The Democrats’ Version of January 6
When Outrage Becomes Excuse: The Hypocrisy in Today’s Anti-ICE Fury
Let’s Call a Spade a Spade
I wrote earlier this month about what’s actually happening with ICE enforcement and why people are dying (“What Is ICE Doing and Why Are People Getting Killed?”). The short version: civilians are inserting themselves into federal enforcement actions, politicians are encouraging it, and the predictable is happening. This piece is about something broader—the pattern of behavior that’s driving it.
I usually prefer to build a case before stating conclusions. Not this time. Let’s cut to the chase.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, his supporters rioted on January 6 because they couldn’t accept that their guy lost—and Trump couldn’t accept it either. Now we have a new January 6, only this time it’s the Democrats. They’ve lost twice to the same man. Why? Because two consecutive Democratic administrations failed at governance, and voters noticed.
Democrats see themselves as God’s gift to righteousness. The majority of the country disagrees—and the Democrats cannot accept that. Broken immigration was one of the issues that sank them. The worst inflation in forty years was another. Rather than address the poor governance that cost them the White House twice, they’re looking for a shortcut: find an issue, send their own thugs into the streets, and create chaos, hoping to manufacture an issue for the next election cycle and to create some relevance for themselves in this one.
That’s what the anti-ICE movement has become. No moral high road. Not reform. Not legislation. Just noise—designed to obscure failure with fury.
Here’s the difference: Trump’s January 6 rioters got it out of their system in an afternoon. Five people died. The Democrats are still at it a year into the new administration. Their chaos has already killed more. Since January 2025, immigration agents have shot 26 people, killing at least seven—most of them U.S. citizens. Add the 36 deaths in ICE custody over the past year, and you have a body count that dwarfs the Capitol riot. Before politicians and activists turned routine arrests into street confrontations, deaths during ICE enforcement were almost unheard of. Now people are dying who wouldn’t have. The people responsible for these deaths are not Trump and ICE—they’re the ones who think they’re on the moral high road. Self-reflection is not something they excel at.
The people inciting this chaos are sore-loser Democratic politicians and left-wing political groups who are essentially shut out of government for the time being—and can’t accept it. More importantly, they can’t accept why they’re shut out: their own incompetence. The country voted against another four years of poor governance. Rather than reflect on that, they’re lighting fires in the streets.
The Double Standard
January 6 was condemned not just because people were angry, but because anger was used to justify lawlessness and intimidation. The lesson Democrats insisted we learn was simple: political grievances do not grant permission to undermine institutions or threaten those tasked with enforcing the law. That principle should not evaporate when the institution in question happens to be ICE.
Yet it has.
Many of the same voices who rightly condemned January 6 as an unforgivable assault on democratic norms are suddenly struggling to apply those standards when the target is an agency they dislike. When activists disrupt enforcement actions or portray ICE agents as inherently illegitimate, Democratic leaders retreat into rhetorical fog. They’ll say they oppose “violence in all forms,” while spending far more time attacking ICE itself than condemning the conduct of protesters who cross the line. The message is unmistakable: the problem isn’t lawlessness—it’s who the law is being enforced against.
The uncomfortable reality is this: undermining law enforcement because you dislike the law is no more defensible on the left than it was on the right on January 6. Different motives do not excuse the same behavior. If democracy depends on anything, it depends on consistency.
Immigration as Prop
This selective outrage exposes a deeper truth: many Democrats don’t actually care about fixing immigration. They care about using it as a moral cudgel.
If they were serious, we would see sustained efforts to reform asylum rules, modernize visa systems, fund immigration courts, and clarify enforcement priorities through legislation. Instead, immigration becomes a prop—useful for fundraising emails, protest slogans, and virtue signaling, but inconvenient when solutions require compromise or political risk.
ICE exists because Congress created laws and then failed, year after year, to update them. Demonizing the agency tasked with carrying out those laws doesn’t make the system more humane—it just makes it more chaotic. And chaos is not compassion.
The Media’s Role
The politicians aren’t acting alone. The news media is pouring gasoline on this fire.
Every confrontation gets wall-to-wall coverage. Endless video loops. Breathless commentary. Rush to judgment before the facts are in. This isn’t journalism—it’s theater, staged to generate clicks for their corporate masters selling soap and toothpaste.
Conflict sells. The more dramatic the footage, the more eyeballs on screens, the more advertising revenue. So cameras show up at ICE operations, and when cameras show up, people perform. They escalate. The media’s presence isn’t neutral observation—it’s fuel.
Notice how the coverage works: Renee Good was a mother of three, a poet, an artist. All designed to generate sympathy and frame her as a victim of brutal ICE agents. But none of that has anything to do with what happened. Why not mention she liked pizza? Because that wouldn’t serve the narrative. The relevant facts are what she was doing at the scene of an enforcement action—not her hobbies or how many children she had. That’s not journalism. That’s manipulation.
The media has every incentive to aggravate this situation and no incentive to calm it down. A peaceful resolution doesn’t trend on social media. A shooting does. They’re not informing the public—they’re inflaming it. And when the next person gets killed at the next confrontation the media hyped, they’ll cover that too. With the same breathless urgency. And the cycle continues.
The Bottom Line
Americans deserve better than moral relativism dressed up as righteousness. If violence, intimidation, and obstruction are wrong—and they are—they are wrong no matter whose cause they serve.
And if Democrats want to be taken seriously on immigration, they’ll have to do more than protest enforcement. They’ll have to govern.
Until then, the hypocrisy will remain impossible to ignore.