Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Works and the Numbers Don’t Lie

Results Over Rhetoric

Here’s something you won’t hear much about in the usual news cycle: Minneapolis is safer. Considerably safer, actually. President Trump told NBC News that crime in the city has dropped somewhere between 25 and 30 percent. The reason? His administration did something previous leaders wouldn’t. They enforced immigration law.

You know what’s remarkable about this story? It’s not that removing criminals reduces crime. That’s common sense. What’s remarkable is how long we pretended this wouldn’t work.

Operation Metro Surge deployed thousands of immigration agents to Minneapolis and St. Paul. The result was thousands of arrests. These weren’t people who missed a court date or overstayed a visa by a week. Trump was clear about who got removed: hardened criminals, most of whom entered through what he rightly calls an open border.

The resistance was predictable. Resident outrage. Public protests. Even Biden spoke out, claiming the crackdown goes against American values. But here’s the uncomfortable question nobody wants to answer: which American values, exactly? The value of protecting citizens or the value of ignoring laws we find inconvenient?

When Safety Becomes Controversial

There’s something deeply broken about a political climate where making a city safer sparks controversy. Minneapolis residents are living with less crime. That’s not a talking point. That’s measurable reality affecting real people who can now walk their neighborhoods with less fear.

The left keeps framing this as a humanitarian crisis. But what about the humanity of American citizens who’ve watched their communities deteriorate? What about the single mom who can finally let her kids play outside? What about the small business owner who doesn’t get broken into every other month?

We’ve spent years being told that enforcement equals cruelty. That borders are somehow immoral. That suggesting consequences for illegal entry makes you a bigot. Meanwhile, cities like Minneapolis suffered. Crime rose. Communities fractured. And politicians offered nothing but platitudes about compassion while actual people paid the price.

The Open Border Experiment Failed

Let’s talk about those hardened criminals Trump mentioned. They didn’t materialize out of thin air. They came through a border that was deliberately left unsecured. This wasn’t an accident or an oversight. It was policy.

The previous administration treated border security like an embarrassing relic of less enlightened times. They installed a “border czar” who never actually visited the border. They sent signals to the world that America’s laws were optional. And shockingly, people responded to those signals.

Now we’re cleaning up the mess. Tom Homan, Trump’s actual border czar (the kind who does his job), discussed pulling 700 immigration officers from Minnesota as enforcement efforts stabilize. That’s how you know it’s working. When you can reduce resources because you’ve already handled the problem.

What the Numbers Actually Mean

A 25 to 30 percent crime reduction isn’t marginal. That’s transformational for a community. That’s the difference between a neighborhood in decline and one with a future. It represents real crimes that didn’t happen. Real victims who weren’t victimized.

Critics will say we need more data. They’ll question the methodology. They’ll find reasons to doubt what’s plainly visible. That’s what critics do when reality contradicts their ideology.

But for the people living in Minneapolis, the data is their daily experience. The streets tell the story better than any study.

The Principle Behind the Policy

This isn’t really about immigration policy in isolation. It’s about whether we still believe in the most basic function of government: protecting citizens. It’s about whether laws mean anything or if they’re just suggestions we follow when convenient.

Individual liberty doesn’t exist without security. Free markets don’t flourish in chaos. Traditional values can’t survive in communities where basic order has collapsed. These aren’t separate issues. They’re connected threads of the same fabric.

Trump’s approach in Minneapolis demonstrates something the establishment hates admitting: enforcement works. Consequences matter. When you remove people who’ve committed serious crimes and entered illegally, crime goes down. This shouldn’t be revolutionary. It should be obvious.

The resistance to Operation Metro Surge reveals more about our political dysfunction than about immigration policy. We’ve reached a point where one political tribe treats any enforcement as inherently wrong, regardless of results. That’s not principle. That’s paralysis.

Minneapolis is becoming proof that we don’t have to accept decline as inevitable. We don’t have to watch our cities deteriorate while pretending there’s nothing we can do. Sometimes the solution really is as straightforward as enforcing the law.

The question now is whether other cities will learn from this example or continue down the path that led to the problem in the first place.

American Conservatives