from the series Something I Said…
By DWIGHT HOBBES
South Minneapolis activists raised pure hell confronting ICE’s jackbooted, might-makes-right assault on civil liberty. Ensuing national attention on Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s murders along with the brutalizing of Alberto Mondragon forced the withdrawal of Operation Metro Surge. In April, U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review got slick, doing an end run, appointing Nathan M. Hansen immigration judge at Fort Snelling Immigration Court. President Donald Trump’s ham-handed administration couldn’t defeat resistance one way, so it went another, in accord with the DOJ’s fast tracking deportations across the country.
As an attorney, Hansen endorsed the harebrained notion of a Democratic higher-ups pedophilia ring operating out of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. There were no victims, any evidence, or an actual investigation. He declared property taxes are illegal according to the Minnesota’s State Constitution. He called for the Federal Reserve to be abolished. In plain language, a career-long, dyed-in-the-wool wingnut, who responded to a City of Stillwater Facebook post, “Is there anything we can do to help ICE if we want to?” now decides deportation cases. To make disastrous matters worse, since President Trump took office there’s already an unprecedented low in asylum claims honored. It’ll be a wonder if Minnesota sees any at all.
His rise in the judicial system is part and parcel of Trump’s ruthless vendetta against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Governor Tim Walz and, by extension, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. It is also characterized by racist xenophobia as you’d be hard pressed to find anyone impacted who isn’t someone of color. Champing at the bit, Trump seized the Feeding Our Future scandal as a means to castigate Congresswoman Omar as an “America-hating socialist” who is “scum” and called Somali immigrants “garbage”. In virtually the same breath he denounced Governor Walz as corrupt and incompetent, citing the scandal – this after condemning Walz over the unrest that followed George Floyd’s death. He went after Mayor Frey for refusing to change Minneapolis’ sanctuary city standing.
On hearing of the Trump administration’s maneuver to undermine protest with Nathan Hansen’s key insertion on the bench, an intelligently articulate, customarily temperate professional acquaintance of mine imparted, “Bastards!” Which sums things up, but editors don’t run one-word commentaries.
Sammy Davis, Jr. used to do a running gag on NBC’s Laugh-In, “Here come da judge, here da judge.” Well, here’s Minnesota’s new jurist, a hanging judge if ever there was one. Nothing humorous about it. Indeed, it’s loathsome, a cowardly underhanded power play to have Minnesota knuckle under to federal oppression. And disgraces America as a supposed land of equal opportunity, not to mention one of freedom from persecution.
DWIGHT HOBBES, a long-time Twin Cities journalist and essayist, is the author of Let Me Tell You About Al Flowers.
