ICE is the new Gestapo. The Trump administration is worse than the Nazis. That, we are told, is the new moral consensus of the enlightened left, repeated by late-night “comics,” legacy media, and blue-check pundits until it hardens into “fact.” Never mind that it is a grotesque trivialization of actual Nazi crimes and an outright slander of Americans tasked with the difficult job of enforcing democratically enacted laws. What matters is the narrative, not the truth.
Look at where much of this latest wave of outrage began: Minnesota. The same Minnesota that would very much like you to stop talking about billions of dollars in welfare and Medicaid fraud while political figures from that state somehow see their fortunes skyrocket. We’re supposed to ignore the spectacle of a congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, whose net worth reportedly went, in little over a year, from under six figures to approximately $30 million, while her husband reportedly sits atop as much as $60 billion in managed assets (AUM), according to his company’s website. Just a coincidence, we’re told. Don’t look behind the curtain, look at ICE instead.
Meanwhile, the supposed “fascists” in the Trump administration were, in reality, trying to clean up only the most dangerous edges of a broken immigration system. Their stated priority was not the family that spent a decade saving to navigate our complicated legal channels, but the criminals who broke our laws repeatedly, first by entering illegally, then by committing other crimes here or having committed them abroad. Many of Trump’s own supporters felt he was only addressing a fraction of the problem, focusing on “the worst of the worst” while the broader system remained in shambles.
That system deteriorated under Joe Biden to levels never before seen. We now have unknown millions — tens of millions — who slipped across the border undetected, on top of millions more who walked in the front door with the help of a smartphone app, uttered the magic word “asylum,” and were waved through with scant investigation into whether their claims were legitimate.
That smartphone app, by the way, the Biden-created CPB One app, was shut down on day one of President Trump’s second term.
Many of those migrants who have reached the U.S. are certainly hardworking people seeking a better life. Others are members of criminal gangs, or worse. Still others are clearly operatives sent by hostile powers like the Chinese Communist Party, which would have every incentive to seed unvetted, military-age men into a rival nation’s territory.
According to a House Homeland Security report from October 2024, “Not only are more suspected terrorists illegally crossing our borders, but apprehensions of Chinese nationals illegally crossing the border have also increased over 1,000 percent [to more than 60,000] under the Biden-Harris administration compared to FY2017-FY2020. These encounters have included individuals with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army.”
Just last week, a Chinese-linked biolab was raided in Las Vegas (think Wuhan), one of many being investigated around the country right now.
Add in Islamist extremists who have never hidden their dreams of global domination, and you have a mix, the Red-Green Axis, far more complex and dangerous than the sanitized “migrant” label suggests. The Red-Green Axis has been something our Citizens Commission on National Security has been writing and talking about for years.
And this is before we even consider chain migration, Temporary Protected Status, secret flights in the dead of night, and the hundreds of thousands who simply never show up for their distant court dates. As of November 2024, more than 1.4 million people have Final Orders of Removal but remain anyway. Visa overstays — students, tourists, workers — stack on top of that.
All of this happens in a country that already admits roughly a million legal immigrants per year, more than other country in the world, and additionally offers asylum and refugee slots annually. Those who played by the rules, hired attorneys, drained their savings, and waited years are made to look like fools as those who broke in are rewarded with hotel rooms in places like Times Square, generous debit cards, free healthcare, and a network of advocates insisting any attempt at enforcement is “racist.”
Is it any wonder many Americans believe this chaos is not an accident but a strategy? The Cloward-Piven approach — overwhelm the system until it collapses — is no longer a fringe theory when you watch public schools, hospitals, and city budgets buckle under pressure. Add the very obvious political benefit to the left of importing millions of future voters dependent on government largesse, and you have a recipe for permanent one-party rule dressed up as compassion. Another issue is that those here illegally are often counted as part of the U.S. population, affecting congressional redistricting and distribution of benefits from the federal government.
To sustain this, the left must muddy the water linguistically. Critics of lawless borders are smeared as “anti-immigrant” even though most Americans remain firmly pro-immigration if it is legal, limited, and orderly. ICE agents enforcing the laws Congress passed are smeared as stormtroopers. Any attempt to distinguish between legal and illegal, citizen and non-citizen, order and chaos, becomes “hate.”
And who funds and organizes the protests that keep this moral panic alive? A familiar cast of characters: billionaire ideologues like George Soros, hard-left technocrats like Neville Singham, CCP-linked entities, Islamist pressure groups like CAIR, and assorted radical NGOs. Some of the people in the streets are true believers; others are simply paid activists. Many more are useful idiots who take their cues from CNN, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, The View, and Rachel Maddow. A small but noisy subset would genuinely prefer to live under a communist or Islamist regime, so long as their tribe is in charge.
Enter Alex Pretti, the cause of the week. “Pretti Good,” say the signs and social media slogans. Two people are shot and killed by federal officers in Minneapolis, and the narrative is pre-written: unarmed, peaceful protesters gunned down by Nazi-like feds. But what do you expect to happen when someone shows up to a demonstration with a loaded gun and two extra magazines — roughly 50 rounds — after already being on ICE and CBP’s radar for aggressive behavior? Pretti had attacked government vehicles days earlier, kicking out parking lights on a federal SUV and resisting efforts to de-escalate. He should have been arrested and charged then. If that had happened, he might still be alive.
Instead, he continued his work with shadowy groups that “monitor” and interfere with lawful enforcement operations, in a city and state where political leaders have signaled that the real enemy is not gangs or cartels but federal agents. In that environment, federal officers face a split-second choice when confronted by an armed man with a record of aggression. If they act and someone dies, they are fascists. If they hesitate and an officer or bystander is killed, they are incompetent. Either way, the narrative writers win.
All of this plays out against the backdrop of Minnesota’s own scandals: welfare and Medicaid fraud estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, allegedly siphoned from hardworking taxpayers and funneled into patronage networks and political payoffs. Governors, mayors, and members of Congress scramble to distance themselves from the mess, even as the money trail circles closer to their inner circles. Yet in the next breath, they and their media allies lecture the rest of us about morality, democracy, and human rights, while likening their political opponents to Nazis and cheering on those who actively undermine the rule of law.
Alex Pretti is less an individual martyr than a symptom. A symptom of a political culture that rewards lawlessness, demonizes enforcement, and lies shamelessly about both. A culture that will call ICE “Gestapo” while looking the other way at fraud, corruption, and the deliberate dismantling of the nation’s borders. And a culture that seems very comfortable playing with fire, so long as someone else pays the price when it finally burns out of control.
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
