POLITICS: Lessons all around as ICE draws down in Minnesota

Common sense is prevailing on both sides as ICE finalizes its draw-down of “Operation Metro Surge” enforcement in Minnesota; we pray the lesson proves lasting: Hyper-polarized politics can actually kill.

Hard-left agitators — seeking to end immigration enforcement and dissolve America in the name of anticolonialism — worked in overdrive to delegitimize ICE as a rogue army of untrained Trump partisans.

These anarchists and their well-meaning dupes swarmed federal agents, blew whistles and honked horns, physically interrupted arrests and threatened to dox and kill ICE officers — with the extremists trying desperately to provoke a violent response and draw public outrage.

Unfortunately, they succeeded, in part: Renee Good and Alex Pretti lost their lives after tangling unnecessarily with federal officers while local cops seemingly stood down.

Politicians local and national took up their deaths as a cause for grandstanding, as Mayor Jacob Frey demonstrated by grotesquely telling ICE to “get the f–k out of Minneapolis!” while Gov. Tim Walz called ICE a “modern-day Gestapo and Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner swore to “hunt down” ICE officers “for decades.”

Lamentably, Homeland Security scored some own goals, as “Border Czar” Tom Homan acknowledged in his Thursday press conference: “There were some issues here and we addressed those issues.”

It sure looks like DHS Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t know what she was sending thousands of agents into, nor get them the training they needed.

But Homan has proved since taking point that it wasn’t systemic problems with ICE or its mission that sent everything south.

He prioritized “de-escalation” of tensions and convinced Frey and Walz that increased violence and rioting was of no use to anyone; now every county in Minnesota is on board with alerting ICE to the presence of illegal migrants in their jails.

Other obvious lessons: If ICE and Border Patrol officers are going to meet mass-protest resistance, they first need serious training in crowd control — or local police keeping the peace on the scene.

And body cams can protect officers from false charges even as they assure civilians that law enforcers can be held to account.

Whatever federal agents’ legal powers, random-seeming raids and detentions rub most Americans very much the wrong way: Homeland Security can’t ignore the optics of its dealings with the public.

Also vital: Local officials, whatever they think of immigration enforcement, can’t simply order police to stay out of it.

Their duty to their own civilians is to keep the peace — and to recognize that the American people voted for rapid deportation of criminal illegal aliens.

That doesn’t end the political debate, nor excuse Homeland Security from doing the job prudently — but treating Americans who disagree with you as all-out enemies is a guarantee of needless tragedy.