No.Nonsense.

As I write this column and prepare to share it with everyone, I know for a fact that what I am going to say here will not set well with some. But as with everything I write, I try to temper my opinions with some common sense, stepping out of the emotions of the circumstance to see the situation from a different perspective.

Yesterday, a young woman was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. This event has set off a firestorm of controversy not just because a woman was killed but because of the overall opinions of ICE and the actions of the Trump Administration. Those on the left are saying that ICE murdered this woman. Those on the right say the shooting was self-defense and therefore justified. Media on both ends of the spectrum are supporting these opposing narratives.

For me, I’m going to lay out my opinion from a different perspective, separate from the emotional charge. I want to talk about the rule of law.

The Constitution establishes that federal law trumps state law (no pun intended). For this reason, the presence of ICE in Minneapolis is lawful despite the city’s sanctuary status. They are there to enforce federal immigration law and cannot be prevented from doing so by local authorities. You may disagree with their methods and you have every right to do so but, by law, you cannot impede their enforcement duties. You can peacefully protest but you cannot throw things at them. You can stand on the side of the road and make your feelings known but you cannot use your car as a blockade to prevent them from doing their job. If you truly want to stop their actions, that must be done through a judicial and/or legislative process.

The woman who was killed had spent the day repeatedly blocking the agents and inciting disruptions. When one of the agents approached her car and told her to get out, she refused. By law, when an enforcement officer tells you to step out of your vehicle, to do so is resisting and illegal. He reached into the vehicle to open her door and she pulled away with his arm inside of her vehicle which is considered assault on a police officer. The most widely seen video shows her at that point attempting to drive away and shots ringing out. This perspective looks like the officers are completely in the wrong at that point. But another video from the front clearly shows her accelerating and running directly into another officer. We can’t presume to know what was going through his mind at that moment but in that split second as she was striking him with the vehicle, he fired through the windshield, killing her.

My heart breaks for her family because she is now dead. It breaks even more because it could have been prevented by a simple change of one decision she made yesterday. The officer’s actions will be judged as to whether he was justified in using deadly force but he made his own decision in a split second to choose his life over hers. How many of us might have made a similar decision?

Since George Floyd, Minneapolis has had significant decline in respect for law enforcement, a feeling that is buttressed by the rhetoric of local and state leaders. You can debate whether the actions on that particular day were warranted. Ultimately a jury determined they weren’t. The subsequent actions of mobs across the country, including in my own city, vandalizing personal property and inciting riots and lawlessness were completely and utterly wrong. The reasons for the feelings may have been valid but the expressions of those feelings diminished the overall message. What’s more, we are less safe when we prevent law enforcement from adequately performing their duties.

We live in the most free country in the world but to remain free we must follow the rule of law. The beauty of our system is that we have every right to protest what we feel is unjust. But when the rule of law is upended for the sake of a cause then the message of that cause becomes buried in the cacophony of the noise around it.