Can states stop Trump's immigration raids?

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0:28Guy Chazan: Protesters gathered outside the federal building in Minneapolis, Minnesota late last week.

0:38Guy Chazan: Just days before, in the same city, a woman was shot and killed by an immigration agent. Get out of the fucking car.

0:46Stefania Palma: Get out of the car.

0:49Guy Chazan: The shooting and the Trump administration's response inflamed tensions across the country. The federal government has vowed to deploy hundreds more agents to Minnesota. President Trump also threatened to use the Insurrection Act to quell protests.

1:10Guy Chazan: Now, state governments are setting up challenges that could hinder immigration agents from carrying out those highly visible raids in their cities.

1:25Guy Chazan: This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times, where we talk about what's happening in U.S. politics, finance and the economy. I'm Sonia Hudson, and this week we're asking, how are states trying to rein in federal immigration enforcement? Here with me to discuss is Guy Chazan. He's the FT's U.S. national correspondent. Hi, Guy.

1:47Stefania Palma: Hi there.

1:48Guy Chazan: And we've also got Stefania Palma, the FT's U.S. legal and enforcement correspondent. Hi, Stefania. Hi. So, Guy, you were at that protest in Minneapolis that we heard at the top of the show. Can you tell me more about why people turned out?

2:02Stefania Palma: Yeah, I mean, I think the real watershed moment was the killing of Renee Good. I spoke to a lot of people in the protest who really weren't very politically active, who had actually never attended protests like this in the past, but just said they were motivated by sheer outrage at the actions of this ICE agent and the killing of a US citizen. There was just a strong sense among the people that I spoke to anyway, that the ICE officers are really just behaving in a sort of out-of-control way, recklessly endangering people's lives. And they wanted to express their anger over that.

2:40Guy Chazan: Yeah. And in fact, you know, on Wednesday, ICE agents shot and wounded another person in Minneapolis. Has that inflamed the protests even more?

2:49Stefania Palma: Yeah, I think the protests are continuing, but they've been basically going on every single day. I mean, what you're seeing, you're seeing this very interesting phenomenon, which is that people are increasingly confronting ICE agents on the streets. There's this thing called patrolling, as they call it, where there's sort of networks of citizens who are kind of monitoring ICE activities, challenging them, whistling, often accompanying them in their cars, creating these kind of convoys. So you're seeing a lot of resistance from people on the streets basically expressing their anger and their disagreement with these policies.

3:26Guy Chazan: Now, Stefania, you've been on Swamp Notes before to talk about ICE. We know that they're a relatively new division of the U.S. government. They were created after the 9-11 attacks. Can you tell me about the legal authority that ICE has here? Like, what are they allowed to do? Yeah. So as you mentioned, so in the early 2000s, the U.S. formed a new department, the Department of Homeland Security, in response to the 9-11 attacks, sort of in a bid to try and secure more public safety for Americans. And as part of this department, one of its agencies was ICE. Now, it's obviously now with sort of increased tensions, I think there's renewed scrutiny in terms of its jurisdiction.

4:09Guy Chazan: And the truth is it has quite a, the breadth of its mission is quite broad. It basically is able to enforce both criminal and civil federal laws on a whole sort of host of topics, sort of anything from, you know, immigration to border control, trade, customs. So it's incredibly powerful. And obviously now it's at sort of the center of one of the biggest tensions in current American society. Who regulates the authority that ICE has? Like who ensures that agency is following the law? I guess if we look at, for instance, what's happening in Minnesota, if you have an incident like the one involving Rene Goode, typically speaking, you would have, you know, states, law enforcement authorities alongside the Department of Justice, the FBI investigating incidents like this.

4:57Guy Chazan: And obviously, if they find illegal behavior, then they would take necessary action, potentially bring charges, etc. This administration, I think, is quite atypical in the sense that, let's say, what happened with Renee Goode, immediately sort of from the get-go, political appointees in the Trump administration came out in defense of the immigration agents and in a very, very public way, even before, you know, the events could be properly examined. And in fact, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, spoke immediately after the incident. Today alone in this country, there have been four different domestic terrorist attacks on federal officers by the ramming of vehicles.

