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?
Larry and the rest of our area law enforcement (Bucks, Montco and Delco), along with the state house of our neighbor, New Jersey-stan, provide this bravado lip service grandstanding to feed their campaign donors red meat. They’ll use the courts to gum up the good work of our federal immigration forces until, eventually, they lose at the Supreme Court. They continue to burn taxpayer funds with frivolity, and they see any delay in justice as a win. Their support of illegal aliens over the US citizen is abhorrent.
During President Barack Obama’s administration (2009–2016), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported more than 3.1 million people, according to data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). His total is the highest of any U.S. president, so far. Obama had a peak of 407,000 to 438,000 deportations in 2013 alone.
It seems, maybe, maybe… +/- 540,000 people have been deported by ICE since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025 for his second term, according to the Brookings Institution and Wikipedia. Discrepancies exist across different sources (intentionally to hide the real numbers?) The variation from all of these different sources is because of a) new and differing definitions (e.g., inclusion of CBP actions or “self-deportations”), b) lack of transparent data, and c) political framing, making precise consensus difficult… which is what the international oligarchs actually want. The international oligarchs don’t care about the national interest of the US. They want to create confusion around it all so they can keep their slaves and depress wages:
1. DHS claimed over 622,000 to 700,000 total deportations by early 2026.
2. The White House stated more than 605,000 illegal aliens were deported, with an additional 1.9 million “self-deported” (an impossible number to prove.) Yet Trump administration also made it cheaper to hire migrant farmworkers on temporary visas under the H-2A program. Hourly rates for workers on H-2A visas have been lowered by $1–$7 depending on the state, with farmers now being allowed to calculate housing as part of the workers’ compensation. (Trump admin also suggested the Epstein files “self-deported” but that turned out to be wishful thinking, and the “self-deported” slave labor that depresses wages is also probably just wishful thinking.)
3. TRAC data reported only about 290,603 ICE removals through FY 2026, further highlighting inconsistencies in reporting. PolitiFact (they usually twist the truth so in fairness to Trump Admin it is probably more) cited around 350,000 deportations since January 2025, excluding border encounters.
The confusion is being pushed on purpose, everywhere. For example, look at the behavior in various State legislatures like Pennsylvania: PA House Democrats withdrew a resolution intended to recognize March 2026 as “National Women’s Month” (HR 390) on March 24, 2026, after a Republican lawmaker introduced an amendment to define “woman” based on biological sex. PA House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D-Philadelphia) paused following the amendment submission, and announced the resolution was “temporarily over” effectively shelving the measure. Our society can’t seem to agree on basic definitions, which is not an organic accident but done very intentionally, and it reminds me of the Tower of Babel bible story. We have Google translate but we can’t talk to each other anymore. We have a Godless society, run by oligarch atheists that aren’t going to allow their slave labor to disappear without a focused and sustained fight (which Trump Admin is not actually providing), and the middle class is sleepwalking while society falls apart and the few that are paying attention are arguing about definitions.