The Daily Caller has an interesting piece out today on the backstory behind Border Czar Tom Homan’s appointment to run ICE operations in Minnesota. In short, Trump sees a bit of dysfunction . . .

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I did a good bit of this at The Hayride on Monday, in a post objecting to endangered RINO Senator Bill Cassidy’s going wobbly on the ICE deployments after last weekend’s developments. Let’s start with what I said there, and then we’ll add more after the excerpt… I’m not about to say I was happy over the death of a radical anti-ICE protester over the weekend. His name was Alex Pretti, and he was a 37-year-old male nurse at a VA hospital who appeared to be well-liked and good at his job. I’ve watched the videos of Pretti’s death at the hands of ICE agents over the weekend, and counter to what the Left are now screaming in unison that he was “murdered,” I don’t claim any particular superpowers of discernment that indicate much other than a scrum, chaos and utterly idiotic situation that was bound to go badly. What I do know is that Alex Pretti brought a gun to a protest of federal law enforcement agents engaged in an operation to deport a criminal illegal alien. He had a right to carry a firearm to that protest. But then Alex Pretti thought it would be a good idea to grapple with ICE agents as the protest turned into a mini-riot, and found out different. I’m not even saying it was a “good shoot” that caused his death. I’m going to be agnostic about that question. What I will say is that wading into a team of ICE officers as they’re trying to do a job the people elected Donald Trump president in order that it would get done, and furthermore is a job a large majority of Americans support being done, is a very stupid and dangerous thing to do and generated very predictable results. Oh, yeah — in case you missed it, Trump’s deportations are still very popular, as Brian Joondeph notes at American Thinker… Night after night, TV viewers see images of angry protesters, breathless commentary about “authoritarian crackdowns,” the familiar ‘Trump is Hitler/Nazi/fascist’ trope, and sympathetic portrayals of activists blocking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The media narrative is clear: Americans are revolting against deportations. But polling tells a very different story. A recent Rasmussen Reports survey shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans support President Trump’s efforts to locate and deport illegal immigrants. That includes a majority of independents, more than a third of Democrats, and almost two-thirds of Hispanic respondents. Support spans all age groups. Black and White voters show nearly identical approval ratings. This isn’t fringe sentiment; it’s mainstream opinion. Yet, this reality is almost entirely missing from media coverage. The disconnect matters because it reveals how much narrative has replaced analysis in today’s political journalism. Protests are viewed as substitutes for public opinion, while polling — especially when it contradicts preferred stories — is ignored, downplayed, or dismissed. Regarding immigration, the media’s main belief is that enforcement equals cruelty, and opposition equals compassion. They often claimed that Trump put kids in cages, ignoring that the practice existed before Trump and expanded during Obama. They also called Barack Obama the “deporter in chief,”  deporting more illegal aliens than Trump. But voters are not nearly so simplistic. The Rasmussen data suggest Americans still believe in something unfashionable in elite ruling class circles: laws should be enforced, and national borders should mean something. Independent voters, who tend to decide elections in competitive districts, approve of enforcement efforts. Hispanic voters, who are often portrayed as uniformly opposed to deportations, support them at surprisingly high levels. Even among Democrats, whose leadership has largely embraced near-open borders, more than a third approve of Trump’s approach. These figures do not reflect a public in revolt. In the vast majority of the country, ICE is busy deporting illegal aliens, and primarily criminals — 70 percent of those deported have committed crimes while here or are under a judicial deportation order; I’m not just calling them criminals because they broke the law coming here — without incident. Largely because how things are supposed to work is that when an illegal is arrested for committing a crime, local law enforcement holds them in jail and then notifies ICE, who comes to get them and takes custody of them, brings them to a detention center and then deports them. The environment is controlled and safe and the public isn’t affected by the removal of a criminal element in our midst. But in sanctuary cities like Minneapolis, that isn’t done. Local law enforcement doesn’t cooperate with ICE. They’ll release criminal illegal aliens on bail or on their own recognizance before trial, without notifying the feds. And then the feds have to go into the community to fetch the criminals and bring them to a detention center to be shipped home. An organized army of “protesters” like Alex Pretti and Renee Good, the woman shot three weeks ago by an ICE agent she hit with her car, are following ICE agents around and interfering with them as they arrest illegal alien criminals. There are communications networks, like the Signal chat organized by Minnesota’s own Lt. Governor, the nose-ringed leftist Peggy Flanagan, which dispatch protesters to the scenes of ICE arrests when they’re detected. And those protests are not nonviolent. They’re invasive, intrusive and aggressive. They’ve led to ICE officers getting hurt and protesters getting hurt. Minnesota’s