Today In Republicans Being Useless: Falling For Anti-ICE Info Ops

Donald Trump ran on a platform of mass deporting illegal aliens from the United States during the 2024 election, and as such, the voters of Oklahoma supported his efforts to do so. In fact, every single county in the Sooner State backed Trump and his policies over the open border approach of Democrat Kamala Harris.

So, if Oklahoma voters have made their support for enforcing America’s immigration laws abundantly clear, why is their “Republican” governor going on legacy media to cower before the left’s latest anti-ICE info op?

The moment occurred on Sunday when Gov. Kevin Stitt appeared on CNN — which a jury found to be literally fake news. While Stitt initially discussed the recent winter storm sweeping much of the country, he was subsequently asked by State of the Union co-host Dana Bash to comment on this past weekend’s ICE-related shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in which a leftist agitator was shot and killed after seemingly attempting to hinder immigration enforcement efforts.

Stitt began his response by acknowledging the “tragedy” that comes with any loss of life. He also correctly pointed out that the American people voted for Trump to reverse the Biden administration’s “disastrous” open border policies that allowed millions of foreign nationals to infringe upon American sovereignty.

But like with too many elected Republicans, Stitt couldn’t help but surrender on the issue at hand by all but voicing support for allowing some illegal immigrants to remain in the country.

“President Trump closed the border [and] promised to get violent criminals out of our country, and I think everybody agrees with that. But now Americans are asking themselves: What is the endgame? What is the solution? … What’s the goal right now? Is it to deport every single non- U.S. citizen? I don’t think that’s what Americans want,” Stitt said.

The “Republican” governor also declined to provide a definitive answer on whether he believes Trump should pull ICE out of Minnesota and regurgitated his apparent support for permitting illegals to stay in America. (It was hardly the first time the Oklahoma governor has opposed lawful efforts to deport all illegal aliens present in the United States.)

Unfortunately, such fecklessness isn’t a characteristic possessed solely by the Sooner State’s governor.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., seemingly suggested the president withdraw federal forces from Minnesota to let the state’s leadership deal with the consequences of illegal immigration, while GOP senators like Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski happily played along with leftist demands for investigations into the incident.

It may boggle the mind to witness how so many elected Republicans could display this level of stupidity following the 2020 Black Lives Matter-Antifa riots, which were accompanied by media-led efforts to emotionally blackmail non-leftists into bending the knee to their destructive ideology. Then again, much of the modern GOP has never possessed the intellect or fortitude needed for times like this.

The reality is that there is no “middle of the road” compromise or number of investigations that is going to satisfy Democrats, the media (I repeat myself), or their unhinged base. As my colleagues Mark Hemingway and Eddie Scarry recently observed, the left isn’t simply opposed to Trump or certain tactics embraced by ICE officials, but enforcement of any and all immigration laws throughout America.

The recent ICE-involved deaths in Minneapolis almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if Minnesota leaders like Tim Walz and Jacob Frey had cooperated with immigration officials (like other state and local leaders) from the beginning and stopped encouraging their radical base to interfere with such operations. But in order to obfuscate their massive fraud scandal, they and other Democrats have continued to encourage the opposite.

[READ: Democrats Want Anti-ICE Protesters To Die So They Can Protect Their Fraudulent Patronage With Riots]

They have insisted that it’s the “authoritarian” Trump administration that’s to blame for the “chaos” they created and demanded that all Republicans denounce the use of force that never would’ve been deployed had they and their allies just followed the law from the get-go. And much like they did when executing their 2020 BLM playbook, Democrats will invariably label any GOPer who questions their position or declines to participate in this anti-ICE info op as a fascist, racist, Nazi, and so forth.

It is way past time for Republicans to buck up and quit playing the left’s game by their rules. No more excuses and no more pathetic, half-hearted responses.

If America’s immigration officers can put their lives on the line to protect this nation’s laws and sovereignty, the least Republicans can do is have their backs in the left’s dishonest information war to demonize them into extinction.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics and RealClearHealth. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood