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Why Are Anti-ICE Activists Building Borders?

Anti-ICE protesters erect a barrier to block a street in Minneapolis. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)

Daniel McCarthy / @ToryAnarchist

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and a columnist for The Spectator and Creators Syndicate.

Anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement activists in Minneapolis are setting up blockades.

They’re demanding ID from drivers.

In short, they’re setting up their own borders—against America’s laws and law enforcement.

It’s not the first time “protesters” have done this.

Activists inspired by Black Lives Matter seized control over a portion of Seattle six years ago and christened their conquest the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) or “Capitol Hill Occupation Protest” (CHOP).

A black teenager, Antonio Mays Jr., was shot and killed by what the Seattle-area ABC affiliate KOMO News calls “civilian guards who were acting as CHOP security.”

Let that sink in: “Protesters” took over part of a major city and deputized thugs to replace police.

That caused a young man’s death—a crime for which no one has been arrested, though last month a jury held the city of Seattle liable to the tune of $30.5 million for Mays’ slaying.

The city wasn’t enforcing the law—it allowed “protesters” to establish their own law—yet now it’s the city’s taxpayers who are on the hook for what the CHAZ activists brought about.

Whether the scene is Minneapolis today or Seattle six years ago, what’s happening in America’s cities is not just a revolt against law enforcement—it’s an attempt to establish different laws, different borders, and a different kind of government, not through anything like a democratic electoral process but by directly seizing power in the streets.

Why isn’t Mays given the martyr treatment that George Floyd Jr., Renee Good, and Alex Pretti have received?

The latter three died while resisting arrest or interfering with officers of the law—Mays was a victim of what fills the vacuum left by the absence of law and legitimate police.

The anti-ICE activists who are checking IDs and setting up roadblocks in Minneapolis, without a shred of legal authority to do so, have been depicted by sympathizers in the media as harmless citizen activists.Yet even a report by Minnesota Public Radio acknowledges these people are putting others’ lives in danger.

“When streets are blocked, it slows our response and limits access to critical resources,” Minneapolis interim Fire Chief Melanie Rucker told MPR News. “Every second matters when lives are on the line.”

There’s a word for what the protesters in Minneapolis are doing, a word the liberals themselves like to bandy about, but only when they can use it against President Donald Trump.

That word is “insurrection.”

That’s what the CHAZ/CHOP was, and it’s what’s underway in Minneapolis.

The difference between these operations and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters is Jan. 6 would have been much worse had the rioters had the kind of disciplined organization—not to mention supportive press coverage—of the anti-cop and anti-ICE seditionists in Seattle and Minneapolis.

ICE’s liberal critics have a basic problem: They like to claim they have procedural legal objections to the way immigration law is being enforced.

Yet they can hardly say they’re for the rule of law when not only are the “protesters” they champion behaving as a law unto themselves in Minneapolis, but the very cause that unites them is illegal immigration.

Libertarians, unfortunately, are often the biggest hypocrites of all, insisting that they are more principled than conservatives who support Trump, when in fact they are proudly unprincipled where the rule of law is concerned—they don’t believe the nation’s drug laws or immigration laws should be enforced, and they encourage flouting those laws.

Yet without the distinction between citizens and aliens, there can be no popular self-government.

Perversely enough, the street activists in Minneapolis and Seattle acknowledge this when they set up their own internal borders and identity checks—they consider America’s law-enforcement agencies aliens and enemies.

The anti-ICE movement has occasionally tried to wrap itself in the American flag, claiming that resisting federal law enforcement within our country is the same as resisting the redcoats in the American Revolution.

But the point of the American Revolution was to win self-government for Americans—the ability to live under laws of our own making as citizens, not laws made for the benefit of foreign interests.

There is a parallel between the Revolution and what’s taking place in our cities today, but it’s not the comparison the anti-ICE activists want to draw.

They are, after all, trying to overthrow the laws of the United States of America for the benefit of people who are not Americans.

There are indeed various procedural and other arguments that can be made in defense of illegal aliens, but those are matters for the courts and the political system, not activist mobs, to decide.

What the Minneapolis activists are proving is that the immigration fight isn’t just about immigration. It’s about who rules—we, the American people, or they, the activists in the streets?

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