5:39Guy Chazan: Three of them happened here in Minneapolis. The implication there is that Kristi Noem is calling Renee Good a domestic terrorist. How is that rhetoric affecting this case? Massively, I would say. Obviously, the entity that would take the lead in terms of examining this from a legal perspective, obviously, would be the DOJ at federal level. The Department of Justice. The Department of Justice, correct. And we've already seen, for instance, the deputy attorney general come out with a statement in the last few days saying that basically there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation, which kind of breaks from what we've seen the past years under different administrations, where in a situation like this, where an individual obviously is killed by a federal agent, that there may well be an examination of a potential civil rights violation.

6:29Guy Chazan: I think it's also important to note that this comment also comes as this particular unit, the civil rights unit within the DOJ, has also been completely gutted. And sort of some experts argue these are kind of the knock-on effects of these kinds of moves. What about state governments? Guy, is Minnesota investigating this shooting?

6:48Stefania Palma: I don't think they can at the moment. I mean, I think they're sort of investigating ways to carry out some kind of probe, but it's very difficult when they're being shut out by the federal authorities. I mean, I think what the state and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, which is next door, have done is to actually sue to stop this ice surge. So they are taking legal action. But beyond that, I think that actually it's very difficult for them to really initiate a kind of independent investigation. I mean, independent of the federal authorities into this case.

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8:14Guy Chazan: Guy and Stefania, this is all very tense and dramatic. How significant is this moment, would you say?

8:22Stefania Palma: It's difficult really to answer that question because what's happening in Minneapolis is essentially just a continuation of what we've seen in other big American cities over the past sort of year or so. Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, in Oregon. We have seen the federal government going for these cities, surging in ICE agents. This is obviously a policy. It's a clear policy. They're targeting democratic run cities and they're making a point. They're basically going in there and arresting lots of undocumented aliens. Often they actually detain US citizens as well, although they seem to be often released quite soon afterwards.

9:07Stefania Palma: But it is clearly now a sort of a nationwide policy. Now, I think what's happened really with Minneapolis, this is just my, in a way, very subjective view from what I saw on the streets there, is that we might have reached a kind of tipping point where public anger at the excesses of ICE agents is beginning to gain momentum. and we could see that really grow. I mean, we're already seeing polls published in the past few days and the last couple of weeks which show that public discontent with the approach of ICE is beginning to mound. So this could really turn into a kind of wide, large-scale kind of public movement.

9:56Stefania Palma: I mean, movement might be the wrong word, but that we could see a trend in public opinion, which is really against these ICE law enforcement actions. But it's very difficult to tell. I mean, it's a very politically divided country. It's going to be very difficult to really ascertain whether this is actually a real change, a real shift in public opinion.

10:17Guy Chazan: Yeah, I mean, to Guy's point, I think if we zoom out a little bit, this is part of a broad crackdown by this administration on so-called sanctuary cities, which essentially are jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But this started early in Trump's second presidency. In April, he signed an executive order that he framed as sort of protecting Americans from illegal immigrants. And since then, the DOJ has actually been filing a string of lawsuits against all sorts of so-called sanctuary cities, you know, be it New York, Los Angeles, Boston, essentially arguing that these policies are impeding the enforcement of federal law and putting, as they say, sort of Americans at risk.

11:03Guy Chazan: Now, a lot of those sort of cases are still pending. We saw sort of one clear case where the mayor of Louisville in Kentucky sort of agreed to revoke their sanctuary policies after sort of pressure from the DOJ. But it's still very much a live matter legally. So going back to Minneapolis and Minnesota, you know, we're seeing this effort by liberal states, like you just mentioned. Minnesota has now joined them to limit ICE's ability more broadly. Can you tell me about that? Illinois and Minnesota in recent days, they've actually filed lawsuits over these immigration operations. And they argue that these kinds of actions by the federal government violate the 10th Amendment, which essentially sets up the whole sort of framework for federalism in this country.

11:48Guy Chazan: Federalism being the relationship and the sharing of power between states and the federal government. Correct. Under the Constitution and sort of what power states have in terms of governing themselves vis-a-vis the federal government. And you have sort of these two very sort of conflicting arguments where sort of the Trump administration is seeking to paint sort of the reaction to their immigration operations and sort of as an insurrection that must be quelled for the sake of American safety, whereas state officials are calling these operations, you know, essentially an occupation of U.S. states.

