If Republicans weren’t worried about a blowback to President Donald Trump’s deadly immigration crackdown in Minnesota, they should be now.
Democrats won a state House race in Minnesota on Tuesday by 91 percentage points, improving on former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 performance in the district by a massive 20 points, as voters showed their outrage over the killings of two Minneapolis residents at the hands of Trump’s immigration forces.
To put that into perspective, the Democratic victor—lawyer and community advocate Meg Luger-Nikolai—won the race by nearly the same margin as another special election in which the Democrat ran unopposed.
The 91-point margin of victory was so large that it rivals the margin that deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad won in a sham election in 2021, which has become an inside joke among election watchers to refer to especially large margins of victory.
Ultimately, Democrats’ two special-election victories on Tuesday once again give their party control of the state House, restoring unified control to Minnesota’s government.
More than that, it shows that anger at Trump’s immigration crackdown is real. If he doesn’t reverse course, it could cause what is expected to be a bad midterms night for the GOP to become a catastrophic one.
You can tell Republicans are scared because they are actually changing their tone on Trump’s immigration brutality, albeit with mealy-mouthed bothsidesism and without promising tangible action to stop what is happening.
Indeed, two Latino Republican lawmakers warned Trump on Tuesday that if he doesn’t stop trampling on people’s constitutional rights as he tries to carry out his deportation agenda, then the GOP will suffer.
“I’m not comfortable with what’s happening in Minneapolis at this time,” Republican Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida told Newsmax on Tuesday, adding that Trump’s immigration goons targeting “grandmothers, somebody taking care of kids that’s been here 10 or 15 years” is “hurting our chances at the midterms.”
Two other Republican lawmakers went as far as to call for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—who oversees immigration enforcement and who slandered the two Minnesotans killed by immigration agents as “domestic terrorist[s]”—to resign.
Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both said it was time for Noem to go.
“She has taken this administration into the ground on an issue that we should own,” Tillis told reporters on Tuesday.
But don’t expect Trump to make changes. On Wednesday, he wrote in a menacing Truth Social post that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is “PLAYING WITH FIRE!” by saying that local officials cannot and will not enforce federal immigration law.
At the end of the day, Trump is a malignant narcissist who thinks he can do no wrong and who relishes seeing his opponents suffer. He’s been that way for 79 years and will not change. That gives congressional Republicans a choice: They can either keep letting Trump get away with literal murder, or use their power to rein him in.
We’re not holding our breath for the latter to take place.
Just look at the cowardice from Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican refusing to alter a DHS funding bill in order to rein in ICE, even as its agents terrorize residents of her own state.