ICE is melting

And President Trump knows he has to change course, even if his more feral advisors do not

Here’s an immigration story the United States should be discussing: California spent the Biden years enrolling illegal migrants into its Medicaid program without any eligibility restrictions except income.

Through the state’s Medi-Cal program, Americans now pay almost $10 billion a year to cover healthcare for 1.6 million people who aren’t even legally in California.

Here’s another: President Trump has essentially closed the southern border. Crossing attempts by families and children have fallen fastest of all. Border Patrol “encounters” with families are on track to fall 98 percent for the 2026 fiscal year ending Sept. 30 compared to the 2024 fiscal year — from 1 million to just over 20,000.

But no one is talking about either story. The scandal of unchecked blue-state spending on illegal migrants is forgotten. So is the way the Trump administration ended illegal crossings in months, and saved families from their dangers.

Instead, for the second time this month news outlets and X posts are filled with a frame-by-frame analysis of the killing of an American citizen by ICE officers: Did his gun go off accidentally? What happened and who is to blame here?

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(The truth, even if you don’t like it. It’s what you’re paying for.)

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To say the least, this turn of events is not a win for the Trump Administration.

Even worse, the administration’s reaction to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were both American citizens, has been profoundly tone-deaf. At best. Yes, many of the protestors are breaking the law by interfering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. In some cases, they are putting themselves and the ICE officers at risk.

But calling them “domestic terrorists” or “insurrectionists” is absurd. Even if they are organized in rudimentary ways, the administration has provided no evidence they are working together to hurt or kill any government officials or frontline ICE officers. The violence has gone the other way — and has escalated this month.

Worst of all, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and Stephen Miller, who has led the immigration crackdown as the President’s deputy chief of staff, have made demonstrably false statements about the killings, especially Pretti’s. As I wrote two weeks ago, I think Good put herself in a terrible situation and her shooting was probably legally justifiable, though tragic.

But Noem’s claims that Pretti was “brandishing” a firearm and or “attacked” ICE officers are simply untrue — and their falsity is obvious to anyone who watches even a few seconds of the video of his shooting. He was trying to defend a woman who was being pepper-sprayed. Then he was pepper-sprayed, thrown to the ground, and shot.

Did he make a mistake by having a firearm on him at the time he confronted an ICE agent? Yes. But he did not draw the weapon, nor has any evidence emerged that he threatened to do so.

And the Second Amendment generally and Minnesota law in particular protect his right to carry a firearm, which is why the National Rifle Association and other conservative pro-gun-ownership groups have hardly rushed to the Trump Administration’s defense since the shooting.

Noem lied. But Miller went further, attacking Presti as a domestic terrorist.

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What Miller doesn’t seem to understand is that by lying in the first sentence, he’s undercut any truth the second might have.

Two weeks ago, after Good’s shooting, I wrote:

If I were running ICE, I would do everything possible to ignore the protestors while continuing to arrest and deport illegal migrants (even at the cost of letting some migrants go).

Yes, ugly confrontations will probably continue even if the Trump Administration does deescalate, because the logic of the protestors demands it. But let the ladies with whistles act out.

They’re behaving this way not because they have the moral (or political) high ground but because they don’t. They can only win if ICE lets its tactical frustration bubble over.

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Unfortunately, this advice went unheeded. Now another American is dead, and Trump is on the defensive.

This didn’t have to happen.

Americans broadly support an immigration crackdown and the removal of both criminal illegal migrants and people who have arrived here in the last few years, particularly if they have been on the dole. The question of what to do with people who have been here a decade or more and have not committed any crimes is more complicated, but a compromise that would allow them to stay legally but not become citizens — at the cost of a fine and back taxes — is possible.

But most people do not support unlimited “sanctuary,” and that’s precisely why ICE’s recent tactics have been so counterproductive. They’ve undercut Trump’s hardline stance on immigration, maybe his biggest strategic strength.

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(The news you need, like it or not.)

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Fortunately, Trump’s political instincts are much better than Stephen Miller’s, and he clearly wants to turn the page on the crisis in Minneapolis. The new ICE officers need better training and stricter rules of engagement, too. They don’t have an easy job in these blue cities where the public is trying to frustrate them — possibly illegally — but they have resorted to aggressive crowd-control tactics and now lethal force much too quicky.

Minneapolis will be below zero again tonight. The president should be able to turn down the heat.

Then maybe we can get back to talking about the failure of open borders, and what comes next.