There is so much wrong with Trump’s federal invasion of Minneapolis, its obvious overreach, its needless provocation, and its constitutional violations. I watch aghast from afar. But when Mike Simpson, my representative in Congress, goes beyond craven silence and, in high dudgeon, asks me not only to approve that whole misbegotten initiative but to feel for the brave ICE officers (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) doing Trump’s will, that’s just too much to ignore.

In his ISJ column from January 24, Simpson contends that Trump’s draconian ICE methods of removing undesirable aliens are justified; they’ve made us safer, he claims, because they’ve reduced violent crimes and slowed the flow of deadly drugs into our communities. He provides no information about the size of these reductions or evidence that those statistical declines are specifically related to illegal immigration. There may well have been other contributing factors. Beware of the logical fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

I doubt the citizens of Minneapolis are feeling safer because ICE is there.

Simpson presents the matter this way: Do you want to stand with the brave ICE officers who protect our communities—or with the agitators who defend convicted criminals?

That’s called setting up a straw man to knock over, then thumping your chest congratulatorily.

His question, so framed, glaringly fails to assess all relevant factors. It is an example of over-simplified “either/or” thinking—and the second option he presents is nothing so much as Orwellian “Big Brother” propagandistic misdirection.

Trump was elected, says Simpson, largely because voters supported his tough-on-crime and immigration policies. And Simpson is right, at least in this, that the majority of Americans do want law enforcement and secure borders. But that does not mean they want to achieve them by making the means worse than

the problem itself. And that is exactly what the Trump administration is accomplishing.

Current polls make abundantly clear that the overwhelming majority of us disapprove of Trump’s heavy-handed methods which resemble those of dictatorships--agents in unidentified vehicles, in masks, and with no obligation to show official credentials; agents roughly seizing suspected illegals and citizens alike, seemingly at random, snatching them off the streets or, based on profiling, targeting schools, churches, places of employment and entertainment (as happened recently in a bizarre over flexing of law enforcement muscle in Weiser, daho—try to imagine what that must have felt like to those present that afternoon in that largely Latino gathering).

The whole ICE operation is a modus operandi intended to generate generalized fear. Citizens who have been here for some time, contributing to our communities and our economy, are afraid to leave their homes. In cities across America, citizens of color are taking to carrying ID papers confirming their citizenship lest they be pounced on and spirited away by ICE. Does that sound like America to you—or the Cold War Soviet Union?

Feeling safer? I think not.

“Across the country, including Idaho [writes Simpson], left-wing agitators have taken to the streets to defend child sex offenders, drug traffickers, murderers, and other violent criminals.” Well, I’ve participated in a couple of local protest rallies, and I try to keep reasonably abreast of Idaho news, but I’ve yet to hear or see anyone defending the above. Really now? If you are seriously concerned about child sex offenses, Rep. Simpson, raise your voice and get the Epstein Files released to the public, those documents that Trump’s Justice Department is sitting on.

Just who are those “agitators” that you refer to, those supposedly “defending convicted criminals?”

Well, I’ve got news for you, Rep. Simpson—they are ordinary patriotic Americans, especially like the great throngs just now turning out in Minneapolis, and they are not there to defend lawlessness but rather to stand up peacefully for the individual rights of all of us, rights guaranteed by the Constitution. As you, sir, along with too many of your Republican colleagues, should be doing right now instead of defending Trump’s not-even-veiled punitive meddling in Democratic cities and states.

“Agitator” in the current context carries a negative Orwellian 1984/Trumpian connotation, as Simpson means for it to do. Well, what is going on in Minneapolis and elsewhere should make all of us sufficiently AGITATED to find our voices and/or our feet and object.

What is going on, according to Simpson, is the fault of “left-wing media trying to distort reality.” (Oddly, he makes no mention of the steady stream of distortions in right-wing media, which pales in comparison with the spinning distortions coming from representatives of Trump’s administration. Example: their immediate official response to the murders by ICE agents of the two innocent citizens in Minneapolis was to label those victims as members of terrorist organizations, assertions completely discredited by evidence.

When you assert, Rep. Simpson, that media bias distorts what is happening in places like Minneapolis, you are not convincing, not when those media outlets are reporting undisputable factual evidence (including video footage) of needless murders and terrorizing of citizens, not when we see the pictures of those huge, overwhelmingly non-violent protesting crowds, and not when we hear directly the statements from local city and state officials (including not a few Minnesota Republicans) that federal intrusion by Trump and ICE is unneeded, unwanted, and hugely destabilizing.

As Sen. Patrick Moynihan once said, “You are entitled to your own opinions, sir, but not to your own facts.”

“Instead of attacking law enforcement, we should be thanking them,” writes Simpson. That is a carelessly written, loosely imprecise sentence. Law enforcement is not a solitary entity. Americans do overwhelmingly support legitimate law enforcement and responsible policing. But Americans by large majorities do not support inadequately trained ICE agents conducting themselves like thugs and goons, trolling at large and striking fear among us.

Of course, the ICE agents are merely pawns, the willing tools of Trump and the Stephen Millers and Kristi Noems of his government, his lieutenants whose persuasions, like his, run toward letting loose the dogs of executive power. “Every country needs a dictator now and then,” Trump said just last week.

So I say to Rep. Simpson, “Analyze these issues more carefully and help us preserve the guardrails of constitutional democracy. Don’t descend into parroting the talking points sent out by the Office of Propaganda at the White House.”