Critics of Minnesota ICE shooting face uphill climb. Here’s why.

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 09, 2026

I don’t buy either the New York Times’ version or the Trump Administration’s about what happened in the fatal shooting of a Minnesota woman by an ICE agent. This is something the finder of fact—the FBI, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a court of law, whomever—is going to have to figure out.

She may have been swerving away before she was shot, yes. The Times’ video clip gives that impression. I’ve seen other clips that give a different impression.

And here’s the thing. Even if she was swerving away at the last moment, it may not have looked that way to the guy who shot her. Two things can be true at once. It may have been that she really was trying to swerve away and it may be that he legitimately thought she was headed right for him and that his life was in danger. He’s faced vehicular assault before.

Here’s another thing. She should have got out of the car the moment the ICE agent ordered her to do so. He had his hand on her car door and she chose instead to back up. That was stupid.

The anti-ICE protests are not comparable to Martin Luther King’s civil rights protests. Those earlier protests relied on nonviolent civil disobedience. The anti-ICE protesters, by contrast, have already been known to charge ICE agents with their cars. From an editorial in the Waterbury Republican-American today:

ICE agents have an almost unbelievable track record of restraint in the face of violent attacks. In addition to two anti-ICE shootings in Texas—one coordinated ambush and one sniper attack—and an 8,000% increase in death threats against agents, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security noted last year that there had been 99 vehicle-ramming attacks against ICE and Customs and Border Patrol between January and November.

The MLK protesters of the 1960s, like the Operation Rescue pro-life protesters of the 1980s, were trained to go limp when law enforcement officers arrested them. The anti-ICE protesters, by contrast, physically impede law enforcement officers from doing their jobs. Given those tactics, I’m amazed there have not been more incidents like this one that just occurred in Minnesota.

Also, the cause of the anti-ICE protesters has far less moral credibility than the civil rights protests of the ‘60s or the Operation Rescue protests of the ‘80s. If you want to tell me that ICE is going about this the wrong way, that the Trump Administration is at times unnecessarily cruel in how they are going about it, fine. I’m all ears. Pope Leo seemed to imply as much:

And someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.

And our own bishops were so concerned about it that they put out their first “Special Message” in 12 years:

We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status.

But what Pope Leo and the USCCB are saying is not what the anti-ICE movement is saying. The anti-ICE movement is saying that ICE should not enforce our immigration laws at all. The de-facto position of the Democratic Party is that we should have open borders.

That is insane. And that is why our friends on the Catholic Left are unlikely to garner the sympathy for their anti-ICE position that they are hoping for in the wake of this tragic fatality.

I often said last year that “2025 is not 2017.” I meant that many of us are not willing to give to Trump critics in the first year of this Trump Administration the same deference that we gave to them in the first year of the previous one.

For the fact is, Joe Biden happened. I know you won’t take responsibility for him, my “LeftCath” friends, but he happened and he’s on you. Ten million, perhaps twenty million or more, illegals in the space of four years. What did you think would happen? Did you think we would have a normal country after that?

So yes, we have masked federal agents trying to restore order on our streets and a woman dead in Minneapolis. It’s a shame Biden voters brought us to this sorry point.

As I’ve said for a decade, it’s not that I deny many of the Trump faults that you point out, lefty friends. It’s that you, his critics, need to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “What’s so wrong with me that I drove them to Trump?”