Readers Write: ICE in Minnesota, Renee Good shooting investigation, Trump’s morals

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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Yesterday, my kids’ elementary school in southwest Minneapolis went in lockdown because Immigration and Customs Enforcement made an arrest right outside their school. My 11-year-old daughter’s class saw the agents outside their classroom window. Kids were scared.

If you don’t live in Minneapolis, and you’re tempted to dismiss a school lockdown as no big deal, my kids experience a lockdown as students of a Catholic school in the parish next to Annunciation. They know kids who experienced that horror. My kids know that someone disguised as a police officer assassinated House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband. For 24 hours while the assassin was on the run, we told our kids not to answer the door to police. And my kids know that only a week ago on Jan. 7 a mom was shot in the head by ICE after dropping her kid off at school.

Kids in Minneapolis are traumatized. Even if you agree with the mission of ICE, please understand what their tactics are doing to our kids. This needs to stop.

Mary Pat Sullivan, Minneapolis

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I went the protest at Powderhorn Park on Saturday and got to watch Minneapolis police officers do their work. I was relieved and very proud to see our police going about their work as “peace officers” (what happened to that term, anyway?) rather than “law enforcement.” To me they seemed part of and committed to our community. I don’t really consider Immigration and Customs Enforcement qualified to be called police, though I wish they would watch our men in blue and learn from them.

I haven’t prayed much since 2018, but I am going to pray for O’Hara and our 600 peace officers. We all realize this tough for them, much tougher than we can know. I hope they can stick it out with us and be around for a handshake and hug when things settle down.

To my surprise, they have become part of my healing, and I am grateful.

Don Amorosi, Wayzata

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And now more ICE agents are being deployed. The Minnesota National Guard stands at the ready. Protesters, many protesters, are in the streets. Squads of federal ICE agents untrained in any type of crowd-control play GI Joe with dubious authority and continue to apprehend and harass, and even shoot and kill, U.S. citizens.

I can’t see where this goes from here. Probably nowhere good.

President Donald Trump — the gift that keeps on giving. Again, just so, so sad.

Timothy Hennum, Minneapolis

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Bill White, Eagan

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It’s a difficult time to be a Minnesotan. Maybe that’s an understatement. People are angry. Others afraid. Good people are stepping down from their posts — not because they’ve stopped caring, but because they care too much. Those gaps will be filled by people who don’t care at all, or worse, care about the wrong things.

I’ve read a lot of comparisons to fascism lately. To Nazi Germany. But there’s a difference worth naming: Minnesotans aren’t letting this slide. We’re showing up. We’re making noise. We are not going gentle into the night. The response has not been apathy or silence. It has been loud, sustained and angry in exactly the way it should be.

That’s worth holding onto. Democracies don’t die from attack. They die from indifference. The machinery of authoritarianism depends on exhaustion. It depends on people eventually shrugging and accepting that this is just how things are now. What I’m seeing is the opposite. People are refusing to let it become normal.

Alex Frecon, Minneapolis

When our local FBI office and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension quickly announced their plans to conduct a joint investigation into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, it made sense: Both agencies have jurisdiction, and each agency would benefit from the expertise, resources and access of the other. In addition, the witnesses, property owners and others involved would be spared multiple, repetitive interviews. The sudden reversal of this cooperative arrangement by high-level authorities in Washington, D.C., hurts every one of us. The FBI’s additional decision to hoard the evidence and not allow the BCA to access it may prevent Minnesota from fulfilling its obligation to properly investigate this death.

Working together is how we do things here. Last summer, the successful manhunt for Vance Boelter, the suspect in the Hortman/Hoffman killings and shootings, involved multiple police departments, sheriff’s offices, the BCA and the FBI. In news conferences during the manhunt, nearly every authority complemented the multiagency coordination. That doesn’t happen by accident.

The BCA, well-known for its expertise in officer-involved shootings, is nonpolitical, with a professional commitment to investigative excellence, cooperation with the wider law-enforcement community and open communication with the public. I’m dismayed that federal authorities are interfering with this area’s longstanding tradition of professional law-enforcement cooperation and preventing Minnesota from investigating the death of one of its own citizens on its own streets.

Laura G. Johnson, Brooklyn Park

What are leaders who decide to weaponize a country’s judicial system against its own people?

Who are leaders who say they are protecting democracy, yet they allow federal officers to harass, arrest, deport and kill their own citizens?

What sort of leaders take an oath to the U.S. Constitution, yet when asked by an interviewer what moral boundary they follow, say, “My own mind”?

A dictator would be my answer, but, oh wait ... it’s Donald Trump, the U.S. president.

How can this be? Where are the guardrails for a leader who is not “for” his people but urges Iranian protesters to “keep protesting” to “save the names of the killers and abusers”?

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In Sunday’s front-page article (“Trump’s moral compass: Himself”) Trump asserted that his power is constrained only by his “own morality.” Daily we observe Trump’s “morals.” Let us contrast his morals with a universally accepted, religiously tested, centuries-old definition of a moral person. And then decide for ourselves if we really want his morality debasing our country.

A moral person throughout history has been characterized by the attributes of honesty, empathy, integrity and compassion, consistently acting with fairness, justice, respect and responsibility, treating others with dignity and demonstrating self-control and a commitment to the common good, not just personal gain.

Philipp Muessig, Minneapolis

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