The door-to-door terror in Minneapolis

A video of a woman being questioned by ICE in Minnesota has gone viral. Agents surround her. They are armed. They are masked. “Are you a citizen?” they ask.  She says, “I am.” They say, “Show us proof.” She repeats, “I am a citizen; I don’t have to show proof. I belong here.”

They ask her where she was born. She says, “Minnesota is my home.” They ask the same question again and again. They say that if she doesn’t show proof of her identity, they will throw her in the back of their car. Steadfast, she refuses. Finally, they leave.

The woman is right. In this country, no one is required to produce identification papers. In this country, no government official has a right to demand them of someone about whom the officer knows nothing. Everyone is protected from unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment, the ban on self-incrimination under the Fifth. While one could choose to cooperate with ICE, no one has to.

What we are seeing in Minneapolis are not about targeted deportations, serving an arrest warrant to someone with a deportation order, or searching for an undocumented person convicted of a crime. It is not about stopping someone whom the officer has a “reasonable suspicion” is violating the law. This is not about deporting the worst of the worst, as President Trump would say.  This is about all of us, going on about our lives.

During a Fox News interview, Vice President JD Vance said he expects to see “ICE, going door to door and making sure that if you’re an illegal alien, you’ve got to get out of this country.” Door to door? What will that look like? A phalanx of masked ICE officers, armed to the teeth, banging on doors, threatening arrest unless they receive answers and papers.

Was this the "door-to-door” terror that Renee Macklin Good was protesting? If so, I would blow a whistle and sound my horn as she did. So should we all.

Good’s death took place five years after Derek Chauvin put his knee to George Floyd’s neck and killed him. Huge demonstrations followed, triggering a nationwide debate about reforming policing, increasing police accountability, clarifying the use of force, strengthening law enforcement misconduct reporting, and even requiring body cameras.

That was then; this is now.

Now, a video eerily similar to George Floyd’s shows a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis kneeing a man in the face while other federal agents hold him down.

Now, agents are breaking into homes with weapons drawn, a teenager is dragged away from his job, agents are guarding a restroom at Target, they are using illegal chokeholds, pulling people out of their cars.

Now, there is a pseudo police force — immigration officers — untrained or undertrained, masked, armed. Make no mistake: this force is running roughshod over our rights and constitutional guarantees. All of our rights are at stake.

Vance, a Yale Law School graduate who knows better, insisted that ICE officers, including Ross, Good’s killer, have "absolute immunity.” That’s false.

As the Tenth Circuit appeals court said in 2006:

While state criminal law provides an important check against abuse of power by federal officials, the supremacy of federal law precludes the use of state prosecutorial power to frustrate the legitimate and reasonable exercise of federal authority.

That’s the key: were ICE officers acting in an “objectively reasonable manner” in doing their job.

State prosecutions of federal officials have been brought from the early 1800s to today. More recently, an FBI sniper was prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter under state law when he killed Vicki Weaver, the wife of white separatist Randall Weaver, during an FBI raid of the white separatist’s redoubt in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

So no, JD: ICE officers do not have absolute immunity.

When Brian O’Hara, the police chief for St. Paul and Minneapolis, was asked what he thought first, upon hearing about the Good shooting. He answered: “This is potentially 2020 all over again.” “George Floyd all over again?” the interviewer asked. “The destruction of the city,” the chief responded.

That may be an understatement. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains on its website:

In the months after Hitler took power, the SA and Gestapo agents went from door to door looking for Hitler’s enemies. Socialists, Communists, trade union leaders, and others who had spoken out against the Nazi Party were arrested, and some were killed. By the middle of 1933, the Nazi Party was the only political party, and nearly all organized opposition to the regime had been eliminated. Democracy was dead in Germany.

If this administration is allowed to violate constitutional rights with impunity here — patently illegal door to door intimidation — where will they go next? Atlanta? Boston? And, even worse, against whom?