ICE from carrying out its mission.

These activists, propped up by a network of NGOs, will only grow more violent as the neo-Confederate rhetoric continues. It is high time the Left reverse course on demonizing immigration law.

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