https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/02/lew-rockwell/trump-immigration-and-ice/

Trump, Immigration, and ICE

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

February 2, 2026

Do illegal immigrants have the right to stay in America, or can they be deported? Of course, they do not have such a right. Furthermore, as Brion McClanahan of the Abbeville Institute has pointed out, the Supreme Court has in numerous cases ruled that control of immigration is a federal matter, not one under state jurisdiction. You can argue that these precedents are wrong, but that is the law as it exists today. That being so, if “progressive” Governors like Tim Walz of Minnesota oppose the removal of illegal immigrants, they cannot block immigration enforcement within their state. They have no obligation to use state officials to help ICE agents, and if demonstrators against ICE attack agents or try by force to free those they take into ICE custody, state officials must arrest them.

For some conservatives, that is the end of the matter: the demonstrators are a raging mob, who have only themselves to blame if some of them are injured or killed Thus, writing in The Spectator, Dan McCarthy, says: “The Border Patrol officer or officers who shot [Alex]Pretti might have been wrong. But the presumptions of civilization are on law enforcement’s side. If there is violence between officers and someone else, officers have the superior right to use force. The attempt to negate laws through mob actions and systematic harassment campaigns – which is what the anti-ICE activists have been conducting – are wrong in themselves, whether or not the laws are entirely right. This is because, as everyone knows, America is not a totalitarian society, elections do matter and immigration enforcement is necessary for any country. It’s a basic form of the rule of law; it is not fascism.”

I believe that this view is entirely mistaken. The ICE agents have acted in an arbitrary and violent way, inimical to the rule of law, as if they were free to injure or even kill anybody who gets in their way. Jim Bovard aptly compares the killing of Alex Pretti to the killing of Vikki Weaver at Ruby Ridge by an FBI sniper. He says: “On Saturday, federal agents in Minneapolis killed protester Alex Pretti, shooting him in the back 10 times after they had taken away the pistol he legally carried. White House Deputy Chief Stephen Miller quickly settled the issue: ‘A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.’ A few hours after Pretti was killed, I commented on Twitter X: ‘How many of the Trump supporters cheering the killing of the Minneapolis demonstrator today would also cheer for the FBI sniper killing Vicki Weaver in her cabin door at Ruby Ridge in 1992?’ This outraged plenty of Trump supporters but the parallels between the federal killings in 1992 and on Saturday are striking. Trump supporters insisted there was no comparison between Pretti’s death and Vicki Weaver because Weaver was unarmed. But Vicki Weaver had a .380 gun on her side under her sweater when the FBI sniper blew her head off as she was holding her 10-month-old baby. Neither she nor Pretti was brandishing before getting shot to death by the feds.

“Trump officials justified killing Pretti because he had a pistol—even though vast numbers of conservatives have brought pistols and rifles to protests in recent years. Similarly, the Rule of Engagement for FBI snipers was ‘any armed male adult observed in the vicinity of the Weaver cabin could and should be killed.’ In a federal appeals court ruling, Judge Alex Kozinski denounced that rule as a new ‘James Bond Agent 007 standard for the use of deadly force’ against American citizens.

“After Pretti was shot more than ten times, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said he was a ‘domestic terrorist’ who sought ‘to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.’ Noem announced that Pretti ‘approached Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. The officers attempted to disarm this individual, but the suspect reacted violently.” Videos of the killing show that Pretti had a cell phone in his hand, not a gun, before federal agents knocked him down and began beating and pistol-whipping him. Trump’s DHS considers videotaping agents to be the equivalent of a hostile attack that justifies a violent federal response. . .Some Trump supporters declared that Pretti deserved his fate because he intentionally chose to place himself in deadly peril by purportedly assaulting federal agents. In both the Minneapolis and Ruby Ridge cases, federal officials claimed a right to preemptively kill their targets and then cover-up the killings.