leadership are ginning up these protests in an effort to force the Trump administration to back down. Why? Not because they care much about protecting criminal illegal aliens per se, but because they want to extract the maximum political cost to deportations, period — because this is the easy stage. After the criminal illegals are sent home, the politically harder work of deporting the less-dangerous illegals begins. And those 20 million, or more, illegals are the ocean which gives Democrats the electoral votes they need to stay politically relevant — even if they don’t vote, and a lot more of them do than you think, they’re still counted in the census. As we’ve seen with the case of widespread, shocking amounts of welfare fraud among the Somalis in Minnesota and elsewhere, immigrants, and particularly illegals, though most of the Somalis were legal immigrants, make for an amazingly lush environment for cheating the system and giving Democrats easy funds for campaigns and wealth redistribution. It’s a Cloward-Piven opportunity leftist radicals have begged for since the 1960’s and they won’t let it go without a fight. Yes, I know. Were I borrowing from anyone else but myself, I would be guilty of plagiarism. I’m happy to report that, as the editorial staff of that publication, The Hayride has no complaints. But there is more, because we are finding that the violence and turmoil surrounding ICE operations aren’t just in blue states but specifically — vastly disproportionately — in just nine counties across the country. (RELATED: What’s Really Causing the Minnesota ‘Insurrection’?) On X, Kevin Bass posted the results of a study he did on violent ICE-involved incidents, and the numbers were fascinating and highly instructive… I am horrified. I cannot believe it. I analyzed public databases and media reporting on violent confrontations with ICE over the past year. Just 9 counties accounted for TWO-THIRDS of violent confrontations with ICE in America. This is twice all violent confrontations in the… pic.twitter.com/PuQuntgtGF — Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) January 26, 2026 At 28, there have been more of these incidents in Chicago than anywhere else, which is perhaps one reason why the police chief there came out strongly against anti-ICE protesters interfering with ICE agents. One wonders if the fact that South Chicago, which has always been the heart of that city’s black community, was the site of most of ICE’s activity during their ramp-up, and the black community was anything but opposed to the deportations. Chicago’s Democrats walk a bit of a fine line pushing the open-borders catechism; their core voters in that city and state are not on board with that catechism, given the negative effect on their quality of life that illegal aliens have. Beyond Chicago, though (and Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson are as loony-left a pair as it’s possible to elect), these cities are as communist a set of enclaves as it’s possible to have in this country. Los Angeles Minneapolis New York Portland San Francisco Seattle Newark Denver Know what also ties those places together? They’re all cities with stagnant or declining populations whose federal funding and congressional representation (state representation, too) are bolstered by the presence of illegals. Alex Pretti might not have realized it — the chances are he didn’t have a clue — but he died trying to protect a political party as it was negating the votes and wealth of Americans in favor of an imported vote-plantation underclass. Almost certainly, he was ginned up to believe that ICE was busily attacking single-mother domestic laborers and fast-food workers already stepped on by The Man, when ICE, for the most part, hasn’t even gotten to them yet. (RELATED: Peaceful Protestors Don’t Carry Loaded Pistols) And he and those like him are being ginned up by Minnesota’s Democrat leadership, and Democrats nationally, so that Trump will give up on the mass deportation and demoralize his own base — and, per Rasmussen’s latest polling, the majority of the country — in advance of the midterms. The horror of it is nothing short of breathtaking. The First Amendment does not give them the right to interfere with law enforcement officers as they carry out their duties. But as I’ve noted a few times, the Left has indoctrinated its activists into a cult of victimization. It’s almost a line-by-line refrain of Jim Jones’s Guyana song and dance, in which the victimization led to exile and mass suicide in 1978. Back then, the bulk of the country was disgusted by Jones’s inducing his followers to drink the Kool-Aid, but now it’s been normalized. I’m saddened by Alex Pretti’s death. I’m sure everyone at ICE is. That it could well have been an accident — there are reports indicating Pretti’s Sig Sauer P320 accidentally discharged, which is a known issue with that cheap pistol, just after it was taken from him, and that precipitated the ICE officers to shoot him — makes this even worse. But that’s precisely why responsible cops across the country, but not in Minnesota, are telling people the First Amendment does not give them the right to interfere with law enforcement officers as they carry out their duties. And to stay the hell back from the fray lest something tragic might happen. The organizations — and they are organizations; this isn’t an organic protest but a disciplined, funded army at work in Minnesota — responsible for “training” the Alex Prettis of the world must be taken down. They are getting people killed, and they’re doing it for an utterly illegitimate, partisan-political purpose that the American people vehemently oppose. (RELATED: Who’s Paying for the Minneapolis Protesters?) We don’t want to see anybody else die at ICE’s hands. The principal culprits in those deaths so far have been the bastards throwing cannon fodder at ICE. It has to stop, no matter how aggressive the administration has to be to stop it. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Emasculating the Emasculating Big Media Europe Is Thus Illuminated, Exactly As It Is Was That Church Attack the Tipping Point in Minnesota? Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

