Why the anti-ICE protests are so ugly

The demonstrators face a strategic nightmare. They're fighting against laws NOT aimed at them. They have no choice but to try to make ICE officers arrest rather than ignore them.

(Again, so many stories I want to write - AND I have to finish and set for printing on Amazon the fatherhood manifesto I promised in December - but the death of Renee Good highlights a crucial conceptual question that must be addressed: what do the anti-ICE protestors want to accomplish?)

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The arc of the moral universe bends towards… open borders?

Seventy years ago, black Southerners began protesting “Jim Crow” laws that divided schools and public accommodations by race. As liberal whites joined them, the movement grew — and remained mostly peaceful.

With the United States racing the Soviet Union for moral supremacy, legal segregation rapidly became untenable; in barely a decade it had collapsed (opening a much messier era of civil rights advocacy).

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(Journalism, analysis, and the truth. With your help.)

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The protestors in Minneapolis and elsewhere — and, of course, the legacy media outlets covering them — seem to believe they are heirs to the civil rights movement, protesting unjust laws.

They’re not.

Consider two crucial and related elements of the anti-ICE protests: who the demonstrators are, and what they are being arrested for.

The civil rights protests began organically or quasi-organically. Small groups of black Southerners, often led by preachers, decided to step forward to be arrested.

And those arrests were generally a direct consequence of the unjust laws that the demonstrators were protesting. A black person who drank from a white water fountain was breaking the law and could be arrested for doing so.

But the illegal immigrants who are the targets of deportation operations are for the most part uninvolved in these anti-ICE protests. They aren’t giving themselves up for arrest, because they know they are likely be deported.

Meanwhile, the American protestors interfering with ICE’s operations aren’t actually ICE’s targets. They cannot be arrested or deported for being aliens, because they aren’t. They can only be arrested if they frustrate the officers enough to force their own arrests.

This difference may seem merely tactical. It isn’t.

A majority and likely a large majority of Americans want stricter controls on migration into the United States. They want most illegal migrants — certainly those who arrived within the last decade — to go home. And the view Americans have on this issue has hardened in the last several years. The Democratic open borders experiment is dead.

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(Yes, the poster has borders. Oh the irony.)

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Segregation laws were morally repulsive. The civil rights protestors wanted to force Southern police officers to enforce them to highlight that fact. They wanted to shine a light on the underlying laws.

Immigration controls are not morally repulsive. Shining a light on the underlying laws will not convince Americans to change them. The only choice the protestors have is to try to make enforcement of the laws look so ugly that Americans will give up on arresting migrants.

The civil rights movement was not merely oppositional. It had an overarching goal: change the laws, end segregation. The anti-ICE protest movement cannot seriously expect to change laws or convince Americans that open borders make sense, so its tactics are its strategy.

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(Tactics, strategy, and the truth. For pennies a day.)

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This doesn’t mean that the middle-aged white ladies blowing whistles in Minneapolis are domestic terrorists. It does mean that they have every reason to interfere actively with law-enforcement operations — this dynamic gives them no choice but to do so.

I know some of you will disagree, but 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.