[Jodavaho.io] — Josh Vander Hook

Now, I have shouted into the void on social media to no end, so, I’m posting for archival purposes my current thoughts on the situation in my home state and city.

This is a post about the ICE operation in Minneapolis. First off, if you have videos of civil rights violations by ICE, please visit this site: https://www.aclu-mn.org/ice-feds-form/

To an outsider, you probably get a filtered perspective that is highly likely to confirm your pre-existing thoughts on the matter. Discussions about that are not what interest me…

I’m concerned that a decreasing minority of the country is railroading the rest of us into a civil rights/ constitutional crisis. Any attempt to pin this on one party falls flat, in my mind. This makes me very fun at parties, of course…

Immigration is a very contentious topic, but there is broad appeal for reform. Check out ¹, and see that all of the following were favorable by 10% or more spread as of June 2025.

• Allowing illegally immigrated children to become US citizens provided they meet certain criteria over time (85% Yes v 14% No)
• Closing the border when facilities are overloaded (63% v 42%)
• 63% worry about illegal immigration (peak = 2025). 6% are “very satisfied” with the level of immigration in the USA.
• 84% say the number of immigrants coming into the USA is a critial or important threat to the USA.
• 77% in particular consider the Mexican border to be a critical or important threat to the USA.

Those polls are eye-opening. So how did we get here?

Well for starters, the number of immigrants turned away at the border vastly decreased, and eventually internal (ICE-like) deportations also decreased.

I will never understand the sentiment / fight against sane border policy like letting states build a wall (trump) to shore up immigration processing while boosting case processing rate (biden/obama). These latest operations are an attempt by Trump at speedrunning Obama 2012 and reversing this trend-especially the Biden years, all at once.

To say this operation is heavy handed is put it lightly. There are widespread protests and innumerable videos of ICE/protestor clashes. In my own personal opinion, many of these clashes are ambiguous, in that yes, law enforcement is doing something violent and maybe unconstitutional, but law enforcement does violent things a lot. And many times (civil rights violations aside), they have legal justification to do that. Unfortunately, one extreme voter base is plenty happy to give them moral justification to shoot a perceived liberal.

I care deeply about civil rights and clear transparency about police use of force. A good friend of mine was shot and killed by police, and video of this incident mysteriously disappeared. Other friends were coerced into saying bad things about the victim of the shooting. So you would think I would be out there holding a sign and swearing my lungs out.

I’m not. My position here is:

1. The ICE operation is very likely legal, and that moral opposition doesn’t allow you to impede legal law enforcement.
2. That having protestors around ICE operations is a good thing …
3. but they are squandering their opportunity to let the public examine for themselves the ethics and legality of ICE tactics.

How do they squander it? By unnecessarily impeding, escalating, and (at minimum, in the legal sense) assaulting officers. Of course, not every legally allowed law enforcement act of violence is morally justified (Renee Good?). But legal/moral justification seems to be easily fabricated nowadays and this is precisely why an objective, passive, complete recording of events is so important! The moment protestors escalate, they move from impartial observers to partial participants, fueling further divisiveness and diluting any case or message.

By unnecessarily impeding, escalating, or assaulting officers, protestors are squandering the opportunity to bring a moral case to the American public, and a legal case to American courts.

A lot of videos seem the play out like this:

• A debatable action by ICE begins peacefully enough. Something like “knock and talk” (vaguely legal) or coercing a person to show ID / proof of citizenship (which they do not need to do!)
• The person, knowing their rights are being violated or just being belligerent, refuses or resists.
• ICE takes this as an opportunity to escalate to a violent encounter.
• Several bystanders get involved.
• The chaos is posted online.

I can’t speak for them, but I bet ACLU would say that it’s not a good idea to be a martyr for a legal test by resisting an unlawful order to show ID. My guess is that the common sense approach is to record it all, state you do not consent, but don’t let yourself get roughed up and for god’s sake don’t do anything dangerous.

Getting 3-4 good examples of civil rights violations on camera, or even a couple dozen just “this doesn’t feel right” door to door searches on camera is worth 1,000 stupid yelling sessions or tiktok grandstanding or escalations. But I’m not out there either, it’s the strongest opinions who take the most visible actions (again).

Here’s a good example I posted on X.

❌They look like they're going to Fallujah, not MN.
✅ the officers are calm and professional despite all the jackhats getting in their face.
✅mostly, bystanders maintain safe distance, do not interfere, and record what may be a civil rights violation
B+, passing lawful society https://t.co/EhiWgDLUOH

— Joshua D Vander Hook (@jodavaho) January 14, 2026

Of course the hero here is the one being questioned, who knows his rights, but declines to give either side a chance to escalate (which is probably what they want, to some degree). The grandstanding by the protestor is especially hilarious. He accomplished nothing except making the officers look like the sane ones (which they were). But for every video like this, there’s another where crying mothers are being pulled out of cars through broken windows.

So where are we? Strategically, R’s are burning public sentiment on the issue to appeal to their core base who are responding to the trend started in 2012-2020. The optics of L’s “distributed protest” response are not great either, but I’m guessing the gamble is that they’ll capture more public sentiment being 90% sane, 9% annoying, and 1% idiotic while recording everything.

Check out this graph:

and:

It’s obvious opinions are rapidly changing. But this is a terrible strategy, and L leadership is not talking anyone down from it. You can’t out-escalate the federal government. You’ll lose. Keep your sanity and have your day in court / at the polls, and enact long term change. Do this before “temporary powers” are invoked to put this all down. Not only is that a possibility, it might be the point of this whole thing.

My hope for the future is that the lunatics running the shows are a decreasing minority, and independents are more interested in due process, rule of law, and civil rights. We have to live to see the next election.

Having said all this, I am a US citizen. Many of my best colleagues and friends are or once were immigrants. My heart goes out to legal immigrants who fear being nabbed for “re-examination”². How awful to make it to a safe place, build a life, only to have armed people come to take you away again. Unfortunately, this is only kind-of a legal issue, it is a moral one, and violating the law has predictable results. Only through vigilance and transparency can this legal issue be made into an actionable policy issue, in courts and at the polls.

But, I hear that there’s going to be a MAGA rally in Minneapolis, just a few miles from me, so I suspect we’re not done with the rhetoric and escalations just yet.