The clarity of the Framers’ constitutional vision contrasts sharply with the fuzziness of international law. The most salient difference is the basis of authority for these two systems of governance. The Constitution tells us in its first sentence that the source of its authority is “We the People.” By conventions of the people in each state, the Constitution was ratified and gained its authority. Had the people chosen otherwise, it would have deemed itself not binding. From where, on the other hand, does international law derive its authority? There is no such clear statement as the Constitution has. “The Americans combine notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to conceive the one without the other.” Some systems of law claim divine authority. Historically, adherents of sharia, Islamic law, believe that this law has been made by God to be binding on all people. Though its adherents generally prefer to persuade others to willingly accept its authority, some have felt it appropriate when necessary to coerce acceptance. Early in Islam’s history, the Pact of Omer granted special allowances to Jews and Christians, gained by paying a special tax and by acceptance of second-class citizenship. The exact terms varied by place and time. The spread into Europe of Islamic sovereignty and its legal authority was checked by Christian resistance, first in France in the eighth century and then in the 16th and 17th centuries at the gates of Vienna. Christianity had its own law system, canon law, but as Christianity gained converts among the Europeans, it did not do so by focusing on law. Its tradition ran back to its own conversion of Rome, in which Christianity did not replace Roman law wholesale, but joined itself to it, as it had long ago made a point of rendering the civil order over to Caesar. (RELATED: Who’s Afraid of the Ten Commandments?) Canon law had its impact on kings — just ask Henry VIII — but its impact as the law of kingdoms was limited. It became even more limited when Christian unity shattered during the Reformation, with Protestantism in general dispensing with the institutional law of the Catholic Church and seeking divine legal authority in Scripture. In one Protestant movement that was particularly influential in American history, the Puritans successfully waged civil war against the English and Scottish king, executed him, and established a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, claiming divine authority for its rule. The bloody disorder that followed the Reformation convulsed Europe and thoroughly rid it of the idea that any one version of Christianity could establish a binding law for all the Christian countries. The exhausted kingdoms finally ended the warring with the series of pacts known as the Treaty of Westphalia. Historians of law date the start of the modern European order and its international law from that moment. The most influential and scholarly of the people who forged this order was the Dutch scholar, Hugo Grotius. Like the previous advocates of international law, Grotius claimed a divine sanction for its binding power, but his ground source was neither the Islamic nor the Christian law traditions. Rather, following the turn of European scholars to the vast corpus of the rabbinic law tradition, Grotius adopted the Noahide covenant of seven basic laws as being that which binds all peoples by divine authority. (RELATED: The Noahide Laws in the Making of American Liberty) Included in those laws is one that requires all peoples to set up courts of law by which to govern themselves, enforcing the basic Noahide law as well as the laws adopted by their own country according to its own legal traditions. There would be no need to fight to the death to establish a single comprehensive law governing all of the world under its divine authority. For most laws, the divine authority devolves onto the already existing law traditions of each nation. For Grotius, this was the place where natural law and divine law traditions came together. (RELATED: The Measure of a Free People) This new conception of an international order was given practical legal force through the treaties between different nations. War might break out, but it would be over conflicting national interests, which are solvable, not over unresolvable absolute claims of divine law incumbent upon all to accept. That divine element was now restricted to a very small skeleton and enjoyed universal assent, practically speaking. This system granted the growing nation-states of Europe a full head of steam. European power grew. Even though there were still wars, there was a coherence to the international structure. Some nations were losers — Poland, for example — but the whole was not threatened until the 20th century. By the time the First World War had finished, those with power didn’t have faith in a Noahide covenant or even its bare skeleton of laws. As well, the new political religions of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism renewed the idea of an absolute struggle to conquer the world and impose the rule of a barbarous faith with utter contempt for human freedom. Fascism and Nazism were smashed to ruin, along with most of Europe. The Communists saw their moment to profit