Transcript of Anti-ICE Protests Grow & Storm Response Scrutiny | 2.3.26

Anti-ice agitators ratchet up the pressure on businesses to pick aside as protests continue to expand across the country.

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I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor, John Bickley. It's Tuesday, February third, and this is Morning Wire.

The House plans to vote on reopening the government today, hoping to minimize any damage.

We'll demonstrate that, and we'll push forward our priorities on the integrity of election. We're going to get this job done, get government reopened.

And In the aftermath of Winter Storm Furn, frustration grows as thousands of Americans remain in the dark.

The amount of unpreparedness runs pretty deep. It's convenient to blame it on NES because they're the most visible, but it goes way deeper than that.

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The Anti-Ice protest campaign is growing with left-wing activists now putting pressure on businesses to denounce ICE.

Daily Wire reporter Tim pierce, is here to talk about the latest in the anti-ICE campaign. So Tim, we've seen these pressure tactics before where advertisers are pressured to cut ties with right-wing creators. What pressure are businesses is now feeling with regards to federal law enforcement?

Yeah, businesses that don't even have ties to ICE are under pressure to take an explicit stance against the agency. Target seems to be the main mark for demonstrators right now. Over the weekend, similar to the protests that stormed into City's Church, dozens of activists march through Targets all over Minneapolis. Here's what some of that sounded like from Frontline's TP USA.

People united will never be defeated.

If we don't get it, shut it down.

If we don't get it, shut it down.

Now, Target hasn't made any show of support for ICE or commented one way or the other. So what do these protesters want them to do?

They wanted to get on the anti-ICE bandwagon. They want the company to publicly condemn ICE and ban agents from conducting operations on target property or even entering stores. Activists even went to target headquarters in Minneapolis on Monday and called out its new CEO, Michael Fittleke, who officially stepped into the top job on Sunday.

Now, the activist's approach seems contrast pretty starkly with Tom Homan's. He arrived in Minneapolis last week, but has kept a pretty low profile this whole time. Do we have any sense of what progress he's made?

Yeah, he hasn't been out in public much, and he said that that's because the progress he is looking for is easier when it's done out of the public eye. He did give a press conference late last week, though, and sounded optimistic. Here's some of that.

This administration is absolutely focused on identifying removal islands that pose a public safety threat and national security threats.

You can't fix problems if you don't have discussions.

I will note a bit of irony here is that the anti-ICE activists and Tom Homan may actually be on the same page regarding Target. The Bordasar's message since the early days of last year has been that if state and local officials don't help the federal government enforce immigration law for dangerous illegal aliens, then agents will be forced to go into places like Target to conduct its business. That invasive action by ICE is much less necessary local law enforcement cooperate. And that appears to be the partnership Homen is attempting to set up in Minneapolis.

Now, shifting gears a bit, ICE was a major theme at the Grammys on Sunday night, and now some of the artists who made speeches are getting some backlash What happened there?

Right. As is typical for these awards shows, the vast majority of the stars affirm the politics of the far left. And ice was the main punching bag on Sunday night. A lot of stars were wearing special ice out gear, and award winners frequently recently made anti-ice statements to a lot of loud applause from the audience. Here's what that sounded like from Billy Eilish.

No one is illegal on stolen land. Yeah, it's just really hard to know what to say and what to do right now. I feel really hopeful in this room, and I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting. Our voices really do matter, and the people matter. I say, sorry.

Now, if you're not watching the video and can't read lips, Eilish, during that brief pause in the audio, said something that sounds like duck ice. Of course, Eilish took heat online for her comments, with plenty of users on X, pointing out that she doesn't appear too eager to turn over her $2. 3 million horse ranch in Glendale. Over to any dispossessed owners of that land anytime soon.

Tim, thanks for reporting. Good to be on.

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Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been frantically working to end the government shutdown before its effects start to really be felt.

Joining us now with the latest is Daily WIRE Political reporter, Cameron Arkan. Morning, Cameron. So let's start with the President. He waded into the shutdown yesterday to try to prevent hiccups in the House. What did he say?

So the President said no changes to the spending bill as it stands right now. As we saw over the weekend, the government did shut down, but the Senate was able to pass spending bills per an agreement between the White House and Chuck Schumer, basically saying, Hey, we're going to separate Homeland Security Funding. We're going to pass a short term solution to fund that Department while we work out some possible restrictions on to immigration enforcement. But for now, he's telling the House, We don't want anything added. We want to get the government back open. So here's some of what the President said in a true social post. He said, There can be no changes at this time, saying he's working hard with Speaker Mike Johnson on this right now. Obviously, we could see an end to the shutdown today, but these situations can be very, very fluid. The goal for the President is he wants this to get out of the House with without it going back to the Senate, so that way the government can reopen and they can go back to these Homeland Security negotiations.

All right, so some real pressure now from the President to get this thing passed without further headaches. Obviously, this all started over a split on the funding for the Department of Homeland Security. You mentioned that. What can we expect with that debate going forward?

