Opinion | No to phased withdrawals. ICE out now.

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I concur with Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. The withdrawal of 700 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from Minnesota is not fast enough.

The ICE invasion has been cruel and racist and totally unnecessary. The demand should be: “ICE out now!”

This issue hearkens back to a debate that took place within the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the years before I joined the Star Tribune as a reporter, I was involved in that movement. At a couple of junctures, I served in public relations for the National Peace Action Coalition, a major American antiwar organization, that organized large, legal demonstrations against the war.

One of the debates in the antiwar movement at that time centered around the question of what the principal demand should be. Should it be a call for a phased withdrawal of troops? Or should it advocate immediate withdrawal? Immediate withdrawal won out.

For a growing number of Americans, it had become painfully clear that the U.S. had no business sending troops to Vietnam, intervening in a civil war in support of a corrupt South Vietnamese regime. Fifty thousand American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese lost their lives in a war that was wrong from the start. Without U.S. military support, the South Vietnamese government would have collapsed almost overnight, and it did when the American people forced President Richard Nixon to withdraw all American troops.

Today we face a situation that has some parallels. An unwanted paramilitary force is occupying our state. The overwhelming sentiment is that they need to go.

The Trump administration keeps inventing new excuses for why ICE agents came and why they are still here. It has been a shell game: If one reason does not work, try another.

At first, it seemed to be part of a law enforcement effort to target Minnesota’s Somali American population over allegations of fraud. Of course, most Somali Americans in Minnesota are citizens who are here legally. The fraud was limited to a very small part of that population. It has become abundantly clear the ICE terror inflicted on our neighborhoods has nothing to do with eliminating fraud.

Then President Donald Trump justified the invasion by saying ICE was rooting out Minnesota’s onslaught of illegal immigrants who were rapists and murderers, preying on the general population. That was also a lie. The undocumented population in Minnesota is small compared with that of other states. And most immigrants, documented and undocumented, don’t commit crimes. Former U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger put it well in a recent opinion article published in the Star Tribune: “As the lead Minnesota federal law enforcement official over seven years, I never heard law enforcement argue to make illegal immigration the top priority. Not once did anyone suggest to me that illegal immigrants were the ‘worst of the worst’ violent offenders in Minnesota. Because it simply is not true.”

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi then suggested in a letter to Walz late last month that the withdrawal of ICE hinged on demands that the state turn over its voter rolls and data on Medicaid and food stamp recipients and repeal so-called sanctuary policies. Is that what the invasion was about? Officials properly called it a ransom note.

Finally, on Feb. 4, Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, suggested at a news conference that withdrawal depended on an end to the harassment of ICE agents, a reference to the courageous citizens who have gone to the scene of ICE deployments to observe and shoot videos of the agents’ violent behavior, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

The protests in this state have been overwhelmingly peaceful, despite the claims of Trump, his top aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem that the many thousands of protesters who have marched peacefully in Minnesota are violent paid insurrectionists. That, of course, is a lie, too.

Peaceful mass protests need to continue until this invasion ends. It was peaceful, legal mass demonstrations, calling for immediate withdrawal, that forced the U.S. to get out of Vietnam.

Our response to Homan’s announcement of a phased ICE withdrawal should be: That’s not good enough.

No to ICE. No to phased withdrawals. ICE out now.