The chaos erupting in Minneapolis isn’t an organic protest movement, and it certainly isn’t spontaneous.
It’s coordinated. It’s calculated. And it’s deadly.
Ordinary Americans are being played — manipulated into dangerous confrontationsby politicians and rabble-rousing activists.
The indoctrination has convinced them that federal immigration law is illegitimate, that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have no authority to operate, and that physically confronting federal officers is not only justified, but moral.
It’s a weaponized form of Trump Derangement Syndrome — and federal prosecutors should call it what it is: criminal conspiracy.
After federal courts in September upheld ICE’s authority to make detentive stops, the opposition didn’t accept the ruling.
They escalated, moving from rhetoric to coordinated action.
What’s followed, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, no longer looks like civil disobedience, but like a concerted effort to obstruct federal law enforcement through misinformation, agitation and street-level interference.
Every bloody confrontation is the foreseeable result of deliberate instruction and escalation.
The activist infrastructure behind this effort matters.
Local leaders like Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey didn’t merely criticize President Donald Trump’s policies.
They systematically delegitimized federal authority by portraying ICE’s lawful acts as an invasion — knowing full well that federal immigration enforcement is exclusive, constitutional and mandatory.
Their statements ran in parallel with activist messaging, reinforcing the same false claims and producing predictable, dangerous results.
“ICE watch” operations run through nonprofits and allied groups are organizing alerts, neighborhood monitoring and coordinated resistance.
Indivisible Twin Cities, which has financial ties with leftist billionaire George Soros, is part of the “ICE watch” effort in Minneapolis, The Post has reported.
So is Defend the 612, a group funded by a host of progressive nonprofits, according to the Daily Signal.
They’re raising money, training participants and synchronizing their tactics.
You don’t need matching jackets to have a conspiracy under the law; you need agreement, purpose and acts in furtherance.
That’s what the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, is for.
When elected officials make false claims while aligned activist groups organize crowds to provoke obstruction of federal law, the line between protest and conspiracy collapses.
Immigration law is federal law. Under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, no city, governor or local official has the authority to nullify it.
When leaders claim otherwise, they aren’t expressing opinions, but knowingly misrepresenting the law.
And those lies predictably produce violence.
For the Democratic politicians behind this madness, the hypocrisy is staggering: Their party spent years going full-bore against Jan. 6 protesters.
Wielding wall-to-wall outrage, they professed absolute moral certainty that political belief is no defense to obstructing federal authority — and they jailed people up and down the chain to prove it.
Turns out that rule is still in effect.
Under federal law, obstructing justice and assaulting or threatening federal officers is a crime.
Coordinating efforts to do so raises even more serious exposure.
Every snowball thrown at a federal officer is a crime potentially punishable by prison time — and everyone who encouraged it is complicit.
And all this uproar is based upon a fantasy so detached from reality it borders on parody: that immigration law somehow expired because it went unenforced; that violating it long enough transmutes illegality into virtue; and that deportation — of convicted criminals or apparently anyone at all — is immoral by definition.
There is no statute of limitations on removability. There is no amnesty by neglect.
No country in history has ever functioned without border enforcement — and enforcing the law is not radical or cruel, but the bare minimum of governance.
The most tragic part is watching people fall for it, believing that they’re heroes on the “right side of history.”
In reality, they’re calculated casualties in a political war.
The people who fed them these lies aren’t standing where they stand when the arrests are made, when the charges are filed, and when the consequences arrive.
Accountability must move upstream: Not just for those breaking the law in the streets, but for the officials who lied to them, coordinated the pressure campaign and knowingly sent them into harm’s way.
If these leaders truly believed in change, they’d tell the truth: Laws are made in Congress, not nullified in the streets through criminal activity.
Yet they choose deception, because outrage mobilizes faster than honesty.
The anti-ICE movement isn’t resistance. It’s exploitation.
And it’s looking an awful lot like a deliberate conspiracy.
Andrew Cherkasky (@CherkaskyLaw) and Katie Cherkasky (@CherkaskyKatie) are military veterans, former federal prosecutors and current criminal defense attorneys.
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