12:22Guy Chazan: And it's really, really setting things up to be a truly existential legal fight for the U.S. And in fact, we saw, for instance, the Minnesota judge that is overseeing these cases. The judge did not temporarily block agents from operating in the state, but also she pointed out that sort of these lawsuits present what she said were frontier issues in constitutional law. Yeah, it seems like we're definitely on the way to a pretty big legal showdown between states and the federal government. What does the Trump administration have to say about these efforts from liberal states? Well, they are essentially pushing back, repeating the general position that they've always had, which is, you know, these immigration operations are absolutely necessary in terms of trying to push back against what they have called an invasion of illegal immigrants in the country.

13:16Guy Chazan: There is sort of talk of calling this pushback an insurrection. And I would also like to stress these are not coincidental terms that are being used. In both cases, words like insurrection or invasion have been used to put together and build a legal premise and a legal argument to then try, and in some cases they already have, invoked rarely used laws in terms of then pushing for specific policies that are legally highly contentious. And the whole conversation now about potentially invoking the Insurrection Act also talks about the Trump administration painting this as an insurrection that has to be addressed.

14:00Guy Chazan: Do you think that this ramp up in state frustration with immigration enforcement and the pushback from the Trump administration is essentially widening an existing divide between federal and state governments? Yes, I think this is the end example of any kind of tension between this particular Trump administration and any of its opponents or perceived opponents being truly, truly heightened. In this particular situation, we're seeing it play out in terms of raising fundamental questions about the concept of federalism and state rights and how this spills over also in law enforcement. But I think what I found particularly interesting is this deep disconnect with other major moments in U.S.

14:51Guy Chazan: society in recent years where, for instance, when we look at the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which was obviously the decision that enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion, that entire decision by the the conservative legal community and beyond, were framed as, no, no, no, the question of abortion must be returned to the states. They need to have the right to decide on something so fundamental. And yet here we're seeing a federal government that really is sort of pushing its way through and trying to really assert itself in states' matters and things happening on the ground like this.

15:29Guy Chazan: Yeah. Guy, what do you think? Is this widening an existing divide between federal and state governments?

15:35Stefania Palma: I mean, there seems something so partisan about this. The way that certain states are being targeted, I think, seems to be driven basically by political considerations rather than national security considerations. And that, I think, has really led to this perception that Trump is pursuing a really partisan political agenda, which will only, in a way, sort of deepen the political divisions that already exist in this country.

16:06Guy Chazan: Well, where do you two see this issue going? Is ICE going to be reined in by these liberal states, or will the administration just further double down? I think the message from the administration is that it's not backing down anytime soon, Even if we just look at the billions of dollars it has given to the Department of Homeland Security in the latest sort of budget law, there is a clear willingness to focus on immigration. It is a key pillar of this second Trump presidency. I do not see that changing anytime soon. It will be interesting to see, for instance, the bills that have been passed or are sort of before governors for potential signature in places like California or New Jersey, where they're trying to further sort of protect immigrants and push back against the federal immigration involvement.

16:58Guy Chazan: Even then, you can envision further legal showdowns in terms of whether these laws impede the federal government from enforcing immigration laws. But it's very much a life matter. And I think we still don't really have the answer to this question. Guy, what about you? Where do you see this going?

17:14Stefania Palma: I mean, certainly in the case of Minnesota, I don't see any winding down or diminution in their willingness to really enforce this crackdown on illegal immigration that we're seeing in Minnesota. I think that actually they seem to have made some sort of political decision that basically this is a key, as Stefania said, a key pillar of the second Trump presidency, a key pillar of their policy agenda, and they will pursue it to its logical conclusion. And they will ignore the sort of mounting opposition and resistance to this. that is going to lead to potentially more violence, more uncertainty, and a really difficult situation for the people living in Minnesota, especially in the big cities, Minneapolis and St.

18:05Stefania Palma: Paul. I think the tensions are only going to grow. All right.

18:09Guy Chazan: I want to thank our guests, Guy Chazan, the FT's U.S. national correspondent. Thanks, Guy.

18:14Stefania Palma: Thank you.

18:15Guy Chazan: And Stefania Palma. She's our U.S. legal and enforcement correspondent. Thanks, Stefania. Thank you.

18:28Guy Chazan: This was Swamp Notes, the U.S. politics show from the FT. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we've got a link to that in the show notes. Our show was produced by Henry Larson, and it was mixed by Sam Giovinco. We had help this week from Lauren Fedor. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I'm Sonia Hudson. Our executive producer is Topher Forges, and the FT's global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Original music by Hannes Brown. Check back next week for more U.S. political analysis from the Financial Times.

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