OPINION:
President Trump deserves a lot of credit for turning the temperature down in Minnesota.
The president has deployed White House border czar Tom Homan to oversee efforts there as his personal representative answerable directly to him.
Mr. Trump, like all reasonable Americans, was horrified by the images of Alex Pretti lying dead in a Minneapolis street. How did we get to this point?
Democrats used to believe in strong national borders. When Barack Obama was president, he deported nearly 3 million illegal immigrants. As a U.S. senator in 2006, he explained his point of view: “The American people are a welcoming and generous people. But those who enter our country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law. And because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented and unchecked. Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws.”
Back then, the Democrats supported those immigration policies. But today, those sentiments would cost Mr. Obama his Senate seat. The J.B. Pritzkers and Tim Walzes of the world would call him a racist.
That’s because over the past decade, the Democratic Party has been hijacked by rich billionaires such as George Soros, who want to sow discord in the country. Mr. Soros’ Open Society Foundation gave $2 million to a group called the Sunrise Foundation, which is stirring trouble in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Sunrise agitators have targeted 70 hotels in Minneapolis housing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“Our strategy to target hotels that are housing ICE agents is WORKING,” Sunrise posted to Instagram on Jan. 19. “Two hotels in the Twin Cities just decided to pause their operations rather than house ICE agents. We need other hotels to follow their lead … We the people have the power, and we’re not backing down.”
Other rich-guy foundations funding the troublemakers in Minneapolis are the Ford Foundation ($700,000 to Sunrise) and the MacArthur Foundation ($250,000 in 2024).
When did rich people – who got every benefit this country could give them and their families – start hating America like this? Why are they giving money to people who behave like Nazi storm troopers and disrupt church services because they heard a rumor the pastor had some connection to ICE? How is that good for this country? It suggests that Mr. Soros and his fat cat friends have no genuine interest in immigration reform, peace on U.S. streets or a more perfect union.
Lost in all the madness is this fact: States don’t have the legal authority to defy the federal government where the Constitution gives the federal government jurisdiction. Article VI, Clause 2 establishes the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to it and treaties as the “supreme law of the Land.”
Article I, Section 8, Clause 18, gives the federal government authority over immigration. The immigration laws Mr. Trump enforces were duly passed by Congress. They are the law of the land, whether New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California or Minnesota likes it or not.
In the Obama years, the Supreme Court held that federal power in this area is so “broad” and “undoubted” that even state-level laws in Arizona meant to complement the federal enforcement regime didn’t pass muster. A lawyer for Minnesota called the Department of Homeland Security surge an “unlawful and unchecked invasion,” as though the state were a separate country capable of making its own immigration policy.
He must have missed that Supreme Court ruling and his law school classes on the supremacy clause. Or maybe he didn’t care.
The liberal Washington Monthly reported in August that “Bill Clinton deported 12.3 million, George W. Bush 10.3 million and Barack Obama 5.3 million in their eight-year administrations. Joe Biden racked up 4 million. Trump’s first term? 1.9 million, and another 207,000” though August 2025. Illegal immigration advocates used to call Obama “the deporter-in-chief.”
No one attacked ICE agents or destroyed motels then. No government officials decided they were the second coming of Orval Faubus, Lester Maddox and George Wallace, who would defy federal law in the interest of the parochial games of political advantage. Who told these Democrats to become the metaphorical equivalents of those segregationist governors (all of whom were Democrats, by the way)?
The activists are funded by modern-day Marie Antoinettes such as Mr. Soros, rich men and women sitting back in their walled compounds, protected by security teams, untouched by the chaos and lawlessness they’re buying.
Most Americans agree we need to crack down on the criminals Mr. Biden let into the country. Most Americans want a way to allow hard- working illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. No one likes watching events provoked by paid troublemakers end in the deaths of Renee Good or Mr. Pretti.
While Mr. Trump works toward a better solution in Minnesota, his Department of Justice should be cracking down on these groups who sponsor and pay for insurrection and destabilize the country.
Partisanship over immigration has tied the nation in knots for more than two decades. If anyone can cut through those knots, it’s Mr. Trump, the man who negotiated the Abraham Accords in his first term and who has brokered more ceasefires in his second than any president in the nation’s history.
The man who brought peace to Gaza is the man who can bring peace to our streets — that is, if my party wants peace.
• Rod Blagojevich served as governor of Illinois from 2003 to 2009. In February, he was pardoned by President Trump for his conviction on corruption charges.
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