from the misery of the prostrate peoples of the continent, using robbery and enslavement to help heal their own wounds and to continue their religious war for total domination. Western Europe tried to establish a new international order to continue what had started with Westphalia, without any belief in the core idea — a divine core of laws that commanded universal allegiance. Yet the strongest indication of their true belief in international law took center stage at the Nuremberg war crimes trial. The practitioners of racial extermination on an industrial basis were carrying out the orders of their state. Were they bound by any treaty against genocide, which was coined to mean the deliberate attempt to eradicate an entire ethnicity (not to describe the massive casualties of an urban war in which one side uses civilians as shields)? By what authority could they be tried? Although the Allied prosecutors did not make the case with any direct reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition, they proceeded on the practical assumption that no one could imagine that the mass murder of entire peoples could be legal. They referenced various previous treaties to justify objections that the defendants were being arbitrarily tried on laws established ex post facto, but this did not satisfy some serious critics, such as Senator Robert Taft. He objected to the trials as betraying the core principles of Anglo-American laws and falling into the same trap as the Nazis of justifying what they were doing on their power to do it and merely propagandizing it with legal rationalizations. He summed up his argument with these words: “Their guilt did not justify us in substituting power for principle.” Taft’s argument is telling in terms of the 20th century power elites who did not take ideas of biblical law tradition seriously. The thinkers who helped establish the modern order, such as Grotius and Selden, were dusty notes from law school lectures, not anything to be admitted to serious, elite discussion. As principled as Taft was, his logic led to allowing the Nazi criminal masterminds to walk free. The pity is that his arguments were not answered on the theoretical level. A few short years later, as the Truman administration was debating its stance on the emergence of a Jewish state in the Holy Land, Clark Clifford faced down Dean Rusk on the validity of the Bible as a basis for argument in world affairs. Rusk was very much opposed, and like most of the State Department, opposed Jewish independence. But Clifford in the end won the argument in that Truman chose to overrule the men he called “the Hahvahd striped-pants boys” in State and recognize Israel. Truman, though, only used biblical arguments in private conversations or letters. He did not argue that way publicly. Taft’s concerns were based on a clear recognition that international law cannot trump the Constitution. As several SCOTUS decisions have made clear, properly ratified treaties have the status of binding American statutes, not of constitutional amendments. Thus, the Constitution’s prohibition of ex post facto laws would be a real issue. We are protected from a Senate and president deciding that, between the two of them, they can override the many protections Americans as a people have insisted upon as their right by including them in our most basic level of law. But the Framers as a whole understood the Constitution’s own authority as deriving from the sovereignty granted the people by God. Therefore, the right to worship freely was protected in the very first constitutional amendment. Its protections were not merely a matter of what Jefferson called in private correspondence a dividing wall, although that is a true enough reading of Jefferson’s religiosity. He wrote his own edited Bible; he indicated a disdain for Jewish law and tradition in his correspondence with John Adams, sparking Adams’s spirited, learned, and eloquent counter. Tocqueville wrote in the 1800s: “The Americans combine notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to conceive the one without the other.” But over time, the religious element was slowly deserted in the company of the powerful. It took the onslaught of militant political Islamism to penetrate the cliches of the elite. They were largely blindsided by its power. Since the aversion to the religious tradition of the West is greatest on the progressive left, it is no wonder that they are so fantastically incoherent and morally empty in dealing with the reality of the war of the Islamists against America. Queers for Palestine seem oblivious to the fact that in Hamas-run Gaza, their treatment would be a good deal worse than what NYC cops handed out to the patrons of the Stonewall back in the Sixties. It also explains why the non-elite branches of American Judaism and Christianity, the ones derided by the progressives as being bitter clingers, have better understood the challenge of the radical religionists than the striped-pants boys or their woke successors. They believe in a muddled version of international law as a wedge to pry America away from the protections of the Constitution. They would have us believe it can be whatever they or other diplomats of similar views say it is and that it trumps our own Constitution and its irksome concerns. That was a danger Robert Taft, Mr. Conservative, saw very clearly. Put it together with the anchor in our most ancient law systems, as did Grotius and Selden, and then we have a sane and clear picture of what international law must do and also of its constitutional limitations. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Dancing in the Street, Listening for God The Captor Who Fell Silent In Defense of a Judeo-Christian America