By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
For months now, far-left activists across America have been gathering in groups, seeking out locations where federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (known as ICE) are conducting raids, hunting down and arresting criminal aliens who are in the country illegally.
They then swarm the ICE action, blowing whistles, yelling and chanting to alert anyone whom the agents might be after, in hopes that the criminals can escape. They frequently use their cars, vans and SUVs in an attempt to block roadways or driveways so that the ICE agents can’t get through, and recently, they’ve even gone so far as to use their own vehicles to ram the agents’ vehicles, or to threaten to run down the agents themselves.
The practice came to a very public head on January 7, when Renee Nicole Macklin Good, an alleged poet and professional leftist activist, tried to run down an agent in the middle of a Minneapolis street, and the agent responded the only way he could to the oncoming vehicle.
The demonic look of glee on her face – as she turned her SUV toward him and hit the accelerator – makes the videos of this incident especially painful to watch; hearing her “wife” egging her on, with the words “Drive, Baby, Drive!” tells us more than we ever wanted to know about the mentality of these radical bands of rent-a-marxists, mobilized at a moment’s notice and given directions, picket signs, and marching orders.
What we have long suspected about these incidents is finally being broadly reported: that these are not organic groups of neighbors, upset at the prospect of the federal government arresting the criminals in their midst.
Rather, these are members of a huge pool of trained – and often compensated – activists, who have drunk the Kool-Aid of the Left, and happily believe everything their trainers tell them, things that we sane and normal onlookers would recognize as a pack of lies in an instant.
Their organizers tell them that ICE has headed somewhere to raid an apartment complex, or business, or shelter, or whatever – so they should rush over there and stage a “protest,” which they define as being a time to harass the agents, to make noise, to use their cars as obstacles, and so forth.
Do the organizers directly tell their foot soldiers that such action is legal? That’s not always clear, but judging from the activists’ action, and from their often obviously absolute confidence when on video or microphone, the activists certainly seem to believe that their actions are perfectly legal.
They arrive at these incidents to cause trouble, as much trouble as possible, with the object of rendering the raids unsuccessful, so that the targeted criminals can get away. They claim to believe that ICE is after innocent families, pure as the driven snow, who are here legally and shouldn’t be “kidnapped” by the feds.
And they appear to believe their mayors’ and congressmen’s rants that the ICE agents are conducting illegal actions.
And they believe that their own actions, their efforts to obstruct these apprehensions, are totally legal, and are protected by the First Amendment protections of the freedoms of speech and assembly.
There’s just one big problem with all that:
Virtually everything they believe – everything they have been told by their superiors, everything they’ve heard on the news and internet, everything they’ve told each other in their excitement to be part of this “resistance” – is a lie.
ICE is there to apprehend violators of federal law, generally not only border jumping but also drug crimes and other serious felonies like human trafficking, child abuse, and interstate gang activity. That’s who ICE is going after.
Of course these ICE actions are legal. What’s illegal are the sanctuary policies that so many cities and states have put in place to oppose ICE, without any authority whatsoever to do so; federal law about federal crimes obviously overrules illegal, contradictory state laws and local ordinances.
Yes, there is a right to protest government policy, but that right is limited to normal, legitimate political protests: a rally at the town square, a march in front of a capital, the publication of articles and brochures, etc. That’s not what these “ICE-Watchers” are doing.
What these radical activists are doing, in truth, is obstructing federal law enforcement in the process of arresting criminals. They are aiding and abetting criminals who are resisting and escaping arrest. They are making themselves accessories to the criminals’ escape attempts.
Not only is there no First Amendment protection for any of this at all, in fact, it is specifically illegal, in any state, in any way, for people to get in the way of law enforcement officers who are in the process of catching and arresting suspects.
This shouldn’t be hard to figure out. We should really know from childhood that you mustn’t interfere when law enforcement is doing their job of arresting people, not only because it’s illegal, but because it’s dangerous; you can get in the crossfire, you can get other people in the crossfire, you can get hurt or killed yourself (as Ms. Good discovered when she aimed her 5000 lb vehicle at a federal agent and hit the gas).
Our society needs to figure out why so many thousands of people think it’s okay to deviate from the knowledge of a lifetime of experience, and harass law enforcement officers doing important and dangerous work.
Is it perhaps because their bosses, the radical organizations run by George Soros, the DNC, and other such moneyed interests, have fed them a pack of lies in order to get these things to escalate into bloodshed?
If you want to protest government policy, there IS a path to do so. You can stage rallies downtown, or in front of the state capitol building, or in front of city hall. Sometimes it takes a permit, sometimes it doesn’t; stay off the street and don’t disturb traffic or block the sidewalks or doors, and you’ll usually be fine. You can even get TV coverage.
But it is never – NEVER – acceptable to just “declare a protest” in front of an active law enforcement action, and attempt to disable the law enforcement community in their process of catching criminals.
These activists have been committing hundreds, even thousands, of felonies per day, for quite a while now, and ICE has been lenient with them until now.
But they’ve gone too far, and the word is, now that they’re getting people killed, ICE is finally going to crack down, as they probably should have done long ago.
The place for a protest is City Hall or the local federal building. These ICE-Watchers really aren’t protestors at all; many, if not most, of them are criminals themselves, obstructing federal police business.
Alerting a criminal’s hideout that it’s about to be raided, obstructing law enforcement in the midst of an official ICE action, and using a 5000 lb vehicle as a weapon, are all serious federal offenses.
It’s high time these wannabe revolutionaries are brought to justice.
And maybe it’s time to start investigating the sources and leadership – both the funding and the training – of these mobile bolshevik units as well.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
