in History, Illegal immigration, Minnesota, Tim Walz
The resistance to the enforcement of immigration law by state and local authorities bears just about all the hallmarks of the resistance to desegregation by George Wallace and others who adhered to the doctrine of “massive resistance.” It’s a point John, Bill, and I have each made in our own way. I traced the roots back to the Confederacy in “Inside the battle of the Twin Cities.”
Last week Wall Street Journal Main Street columnist Bill McGurn took a look at legal issues raised by the January 18 anti-ICE Cities Church riot in Saint Paul. Now in this week’s column he turns to the doctrine of massive resistance to the enforcement of immigration law promulgated by the state and local authorities in “Minnesota Burning.” He takes as his theme the line that runs from George Wallace to Tim Walz. He writes:
The battle between federal agents trying to enforce the law and Minnesota state officials working to ensure that it can’t be enforced has a more immediate precedent that might surprise Gov. Walz and the rest of Minnesota’s ICE resisters.
It dates to 1964, when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy dispatched the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Mississippi to find three young civil-rights activists who had gone missing. Their bodies were discovered six weeks later beneath an earthen dam. The men had been killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the local sheriff’s office. The film “Mississippi Burning,” starring Gene Hackman, was loosely based on this story.
The FBI’s lead investigator was Joe Sullivan, whom Tom Clancy called “the greatest lawman America ever produced.” Sullivan was also a colleague of my father, an FBI agent. Sullivan once told me that he’d discovered that police departments and other government institutions in Mississippi were infested with Klansmen. They were, he said, a “state within a state,” operating to nullify federal law and deprive African-Americans of their rights.
Isn’t the nullification of federal law what’s happening in Minnesota today? The attacks on ICE may be cloaked in righteousness, but it’s self-righteousness.
The historical ironies abound. Today the activists operating to force ICE to leave have zero appreciation that their defiance of federal authority puts them in the same position as George Wallace and like-minded Southern sheriffs and governors.
In 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower had to invoke the Insurrection Act to enforce federal court orders to integrate Little Rock Central High School after the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregated schools were “inherently unequal.” John F. Kennedy did the same five years later to help black students trying to enter Ole Miss.
JFK did so again in 1963 at the University of Alabama. There Gov. Wallace infamously stood in the university’s doorway to prevent two black students from matriculating.
Today the same sort of clash over federal authority is playing out on the streets of Minneapolis. There the anti-ICE forces believe they can nullify the enforcement of U.S. immigration law and get ICE to abandon their city.
McGurn turns to Professor John Yoo:
“Walz and Frey have put themselves in the same constitutional camp as Bull Connor and the Southerners who led the ‘massive resistance’—as they called it then—campaign to Brown v. Board of Education,” says John Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor who served in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration. “The segregationists denied that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution gave the national government the right to finally interpret and execute federal law.
“Regardless of the policy merits of the immigration enforcement policy,” he says, “there is no doubt that immigration law is purely federal, that it gives the federal government the right to enforce it free of obstruction by the states. It leaves Trump in the same position constitutionally as those who wanted to enforce Brown upon a recalcitrant South.”
George Wallace vowed “segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever.” If only Walz were as candid as Wallace, the anti-ICE resistance could also adapt his vow to their own uses: “illegal immigration today…illegal immigration tomorrow…illegal immigration forever.”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/02/rhymes-with-segregation.php
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