Tim Steller's column: Code red for Tucson, blue cities to resist federal assault

On Thursday afternoon, there was another false alarm.

Word circulated among Tucson activists that immigration agents were gathering at Pima Community College’s Desert Vista campus, apparently preparing for an operation.

People went to the scene. The Star sent journalists.

As it turned out, these were officers from Arizona’s Department of Public Safety, preparing to serve a warrant nearby. The routine work of law enforcement goes on, and that's good.

This sort of scene has played out often in Tucson over the year since President Trump took office. Activists respond in crisis mode to reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, only to find that either the incident is over or didn't involve immigration agents. 

I’ve worried at times that activists would protest an operation that we might all agree is necessary: The arrest of a rapist, let’s say, who is in the country illegally. In my mind, that could undermine public opinion of the protests, because we all want such people arrested. And public opinion, of course, is critical.

In fact, even Pima County Attorney Laura Conover, a progressive Democrat, tried to make a similar distinction in a video posted Dec. 16. She said Tucson had experienced two immigration raids that were the result of long-term investigations in recent weeks, that she and Tucson Police Chief Chad Kasmar had been informed of them, and that they were not the feared "ICE sweeps". 

There is an “apples and oranges” difference, Conover said, between long-term investigations undergirded by judicial warrants, and “ICE sweeps” — those operations we’ve seen in cities like Chicago without a specific target. 

“Apples and oranges," Conover said, gesturing to her left and right. "Sweeps, and lawfully authorized searches."

But I’m starting to agree with the activists I’ve interviewed who argue that blanket resistance is the only viable answer to federal immigration actions, not some effort to weed out the legitimate ones. It’s too bad for hard-working agents in respectable agencies like Homeland Security Investigations, which led the Tucson raids, that their agency is part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but so it goes. 

Federal agents are being used as the tip of the spear in a broader Trump administration assault on Democrat-run cities and states. The federal government is making cities that vote like Tucson suffer for the sin of viewing the world differently than the president and his allies do. 

Misusing government power

The evidence for this campaign of retribution against American citizens who have opposed Trump is in plain view.

Recently, Trump has been targeting Colorado, a state that voted against him three consecutive times, for keeping in prison a political ally, Tina Peters. Trump has pardoned her and demanded her release, but she is imprisoned for election-related crimes under state law, so a president cannot free her. And Colorado’s governor has refused so far.

The result? Trump and his administration have been using the available levers of federal power to exact retribution on Colorado. Among them:

— Withholding federal childcare assistance and food aid money;

— Vetoing a bill funding a water pipeline project for southeastern Colorado;

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— Dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder;

— Rejecting disaster relief for Colorado counties hit by floods and fires.

This is the context in which people should view the massive deployment of federal immigration agents to Minnesota, another state that has never voted for Trump. It’s also the state where George Floyd was killed, setting off nationwide protests and riots in Trump’s first term, and the home state of Gov. Tim Walz, the vice presidential candidate Trump and J.D. Vance defeated in 2024.

Finally, it’s the home of around 80,000 people of Somali descent, who have become the target of the administration’s anti-immigrant campaign in this mid-term election year. Remember the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio in 2024? This year's black immigrant targets are the Minnesota Somalis.

So it’s not surprising, given the administration’s penchant for using government power to punish Americans who don’t support them, that chaos erupted during an immigration action Wednesday in Minneapolis, the city where I grew up. I'm not talking here about the killing of a woman observing ICE activities from her car Wednesday morning in Minneapolis. 

On Wednesday afternoon, three miles away, U.S. Border Patrol agents swarmed onto the grounds of Roosevelt High School at dismissal for unknown reasons, pushing staff members and pepper-spraying students. One staff member reported he told a Border Patrol agent to leave school grounds, and the agent stepped up, bumped him, then accused the staff member of pushing him, tackling the staff member in the wet snow.

“They don’t care. They’re just animals,” the school official told Minnesota Public Radio. “I’ve never seen people behave like this.”

Jesse Ventura, a graduate of Roosevelt High School as well as a former Minnesota governor, pro wrestler and Navy SEAL, compared the paramilitary assault on his hometown to the behavior of dictatorial governments he's seen in Southeast Asia. 

Standing outside the school, he said: “We’re a Third World country now."

Federal agents are the paid agitators

That ICE killing of Renee Good carries many lessons for Tucson protesters. One that bears noting is that if you threaten the political viability of the Trump administration and its campaign against blue America, you will be destroyed, even posthumously as a victim of federal violence. You will be stereotyped, defamed and dehumanized by the highest officials in the United States government.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a domestic terrorist. 

Vice President J.D. Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”

President Trump called her a “paid agitator.”

Which is ironic, in light of incidents that have occurred in blue cities around the country, among them Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and now Minneapolis. In many cases, as in the incident at Roosevelt High School, the federal agents are the real paid agitators, using their impunity to incite conflict. They’re engaged in a vast, ongoing federal riot around the country, disturbing the peace of cities and states Trump did not win.

News reports last week said Phoenix is the next Democrat-led city in the barrel of an ICE operation. It’s unclear if Tucson will also be targeted for sweeps by ICE or Border Patrol, which has thousands of agents in Southern Arizona. But it’s understandable that people don’t distinguish between the apples and oranges of ICE sweeps or targeted searches and arrests.

All these federal agents are part of something much bigger. The apparatus of the federal government is being deployed against the heartland of America — its cities. Places like Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City — even little Tucson —  are still the economic and cultural engines of America. 

Republicans have often argued that blue cities are badly governed, and in some cases, they've been correct. Tucson is certainly underperforming now. But we have a right to govern ourselves differently and live differently, to work out our own problems, without the jackboots and reckless gunplay of the federal government being deployed against us. We have a right to our flaws.

So I don’t begrudge anybody their knee-jerk responses to apparent federal agents assembling in our neighborhoods, city or state. Protesting peacefully and observing them is brave, especially now. The rights to free speech and assembly remain protected by the First Amendment, but they wither if we don’t use them, even if we sometimes overreact or respond to false alarms.