More Cities Rebel Against ICE After Trump’s Compromise In MN

The Trump administration’s response to the weekslong insurrection in Minneapolis showed left-wing leaders across the country one thing: Riots work.

Weeks of left-wing rioting and obstruction of federal immigration enforcement operations have resulted in the federal government apparently giving major concessions to Minnesota Democrats, and now, Democrats in other states and cities are emboldened to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers from doing their job.

As his first executive order after taking office on Jan. 1, Sean Ryan, Democrat mayor of Buffalo, New York, decided on Monday to prohibit “the use of City of Buffalo personnel or resources for federal civil immigration enforcement.”

“ICE is creating fear and confusion across the county [sic] — including among U.S. citizens and other people who are here legally — and that fear is undermining public safety,” Ryan said in a press release.

In Arlington, Virginia — one of the state’s most populous areas — county board Chairman Matt de Ferranti encouraged residents to call 911 if they see ICE. At the state level, Democrat Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim, an immigrant from Bangladesh who is also trying to make many guns and magazines illegal, introduced three bills to obstruct ICE. Gov. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., already ended state law enforcement cooperation with ICE.

On Monday, the city council of Montana’s state capital, Helena, also passed a resolution instructing the city police department not to enter into agreements with or assist ICE. It also stipulates that city officials will not disclose information like immigration status or place of birth, unless a court demands they do so, while doubling down on a current policy that states the police will not investigate, detain, or arrest anyone based on his violation of immigration law.

The Helena resolution “request[s]” that ICE agents remove masks, which is essentially asking that they put themselves and their families at risk of being doxxed and attacked by violent leftists.

Democrats across the country are already taking the Minneapolis blueprint and running with it, because what happened there demonstrates leftist insurgents can just orchestrate anti-ICE chaos and rioting until the federal government relents. Riots work when the federal government capitulates to mob rule — which is apparently the case in Minnesota.

Negotiating With Warlords

After calls with Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., and Democrat Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey earlier this week, Trump will reportedly pull some Customs and Border Protection (CBP) out of Minnesota and shift around leadership on the ground. The Trump administration has indicated that a reduction in federal agents would be conditioned on federal law enforcement receiving the cooperation of state and local law enforcement, which Walz and Frey have thus far prevented.

In fact, it was Walz’s and Frey’s anti-law-and-order positions that put federal officials in harm’s way and created a violent situation in the first place. State and local law enforcement could have been arresting people the whole time, but Democrat political leadership encouraged, and in some cases allegedly orchestrated, all the riots and obstruction.

Walz took a victory lap after the call, saying he has “never been prouder to be a Minnesotan,” referring seemingly to the retreat of federal agents, and Frey said he’d continue his anti-federal-immigration-enforcement activities.

“Some federal agents will begin leaving the area tomorrow, and I will continue pushing for the rest involved in this operation to go,” he posted to social media. “Minneapolis will continue to cooperate with state and federal law enforcement on real criminal investigations — but we will not participate in unconstitutional arrests of our neighbors or enforce federal immigration law.”

“Violent criminals should be held accountable based on the crimes they commit, not based on where they are from,” he added, feigning “cooperation” while undermining the entire purpose of immigration enforcement: Legitimate targets for deportation are not simply illegal aliens who also commit violent crimes, but all illegal aliens, regardless of whether they have additional criminal history.

Despite that, Frey seems to have gotten his way because Trump appears to have downgraded the deportation operation to “just give us your criminals.”

“I had two very good talks. … What we need is their criminals,” Trump said, adding, “All I said, ‘Just give us your criminals, and if you give us the criminals, it all goes away.’”

It all goes away? Trump campaigned on the promise of conducting mass deportations, which means deporting everyone in the U.S. illegally, and if done thoroughly, denaturalizing and deporting those who have been given legal status or citizenship who do not deserve it. It does not mean deporting the handful that left-wing insurrectionists are willing to hand over to federal law officers.

Forcing Agents to Operate in Chaos

No one celebrates the deaths of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, despite the fact that they were leftist agitators who sought to obstruct federal law enforcement, and in the case of Good, ram her car into ICE agents. Reports also indicate that Pretti was known to federal law enforcement after a violent confrontation with agents a week prior to his being shot, resulting in a broken rib — though it is unclear whether the officers involved in the fatal incident knew they were dealing with a person who previously clashed with law enforcement.

It does seem likely, however, that Good and Pretti would still be alive if they had not been egged on by people like Walz and Frey. They would also likely still be alive if the federal government had done the right thing from the start and invoked the Insurrection Act, arrested all the obstructionists, elected officials giving political cover, and their financiers, restoring order the moment things started to get out of hand. Not doing so gave federal agents the impossible job of trying to conduct successful law enforcement operations while simultaneously battling left-wing agitators.

Confrontations like Good’s and Pretti’s seemed inevitable in the chaos, and law enforcement is made exponentially harder in chaos. As my colleague Eddie Scarry noted, Democrats are willing to die in order to stop deportations, but that deranged ideology cannot be the justification for ending law enforcement.

Minneapolis was a test that the federal government failed, but the failure should at least serve as a corrective for the Trump administration’s inevitable clashes with agitators in other cities who seek to derail the enforcement of immigration law.

Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. As an investigative journalist, he previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.