Yesterday in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accused the Trump Administration of lying about his state:
The Trump administration’s assault on Minnesota long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. It is a campaign of organized brutality against the people of our state. It isn’t just. It isn’t legal. And, critically, it isn’t making anyone any safer.
Quite the opposite: Immigration agents have now shot and killed two of our neighbors: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And there are countless other stories of protesters and bystanders being physically attacked by federal agents, to say nothing of the chaos and violence being unleashed against the targets of these raids, many of whom have done nothing wrong except exist as a person of color.
The pretext for all this is the Trump administration’s insistence that our immigration laws would otherwise go unenforced. This federal occupation of Minnesota is, administration officials insist, about our predilection for releasing “violent criminal illegal aliens” from state custody.
I can’t stress this enough: The Trump administration has its facts wrong about Minnesota.
My question for Gov. Walz is how does he know?
I use the word “lie” with a very specific meaning: the knowing telling of an untruth with the intent to deceive.
For example, Gov. Walz declaims:
Some of the administration’s claims are ridiculous on their face. For example: It claims that 1,360 non-U.S. citizens are in Minnesota prisons. The truth: Our total state prison population is roughly 8,000, and only 207 of them are noncitizens.
The sole means the state appears to use to determine whether someone being held by its Department of Corrections is a citizen self-identification. Absent documentary evidence of inquiry beyond self-identification, the most reasonable inference is that no such inquiry occurs as a matter of routine practice. That would imply that the DoC only notifies ICE that it is detaining a non-citizen if the detainee identifies himself or herself as a non-citizen.
In other words individuals have every incentive to avoid identifying themselves as non-citizens. In this context self-identification is not neutral reporting; it is a strategic choice made under conditions where disclosure carries clear legal risk including risk of removal from the United States at the end of the prison term.
I don’t believe that Gov. Walz is lying. I think he is equivocating or, at the very least, speaking in ignorance. I am confident that the number of prisoners being held by Minnesota’s DoC is around 8,000. What we can say with confidence is not how many non-citizens are incarcerated in Minnesota but that the state’s own methodology makes confident claims impossible
