from the series Something I Said…
By DWIGHT HOBBES
Correlations between Donald Trump’s presidency and his hero Adolf Hitler’s regime continue. Dachau and other early concentration camps included abandoned factories, breweries and warehouses. These are places you stock and store materials – things, not human beings. ICE had such plans for migrant detainees. Until community unrest and state lawmakers put a halt to them. A vacant commercial building on Emery Way in Shakopee was going to hold up to 1,500 people. The local developer, Opus, decided not to finalize a lease. In Woodbury a half-million- square-foot facility off I-94 was in the works but has not panned out. The Department of Homeland Security had, in fact, reportedly targeted several industrial properties for Trump’s mass deportation goal, but hell raising locals scuttled those sites as well.
Yet again, Minnesota’s resolve is not in the Third Reich playbook. On all fronts, from
guerilla networking to protesting in the street to politicians standing their ground and pushing
back through the courts, resistance is strong on several fronts.
Shutting down those projected facilities came on the heels of White House Border Czar
Tom Homan cleaning up after discarded Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. In May
2026, she backed the $38 billion initiative with Operation Metro Surge no longer in full swing.
With her ouster, Homan oversaw state leaders handing off migrant inmates to the relatively more
humane setting of local jails and prisons that were actually built and staffed for the purpose.
The fight is far from over. As of late June, a federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed
the administration to get back to speedy deportations of undocumented migrants without
appearing before a judge. Added to which, ACLU Immigrants Rights Project attorney Anand
Balakrishnan stated “[This] push for fast-track deportations will subject people to an unfair and
error-prone system.” For instance, as the Associated Press reports, examples of migrants residing
in the U.S. longer than two years were expelled in expedited proceedings.
State-level legal battles against the federal government remain ongoing. Like a U.S.
District Judge Patrick Schiltz ruling that halted Department of Justice subpoenas aimed at
Governor Tim Walz, both Twin Cities’ mayors, county boards of commissioners and everyone
Trump could think of in retaliation for refusing to bend the knee and aid immigration crackdown.
Judge Schiltz went so far as to say in a 29-page ruling, “Initiating a criminal investigation in
order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action — particularly
official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to
take — is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use the grand-jury process.”
You have to take your victories as they come and go forward. All the more important
that the intended warehousing saw a serious setback for President Donald Trump’s war on
humanity.
Dwight Hobbes, a long-time Twin Cities journalist and essayist, is the author of Let Me Tell You About Al
Flowers.
