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Anonymous ID: 854ee8 Jan. 26, 2026, 11:49 a.m. No.24176997   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>7008

An Op-Ed by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, published in the Wall Street Journal

The Un-American Assault on Minnesota

Federal officials are lying. My state’s Corrections Department honors all immigration detainers.

St. Paul, Minn.

The Trump administration’s assault on Minnesota long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. It is a campaign of organized brutality against the people of our state. It isn’t just. It isn’t legal. And, critically, it isn’t making anyone any safer.

Quite the opposite: Immigration agents have now shot and killed two of our neighbors: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And there are countless other stories of protesters and bystanders being physically attacked by federal agents, to say nothing of the chaos and violence being unleashed against the targets of these raids, many of whom have done nothing wrong except exist as a person of color.

The pretext for all this is the Trump administration’s insistence that our immigration laws would otherwise go unenforced. This federal occupation of Minnesota is, administration officials insist, about our predilection for releasing “violent criminal illegal aliens” from state custody.

I can’t stress this enough: The Trump administration has its facts wrong about Minnesota.

The administration claims that Minnesota jails release “the worst of the worst.” In reality, the Minnesota Department of Corrections honors all federal and local detainers by notifying Immigration and Customs Enforcement when a person committed to its custody isn’t a U.S. citizen. There is not a single documented case of the department’s releasing someone from state prison without offering to ensure a smooth transfer of custody.

Yet the lies persist. This week, ICE tweeted that rural Cottonwood County had refused to honor a detainer for an alleged child sex predator. That’s not true. The county sheriff followed procedure and contacted ICE when the subject posted bail, but ICE agents were too busy wreaking havoc in the Twin Cities to do their actual job and pick the prisoner up.

Some of the administration’s claims are ridiculous on their face. For example: It claims that 1,360 non-U.S. citizens are in Minnesota prisons. The truth: Our total state prison population is roughly 8,000, and only 207 of them are noncitizens.

Earlier this month, the administration published what it claimed was a list of people who have been arrested as part of this ICE sweep, asserting that this list represents “the worst of the worst” criminals, and implying that we have been protecting them from capture.

Minnesota Public Radio investigated this claim and found it to be completely false: “Most of the people on the list had been immediately transferred to ICE custody at the end of time served in Minnesota prisons. All of those transfers happened before ICE began its surge of operations in Minnesota on Dec. 1, 2025, with some even happening years before.”

In other words, ICE is taking credit for arrests that state and local law enforcement made, activity that took place before this assault on our state even began.

Everyone wants to see our immigration laws enforced. That isn’t what is happening in Minnesota. In recent weeks, masked agents have abducted children. They have separated children from their parents. They have racially profiled off-duty police officers. They have aggressively pulled people over and demanded to see their papers. They have broken into the homes of elderly citizens without warrants to drag them outside in freezing temperatures.

That isn’t effective law enforcement. It isn’t following the rule of law. It’s chaos. It’s illegal. And it’s un-American.

I have repeatedly appealed to President Trump to lower the temperature. But he refuses. I fear that his hope is for the tension between ICE agents and the communities they’re ransacking to boil over—that he wants you to see more chaos on your TV screens, protests turn into riots, more people get hurt.

Minnesotans aren’t taking the bait. They are protesting—loudly and urgently, but also peacefully. They are helping their neighbors cope with this violent, lawless assault on people of color throughout the state—walking children to school safely, preparing mutual-aid packages, and organizing to make sure these atrocities are well-documented so that those responsible can face justice.

Minnesota is a state that believes in the rule of law and in the dignity of all people. We know that true public safety comes from trust, respect and shared purpose, not from intimidation or political theater.

This assault on our communities is not necessary to enforce our immigration laws. We don’t have to choose between open borders and whatever the hell this is. Mr. Trump can and must end this unlawful, violent and chaotic campaign, and we can and must rebuild an immigration enforcement system that is secure, accountable and humane.