By Jarrett Stepman, Op-ed contributor Tuesday, January 20, 2026A protester with an anti-ICE sign stands outside of the Henry Bishop Whipple Federal building on January 18, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. | Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The Left is desperate to make lawful deportation in America a giant, impossible mess to deal with.
According to a new media narrative, President Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security are behaving irresponsibly by conducting more immigration raids around the country, which in turn have allegedly led to violence against innocent civilians and illegal aliens.
And if you’ve been listening to Democrats, you’d think that the reason that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is particularly active in blue states is that the Trump administration is being mean to them for political reasons.
Their reasoning goes that Trump wants to occupy and bully their states with ICE “terrorists” who spend their time murdering innocent American citizens for no reason other than to cruelly “own the libs.”
“This is retribution-style politics,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a recent CNN interview. “This is drama. This is performance politics at its worst, and it’s hurting people and it’s making us less safe.”
This is projection. It’s Frey and friends who are all about “performance politics.” They desperately want to convey the idea that Trump’s immigration enforcement policies are the real problem.
But the narrative that aggressive ICE enforcement in blue states is just some kind of political retribution is bunk for many reasons. The biggest one is that Democrats have actively pursued policies that would lead to a confrontation with the federal government over immigration law.
This is happening by design.
Sanctuary city and state policies aim at blocking the federal government from carrying out federal laws through non-compliance. If the federal government still intends to carry out the law, it doesn’t have the same process at its disposal to do that as it does in states that cooperate.
The Trump administration has generally prioritized bringing in illegal aliens with a criminal record. This can be done more easily in states that cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security. Generally, local authorities detain individuals for various crimes, and when they discover that the criminal is an illegal alien with a deportation order, they hand them over to federal officers.
Not so in blue states, where the federal government must actively pursue illegal aliens if it wishes to detain and deport them.
CNN actually covered this issue in August.
“In states that voted for President Donald Trump, ICE agents are far more likely to arrest immigrants directly from prisons and jails,” CNN reported.
“In Democratic-leaning states, by contrast, ICE is frequently arresting immigrants from worksites, streets and mass roundups that have sparked protests and intense backlash in cities such as Los Angeles. Most of those arrested don’t have any criminal record,” CNN continued.
CNN further found that “59% of arrests in red states took place in prisons and jails, while 70% of arrests in blue states took place in the community. That partisan gap between red and blue states existed before Trump’s second term began–but it has widened since last year.”
The sanctuary policies are triggering the federal government to engage in aggressive raids. These raids are less efficient, riskier, and more likely to sweep up illegal aliens who don’t have an extensive criminal record outside the initial crime of violating U.S. border laws.
This is a point my wife, Inez Stepman, and Vice President JD Vance recently made on X. Needless to say, I agree.
Democrat politicians and their activist supporters certainly know that sanctuary policies encourage more aggressive ICE enforcement.
The Prison Policy Initiative, a left-leaning non-profit organization, highlighted how the data shows sanctuary policies “work.”
Their December paper, titled “New ICE arrest data show the power of state and local governments to curtail mass deportations,” notes that enforcement strategies differ in blue and red states based on the level of local cooperation.
“Local jails and police departments are key to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda because they facilitate ICE arrests of people who are already in police custody,” the paper began. It celebrated that the administration was behind on its deportation goals “in large part due to state and local efforts to protect immigrant communities and limit cooperation with ICE, Border Patrol, and other federal agencies.”
Instead of just accepting de facto nullification of federal law, the Department of Homeland Security has stepped up ICE raids to make up for non-cooperation in places like Minnesota.
When you combine that with an aggressive, activist street element and irresponsible Democrat politicians like Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, you get situations like the ones that led to the ICE shooting of Rachel Good.
The blame for this messy situation doesn’t fall on the Trump administration. It falls on those who don’t accept the results of the 2024 election, who insist that the results of the open borders insanity of President Joe Biden be locked in forever, and now look to do everything in their power to undermine the law.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. He is also the author of the book The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.
