If you naively thought, as I did, that Wednesday’s self-defensive ICE shooting of leftist agitator Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis would bring about at least a temporary reduction in hostilities toward law enforcement, well, think again.

Yesterday afternoon, in antifa’s capital city of Portland, Oregon, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot two suspected Tren de Aragua dirtbags in self-defense after one of them weaponized their vehicle and tried to run over the federal agents. The Department of Homeland Security posted the details earlier this morning:

The driver of the vehicle, Luis David Nico Moncada is a criminal illegal alien from Venezuela and suspected Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally entered the U.S. in 2022 and was RELEASED into the country by the Biden administration. Since then, he was arrested for DUI and unauthorized use of a vehicle. He has a final order of removal.

The passenger, Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras is a criminal illegal alien from Venezuela and is associated with Tren de Aragua. She illegally entered the U.S. in 2023 near El Paso, Texas, and was RELEASED into this country by the Biden administration. Since illegally entering, Contreras played an active role in a Tren de Aragua prostitution ring and was involved with a prior shooting in Portland.

Not surprisingly, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek immediately sided with the illegal alien gang members, claiming that the incident was “instigated by the reckless agenda of the Trump administration.”

Kotek added, “While the details of the incident remain limited, one thing is very clear: When a president endorses tearing families apart and attempts to govern through fear and hate rather than shared values, you foster an environment of lawlessness and recklessness.”

Thus, the Left’s soft-on-crime crusade continues apace, as does its pernicious lie that law enforcement is racist.

I’m guessing that Kotek and her ilk didn’t get the memo that today, January 9, is National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day. Even DC Mayor Muriel Bowser had the decency to acknowledge it.

Our nation’s immigration officers are fast becoming the running backs of law enforcement. By that I mean: Their career window is brief, their work is hazardous, and they don’t get paid nearly enough.

Michael Anton warned of this soft-on-crime trend in his prescient 2020 book The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return:

America, or large parts of it, appears to have lost the will to enforce the law. This trend — the reversal of one of the great public policy triumphs of the last generation; namely, beating back the massive crime wave that began in the mid-1960s — is not merely making our cities dirtier, more stressful, and more dangerous. It’s literally getting people killed. Homicide rates, which had been declining across the land since the early 1990s, began to tick up after a safely reelected Barack Obama let loose his inner “community organizer” and sided with the hard left against cops and law-and-order DAs. The trickle becomes a surge and then a flood.

Anton’s assessment isn’t necessarily unique. It merely picks up where Heather Mac Donald left off. Mac Donald, who has extensively chronicled the Left’s War on Cops, called Barack Obama’s ruinous eight years in office “the most anti-law-enforcement administration in memory.”

Which it was, until Basement Joe Biden got those 81 million votes and sneered, “Hold my Imodium.”

Donald Trump isn’t complaining, but we have to hope that he and his administration are up to the task of cleaning up this mess.