Editors at National Review Online highlight one indefensible form of political violence.
This week featured yet another violent attack on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On Wednesday morning, three detainees of ICE were shot in an attack that appears to have targeted Dallas-based ICE agents. One of the detainees died, and the others are in critical condition. The suspect, identified as Joshua Jahn, was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Law enforcement relayed that, like the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, the shooter in Dallas inscribed political messages on the bullets or their casings. The messages were “anti-ICE” in nature.
This has to stop. It’s part of a very disturbing trend.
In July, eleven left-wing agitators ambushed an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, opening fire on agents and shooting one in the neck. In Portland, Ore., an incendiary device was thrown at officers. That same month, another attacker in McAllen, Texas, shot two police officers and a Border Patrol employee, sending them to the hospital. An ICE facility in Washington suffered an arson attack. The left has tried to popularize a push to unmask and dox ICE agents.
This anti-ICE movement has been implicitly cheered on by elected Democrats who adopted a party line of invoking fascism when talking about immigration enforcement. “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” said Tim Walz at a May commencement address. “When you compare the old films of the Gestapo grabbing people off the streets of Poland,” opined Congressman Stephen Lynch, “and you compare them to those nondescript thugs who grabbed that graduate student, it does look like a Gestapo operation.” Other commentators have called ICE Trump’s Praetorian Guard.
The rhetoric that ICE is a lawless or personal force wielded by the president against enemies is not just overheated nonsense — it is hypocritical. All but five Democratic senators voted for a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget recently.
