Tim Doolittle lives in Oakdale, Minnesota.

This is addressed to all Mainers.

You have all seen the brutality and wantonness with which we Minnesotans have been treated since our Operation Metro Surge began in December. As you are now doing, people here protest and blow whistles. Our politicians (many of them anyway) plead with the feds to leave us alone.

None of these tactics have worked here. They won’t work for you either. But if you are horrified by what is happening in our North Star State, do all you can anyway.

It should be a source of outrage to all of us that government agents can hide their identities, scour neighborhoods day after day for their supposed targets in large armed groups, barge into homes and businesses and drag people out, gas and rough up any protesters who are in the area and not tell us who they take and why and what happened to them.

It is equally scary that the whole premise of these ICE deployments is a lie. Immigrants in our country commit fewer crimes than the population at large. Of course they are not crime-free, and nobody would argue that we should not deport immigrants who are guilty of serious offenses.

Enter now the narrative from ICE that it is rounding up “the worst of the worst,” and it sounds pretty good. But the number of these criminals is not anything close to the number communicated by ICE. This is not a case of ICE pursuing a noble mission but doing it in an incompetent, disruptive and bloody way. The noble mission is simply a sham.

One of the themes of our wonderful local reporting in Minnesota has been trying to make the ICE numbers match up. ICE says it has more than 3,000 agents in Minnesota and they have already rounded up 3,000 of the “worst of the worst.” (Efficiency note: that is one detainee per agent over the seven or so weeks of Metro Surge. Not great.)

In Maine, your governor has rightly demanded answers about the number and identity of
“targets” in your state. Here in Minnesota, ICE came up with a list of 240 people out of the more than 3,000 it claims to have detained.

Surely the 240 people it did identify must be really heinous, right? The Minnesota Star
Tribune found that 80% of them had felony convictions. Sounds pretty bad. But before
breathing a sigh of relief that the horrible tactics by ICE at least are for a worthy cause, consider that the reporting goes on to say that nearly everyone on that list had already served their time and were not actively wanted by police.

So, sure they served their time, but they were criminals and so we should be going after them, right? Well, no. Many of them were detained by ICE as they were being released from prison — no need for columns of SUVs rolling up to their homes and creating mayhem.

Who are all the rest of the 2,700-plus souls rounded up by ICE but not named? Maybe there will be a couple truly nasty folks. More likely they will be like Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias and his 5-year-old son Liam, who were snatched up and sent to Texas. He was pursuing an asylum case and has no criminal history.

Or Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria and his 2-year-old daughter, who were put on a flight out of the state within eight hours of their detainment, barely beating a judge’s emergency order to release the child. The dad’s crime? Felony re-entry, which is coming back to this country after being formally denied entry or being deported. A crime for sure, but not exactly rape or murder.

So, Mainers, seek the answers about who ICE is taking and why, watch ICE operations, continue to protest and help your neighbors. But don’t look for your crime rate to drop.