So something that's really critical with this is a continuing resolution, if passed, as it stands right now, would go until February 13th. A lot of lawmakers aren't too keen on whether or not that's going to be enough time. Meanwhile, you have people like Chuck Schumer have a whole laundry list of reforms they want to see to federal immigration enforcement. For example, a pivot from a lot of administrative warrants, less of a process, to judicial warrants for immigration arrest, which could really make it a lot more difficult for immigration authorities to get the numbers that they're seeking and some of the arrests that they're wanting to get as well. So obviously on the safety end, though, Christie Noem did announced that officers that are in Minneapolis are going to start wearing body cameras. We could also potentially see some other compromise changes as this goes down. We'll end up seeing what actually comes out of these talks maybe in a couple of weeks.

Now, I know some Republicans were pushing for the Save Act to be included in this spending package. What is that legislation? Remind us, and what comes next for it.

So the Save Act was a piece of legislation that some members of the House wanted to be included into the spending package as it stands right now, which would have sent it back to the Senate. Now, that doesn't seem like it's going to happen because you did see the House already passed the Save Act. Instead, you have a bunch of lawmakers now calling on Mitch McDonald to get that out his committee independently and to the Senate for a floor vote and then to the President. Now, what that act actually does is it's called Documentary Proof of Citizenship. And what that means is when you go and register to vote, you have to, instead of just checking a box, actually prove that you are a citizen of the United States. Now, you have people like Schumer, as we mentioned, saying that this is like a Jim Crow era relic, right? But this has already been a lot in a few states already. We've seen this already in practice. This would just take that policy nationwide.

So what comes next? What should we expect today and the coming days in this process?

So the hope is that the government shutdown will end today. Obviously, when it comes to Congress, things can change very rapidly. But the goal, at least to the President, is to the House gets this out and it gets to his desk. Keep in mind, the House already voted to back these spending bills last month before we saw some of the action in Minneapolis, which resulted in that Senate deal. So There's already a lot of movement to begin with here, and we had a government shutdown last year, so not a great look to keep this dragging on, really, for either party at this point.

Right. Both parties motivated to get this thing moving forward. Cameron, thank you so much for reporting.

Thank you.

The response to the crippling power outages from Winter Storm Fern has frustrated many communities across the country, including here in the Nashville area. It's been more than a week, and more than 20,000 residents are still without power in the music city. It's a situation declared unacceptable.

Daily Wire reporter, Lyndon Blake, joins us to explain the holdup. Lyndon, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Now, as one of the many residents who lost power for a week, what was The Holdup in Nashville?

You are one of many people that have had frustrations with how Nashville's handled this. You had celebrities, including Reese Witherspoon, John Rich, speaking out about the lack of urgency it seemed that Nashville Electric Services had. The holdup really came down to a lack of preparation, and now Nashville mayor, Freddie O'Neill, is calling it unacceptable. Here's what went wrong. It was a twofold. First, you had the NES CEO, Theresa Boyles-Afflin. She focused this past summer on saving Nashville's tree canopy instead of trimming back those trees that were clearly too close to power lines. Then when you have a natural disaster, like we had a Winter Storm Fern, you have a lot of these trees on top of the power lines, and you can't get to the power lines until you get rid of the trees. There was a lack of enough people to come get those trees off the power lines. Here's Davis Hunt, the Editor-in-Chief of the Nashville Pamphletier with more.

The added difficulty they've had is they didn't have enough vegetation workers. So a lineman goes in and repairs the line, but you typically have vegetation workers go in and clear off the tree so the lineman can work. And so there's two concurrent bottlenecks happening there, lack of vegetation workers and lack of lineman.

So again, NESA CEO, her comments about trying to save Nashville's trees came back to the forefront all the trees that fell during the storm on top of the power lines.

Now, as a resident here, it wasn't just that the branches came down. It was also that we didn't really hear anything from leadership. So what has the mayor said?

Yeah, well, the mayor has finally spoken up. It took a little while for him, too, which led to more people being frustrated and being like, Where is the leadership in the city when so many people are without power? There was a big difference in how mayor O'Neill responded to the ICE enforcement that happened last year in Nashville and how he responded to this year's ICE storm.

If you have the ICE raids, the ICE immigration enforcement operation that happened on May fourth in Nashville. That was a Sunday. By the following Monday, the next day, May fifth, mayor O'Neill had put together the Belonging Fund in partnership with a local nonprofit, which was designed to route resources to people affected by the immigration enforcement operation. In contrast, after the storm hit Sunday night, O'Neill took five whole days to get the Winter Storm Recovery Fund. They just didn't take the storm seriously or the threat of the storm seriously. I grew up here, so if you grew up here, you have the memory of the 1994 storm. People still talk about it yearly, anytime it snows. So there is still this reminder of that and how bad that was.

To put this in perspective, when Nashville started out with 100 linemen on standby, you had Duke Energy in Charlotte, North Carolina on standby for Winter Storm Fern with at least 18,000 linemen. That, to me, was like, whoa, That just shows one state that was ready to go to work and one state that was already operating behind the ball.

Well, this was a major test for Mayor Freddie O'Neill, and for a lot of us, it was a failure. Lyndon, thanks for reporting. Thanks.

Thanks for waking up with us. For those listening to the show, you can also now watch the show free on Daily Wire+. We'll be back this evening with more news you need to know.

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