Ramstad: Vance blames protesters, Minnesota leaders for feds’ inept immigration crackdown

Vice President JD Vance said he came to Minnesota to understand why the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has “become so chaotic” here.

“I’m proud of the fact that we are standing behind law enforcement,” Vance said when he was asked whether he was proud of the way the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were conducting themselves in Minnesota.

That was at the start of his appearance in Minneapolis’ North Loop on Thursday, Jan. 22. For the next 30 minutes, he heaped criticism on everyone else in Minnesota law enforcement, even seeming to suggest cops reveal ICE operations to protesters.

“Sometimes they tell [state and local officials] where they’re going and then they find out that their agents’ faces are on Reddit or some social media thread,” Vance said.

Operation Metro Surge, in which more than 2,000 federal agents have arrested undocumented immigrants in Minnesota over the last seven weeks, has become a political disaster for the Trump administration.

The Jan. 7 slaying of Renee Good by an ICE agent was the turning point, of course. And if Republicans lose statewide races this fall as now seems likely, they will look back on that day with the agony they have so far failed to express over her death.

National polls since have shown plummeting support for ICE and for President Donald Trump’s entire approach to immigration. Last week, an Economist/YouGov poll found a sudden surge of support for abolishing ICE. And 61% of respondents in a New York Times/Siena Poll published Friday said ICE tactics had gone too far.

ICE and related agencies prefer secrecy. What little data they’ve disclosed about Operation Metro Surge shows that what they do — and how they do it — doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Marcos Charles, acting executive associate director at ICE, began a separate news conference Thursday proclaiming the agency had arrested 10,000 undocumented immigrants in Minnesota in the last year and 3,300 since Operation Metro Surge began in early December.

He then held up a handful of photos of newly arrested undocumented immigrants with criminal records. That added five or so names to the 240 criminal arrests disclosed as of earlier in the week.

So that’s a criminal catch rate of less than 1 in 10 arrests, at least that they’ve said in their data.

If this so-called “largest immigration action ever” operation was a business venture, it would be an utter failure. Vance, a former venture capitalist accustomed to coping with results that wouldn’t fly in most businesses, has clearly noticed.

ICE also hasn’t said how many protesters it has arrested and let go. I sent a request for data to ICE but did not get a reply. I don’t really expect one from an agency that poses high barriers even to members of Congress.

I do expect ICE to get violent and dangerous people out of the country. But the data makes clear Operation Metro Surge is much less about catching criminals than is portrayed.

Vance, Charles and Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino revealed the real game in their nakedly political remarks this week. They repeatedly blamed Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for their problems, then acknowledged they hadn’t tried to meet them.

The federal agencies could have worked quietly, as most police do in pursuit of criminals, and done their job with fewer officers, less violence and more cooperation from colleagues and support from the public.

Instead, they created a spectacle, with a social media campaign and convoys of SUVs and masked agents cosplaying as military invaders.

With it backfiring on their image, they are now playing the victim card. They portray protests as attacks and say Walz, Frey and local police should stop people from following them around.

Lashing out at Minnesota’s leaders this week, Bovino put a twist on Thomas Paine’s famous quote about government by saying, “Politics and politicians on their very best day are barely tolerable evil.”

In the book “Common Sense,” Paine wrote, “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”