This brutal invasion would horrify our nation's founders

The Twin Cities metropolitan area is under occupation by armed federal agents. According to the Census Reporter, there are roughly 3.7 million people living in the metro area and there may already be 3,000 militarized federal agents occupying our city. An additional 1,500 active duty troops from the army’s 11th Airborne Division are on standby, ready for deployment to Minnesota.

Let’s put that in perspective. During the last year of his first term, President Donald Trump negotiated a full withdrawal from Afghanistan, which at the time was a nation of 39 million people, to be completed in early 2021. In 2019, there were between 12,000 and 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. At the start of the Biden administration, there were only 2,500 U.S. soldiers remaining there.

I say this because the Trump administration has decided to send more armed federal agents to the Twin Cities than Joe Biden inherited in Afghanistan. That’s too many armed federal agents under any circumstances.

Two U.S. citizens have already been killed who would be alive today absent the occupation. Many U.S. citizens have been detained and physically abused, and many more such instances have been endured by legally authorized immigrants.

We are about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Founders of the United States were intensely suspicious of standing armies in peace time. If they were British citizens, the colonists asked, why were the Red Coats stationed in Boston? They included, among their reasons for dissolving their ties to King George, the following:

“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”

In 1787, at the Constitutional Convention, future President James Madison made the following observation:

“A standing military force, with an overgrown executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”

It was clear to the nation’s Founders that federal forces were meant to fight foreign enemies and defend the United States from other nations. Among their first actions after the end of the Revolutionary War was to disband the Continental Army. Federal forces were never meant to occupy American cities and rural areas.

Some might suggest that the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States constitute a foreign invasion. Hogwash. The undocumented here come from many nations and arrived for as many reasons. It was not and is not an organized foreign invasion.

U.S. federal forces are meant to protect us from foreign threats, not to occupy the streets and farms of America in unmarked cars and wearing masks and picking up people without judicial warrants based on how they look, or speak, or what neighborhood they live in, or how they get to work, or where they work.

What is happening in Minnesota is un-American. It would make the Founders wonder what has become of their project. After 250 years, we now resemble the British more than we do the Patriots, except the Red Coats had the courage to show their faces.

• Jeff Kolnick is a retired professor of history. He is a founder of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy and he served his faculty union as a negotiator and local president.