Even after 20 years in power, Minnesota’s Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar has not had enough. This winter, she announced she is leaving her Senate digs. But rather than start wrapping up her professional life like non-criminally insane people do at her age, she’s decided instead to make a run for the Governor’s mansion on Summit Avenue in St. Paul. I would bet every cent I have that a second presidential run will follow shortly in 2032 or 2036 when she is 71-75 years old. Typically, the prospect of more Klobuchar would elicit little more than numbness in yours truly. At her core, the senator is a pretty boring centrist who isn’t going to really improve people’s lives all that much. Yet current events have changed matters. Beginning in Dec., Trump’s vicious immigration crackdown (dubbed “Operation Metro Surge”) has cut a bloody swath across our state, with federal immigration agents killing some residents and traumatizing countless more. Klobuchar’s response to the operation has been totally insufficient, making her continued political ambitions not just uninspiring but unacceptable.

Back in January, Klobuchar went on NPR to talk about what must be done with ICE. At the time, Operation Metro Surge had already wreaked significant havoc throughout the Twin Cities and beyond. Businesses had shuttered. Immigrant communities had gone underground. And scores of people had been illegally attacked, assaulted and detained by the agency. Just a few days before her appearance, VA nurse Alex Pretti had been brutally murdered by ICE. It was a horrifying act of violence that came on the heels of Renée Good’s equally repulsive slaying. In response, Democrats had just begun threatening to withhold DHS funding to compel reform (which they have now followed through on), and Klobuchar was there to detail what those demands included. ICE officers, the senator said, needed things like “months and months of training” rather than the 47 days they currently receive. She also urged that ICE needed to “get rid of [their] masks” and its agents must wear “mandatory body cameras”¹ when out in the field.

Klobuchar’s statements were boneheaded even for her. Good’s and Pretti’s killers were already seasoned veterans of ICE and CBP, making it dubious how much more training would have helped prevent their tragic deaths. The murders were also already captured on video from myriad angles, which suggests that adding another in the form of a bodycam would not have deterred agent aggression.

These proposals are also misguided because they assume we are still in a business-as-usual environment. But the times in which we find ourselves are anything but. The second Trump administration has been increasingly autocratic throughout the past year and signaled its unwillingness to abide by limitations on its power. This is especially true of ICE. On January 24, 2025, for instance, Trump summarily fired 17 inspectors general, including those at the Pentagon, as well as the departments of State, HUD, Veterans Affairs and Interior. He did not fire Joseph V. Cuffari, the IG of ICE’s parent agency, Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS). Cuffari is a first-term Trump appointee who has been widely seen as lax about accountability and reporting. Little more than two months later, the administration deported Venezuelan migrants even after a federal judge ordered them to halt the removals.

More recently during Metro Surge, a Minnesota judge remarked how ICE has “disobeyed more judicial directives in January [of 2026] alone than ‘some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.'”² Later in February, it was reported how federal courts had already ruled more than 4,400 times that ICE detained people unlawfully, and yet, the agency kept detaining people anyway.³ In some cases, judges even ordered specific people to be freed from custody, but the agency either ignored the orders or transferred people to different detention centers to evade compliance.⁴

The administration has been able to successfully evade limitations by exploiting the basic structure of how our system of government is set up. As everyone knows from their 8th or 9th grade civics lessons, while the legislature has a pen to write the laws, the executive has the guns to enforce them. And at the end of the day, it is only the guns that matter when it comes to which laws actually get followed. The legislature then can tweak the system as much as it wants, if the Executive Branch declines to implement them, the legislature is shit out of luck unless they want to consider impeachment. The only reason a system like this has limped along for 250 years is because the people who have occupied the presidency have been (mostly) willing to go along with it and dutifully execute their constitutional authorities. Trump and his acolytes have demonstrated that this no longer needs to be the case, and in doing so, have established a blueprint for other aspiring strongmen or women to follow.

Any serious response to ICE would need to reckon with how this Pandora’s box is now open. It would need to treat the agency not as a street-level issue perpetrated by bad actors that the overarching political system can solve. Instead, it must grapple with the fact that the system itself is the issue. It can do this by tackling the long-running problem of our imperial presidency. For decades now, Congress has been writing laws that give wide latitude to the presidency over issues like immigration. Removing some of those powers would be a good place to start in actually reining in ICE. Whether that be by abolishing the agency or moving it out from under direct control of the Executive Branch, an effective response would be one that goes after the source of the ICE problem rather than its associated symptoms. Let’s face it. If your toddler is playing with a gun you keep in the home, you don’t put the safety on and then give it back to them. Neither should you attempt to merely impose regulations on ICE and then turn it back over to people clearly unfit to wield it. In both cases, it is far safer just to take the damn thing away.

Even a less dramatic reaction like repealing 40 U.S.C. § 1315 would be preferable to the reforms offered up by Klobuchar. 40 U.S.C. § 1315 was the legal authority the first Trump administration used to send ICE into Portland to beat on George Floyd protestors back in 2020 in a disturbing prelude to Metro Surge. The law stipulates that the DHS Secretary can “designate employees of the Department of Homeland Security […] as officers and agents for duty in connection with the protection of property owned or occupied by the Federal Government.”⁵ While the law is subject to judicial review, it rewards the executive with massive authority to deploy forces when and where they choose and give them the ability to carry firearms, conduct investigations and serve warrants. All that an invaded community can really do in response is wait for the courts to (hopefully) push back. By repealing it, Democrats like Klobuchar wouldn’t have to worry so much about whether ICE is going to comply with the law while on American streets, as they would have made it far more difficult for them to be on the streets in the first place.

