From the Editors: ICE out? Think again.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey delighted his far-left supporters when he said at a press conference earlier this year that ICE agents should “get the f— out of Minneapolis.” Left-wing politicians in Philadelphia have echoed this cry, even naming their proposed legislation the ICE OUT Act, an act of political backronyming that’s up there with Larry Krasner’s “FAFO coalition.”
(As an aside, whatever political consultant told Democrats they need to use profanity more to make their scripted statements feel spontaneous and heartfelt needs to be fired. No one was asking for this, it’s just childish.)
But however much these activists and politicians want to see ICE removed from their towns, they need to face facts: It’s not going to happen.
Since the beginning of the republic, political power has been divided between the federal government and the states. And it only took a few years after the Constitution was enacted before some people started floating the idea that some federal power or other should apply to their state because the people there don’t like it.
Some of the first to attempt this were small-government conservatives in the South. Led secretly by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, they issued the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in 1798, stating that the federal Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional and would not be enforced in their states. A few years later, Federalists in New England used the same language to proclaim that the federal Embargo Act of 1807 was unconstitutional and would not be enforced in their states.
That must have been a shock to the main proponents of the Embargo Act — Jefferson and Madison — but that is the nature of neutral principles: they apply equally against all sides. Or, in this case, they don’t apply, because all of these remonstrances against the federal government failed. Federal laws were enforced until Congress decided to repeal them.
John C. Calhoun and the Nullifiers tried the same move against the tariff of 1828, which was deeply unpopular in the South. Abolitionists tried it against the Fugitive Slave Act in the 1850s, which was even more unpopular in the North. And of course, after the Civil War, Southern states tried to ignore federal civil rights law for a century, successfully at first, but ultimately they failed like the rest.
Whether you think a law is good or bad is less relevant to this debate than whether the Constitution vests that power in the federal government. If it does — as is certainly the case with immigration and customs enforcement — then the only forum to change that law is in Congress, not the state or local governments. That does happen — many of the laws cited above were repealed eventually — but that takes political persuasion at the federal level, not pompous grandstanding in the states.
That’s a lesson Krasner is determined not to learn. After all of the big talk about arresting federal agents (total arrests: zero) he now is raising just as big a fuss about the ICE deployment to Philadelphia’s airport. But even in the half of the airport that falls within the city limits, Krasner has no cause to arrest any federal official, even if he had the power to do so — which he doesn’t. Of course, that won’t stop him from rushing toward the cameras as usual.
Constitutional issues aside, it’s worth noting that the ICE deployment at Philadelphia International Airport has gone perfectly fine so far. Even our friends at the local paper of record were compelled to admit that nothing untoward happened and the security process went just fine. That’s because people know how to behave at the airport and the lone protester the Inquirer was able to find peacefully held his sign and let agents go about their business.
There’s a lesson in that. Will Larry Krasner and other far-left agitators learn it?
