Occupation in Minnesota 

In the WSJ, William McGurn wonders if Governor Tim Walz understands the argument he is making. After Walla compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the Nazis who sent Anne Frank to her death, the governor of Minnesota heard from the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Before the Nazis, it was the Civil War and Walz’s Fort Sumter moment.

Walz knows who is at fault for the two Minnesotans who died.

(Walz) wants ICE—whose presence he calls an “occupation”—out of Minnesota.

“The battle between federal agents trying to enforce the law and Minnesota state officials working to ensure that it can’t be enforced has a more immediate precedent that might surprise Gov. Walz and the rest of Minnesota’s ICE resisters,” reports Mr. McGurn.

Nullifying Federal Law

As McGurn writes, the historical ironies abound.

Today the activists operating to force ICE to leave have zero appreciation that their defiance of federal authority puts them in the same position as George Wallace and like-minded Southern sheriffs and governors.

In 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower had to invoke the Insurrection Act to enforce federal court orders to integrate Little Rock Central High School after the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregated schools were “inherently unequal.” John F. Kennedy did the same five years later to help black students trying to enter Ole Miss.

Today’s clash in Minnesota over federal authority is not unlike earlier federal clashes.

There the anti-ICE forces believe they can nullify the enforcement of U.S. immigration law and get ICE to abandon their city.

Immigration law is purely federal. That gives the federal government the right to enforce it, free of obstruction by the states. It leaves President Trump, writes Mr. McGurn, “in the same position constitutionally as those who wanted to enforce Brown upon a recalcitrant South.”