Klobuchar and other centrist Democrats have never been good at this type of thing, however. They are strident institutionalists and always seek to put a band-aid on systems that are, in fact, at risk of sepsis and organ failure. Almost never do they go after the root cause of the problem itself. Throughout my life they’ve done this on countless issues. With healthcare in 2009, they simply shoveled money at consumers to help them get coverage while leaving the parasitic leeches known as private insurers intact. Then in 2021, they did it again with climate change. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) offered numerous subsidies to spark the green energy transition and incentivize consumers to invest in things like electric cars and energy efficient home upgrades. But it barely touched the origin of the environmental crisis and largely maintained our reliance on dirty fossil fuel energy.

Centrists cling to this approach even when the times call for them to abandon it. That was true during the fight to pass the Affordable Care Act, as healthcare costs had spiraled out of control even back in 2009. It was also true during the battle over the IRA, as climate change had already devastated lives and communities from coast-to-coast. And it is true now with ICE’s activity on Minnesota, whose adverse effects have been more dramatically immediate.

During this horrible episode in our state’s history, the state’s small businesses have been demolished, losing up to $81 million in revenue in January alone.⁶ 76K people also faced food insecurity during that month.⁷ Additionally, “schools across the state—from Minneapolis and Saint Paul to metro-area suburbs to Greater Minnesota communities—[…] reported sharply reduced attendance”⁸ and nearly 9K children now need increased mental health support.⁹ Overall, Minneapolis estimates ICE has caused “at least $203.1 million in community and economic impact, including losses to workers, businesses, food and housing stability, and mental health services.”¹⁰ This is a devastating blow that no state can really weather and requires an urgent and comprehensive response—not a milquetoast or incremental one. Until Klobuchar and others like her are ready to get serious and use all available means to stop the agency and prevent this from happening again, we must look elsewhere for our next crop of leaders.

Recently, we saw exactly who that could look like. On January 9th, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura visited his alma mater, Roosevelt High School, in South Minneapolis. He was there to show support for the school’s students who had been roughed up by ICE creeps just the day before. Standing blocks from where Renée Good was shot dead on January 7th, Ventura gave an incensed and unequivocal statement to the press, tearing into Trump, ICE and Operation Metro Surge. “I just talked to everyone in there and told them how proud I was of them standing up to the draft dodging coward’s gestapo,” he began in his typically bellicose and hilarious way, before continuing. “We have a system here. It’s called the Constitution. And we have a party, the Republican Party, that doesn’t seem to want to abide by the Constitution. January 6th is a prime example of that. And now they’re all free and in charge.” Finally and most importantly, he said this: “You want to know something. I’ll give you a quote. We’re a third world country now.”

Due to Ventura’s 9/11 trutherism, it has become all too easy to dismiss statements like these as wild talk from a fringe crank. But I would argue that his interview paints him as a far more serious statesman than “moderate” representatives like Klobuchar. Ventura at least was able to accurately diagnosis what ICE’s invasion of Minnesota represents. He conveyed how it is an indicator of a systemic problem and a signal that the country has now moved into a state of terminal decline. If Ventura was to return to political office, either as Minnesota’s governor or by gaining national office (he has hinted at both), we of course don’t know if he would propose appropriately systemic responses. But his ability to at least be honest about the situation we’re facing and accurately diagnosis its gravity was deeply refreshing compared to Klobuchar and the rest of her centrist cohorts. Despite wanting to continue ruling the nation, these people have time and time again been unable to substantively address its many issues. Their pathological obsession with trying to prop up failing systems rather than sweep them away has created great suffering. With ICE, that pattern is now repeating itself, just in a more accelerated fashion. They cannot speak with the same clarity of purpose as Ventura, much less offer solutions remotely proportionate to the threat ICE continues to pose. And after the destruction the agency has left in its wake in Minnesota, that is a mentality we can frankly no longer afford.

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1. Sen. Klobuchar says Democrats are united on ICE reform demands : NPR
   
2. Judge in Minnesota Says ICE Has Violated Nearly 100 Court Orders – The New York Times
   
3. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-removes-hundreds-alleged-venezuelan-gang-members-under-now-blocked-authority-2025-03-16/
   
4. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/courts-have-ruled-4400-times-that-ice-jailed-people-illegally-it-hasnt-stopped-2026-02-14/
   
5. 40 U.S. Code § 1315 – Law enforcement authority of Secretary of Homeland Security for protection of public property | U.S. Code | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute
   
6. How Minneapolis is tallying the cost of ICE; Report says small businesses lost up to $81M in January – KSTP.com 5 Eyewitness News
   
7. As ICE presence slows, immigrant families still face food crisis
   
8. Housing, Jobs and the Local Economy: Operation Metro Surge’s Long-term Impacts to People and Prosperity in Minnesota – McKnight Foundation
   
9. City Federal Response – City of Minneapolis
   
10. Frey calls on feds, state to pay Minneapolis ICE surge costs | MPR News