ICE enforcement is echoing the Fugitive Slave Act

The scenes playing out in Minneapolis in recent weeks offer an object lesson in the dangers of federal overreach.

- Stephen Mihm, Tribune News Service

People walk near a memorial to Renee Good on Sunday in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

(File/Laurence France Presse)

After the killings of two American citizens — to say nothing of the brutal treatment of immigrants, both legal and otherwise — the outrage is palpable and growing. This is yet another moment when a little history might have helped Donald Trump.The president is apparently blissfully unaware that many attempts to deploy the federal government to impose unpopular policies on an unwilling populace don't just fail — they end up destroying those foolish enough to wield that power in the first place. Case in point: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a deeply unpopular law that effectively radicalized large swaths of the American electorate. It led to widespread civil disobedience, the destruction of a major political party and, thankfully, accelerated the end of slavery itself. Its lessons are ones Republicans should ponder — and fast.

The Fugitive Slave Act was part of a larger set of bills known collectively as the Compromise of 1850, which sought to balance, ever so delicately, the political interests of the North and the South on the question of slavery. This was in the wake of the admission of territory acquired during the Mexican-American War, and the measure was a concession to pro-slavery forces. It gave Southerners a reliable means to recapture enslaved people who had run away. An enslaver need only provide a basic affidavit to a federal marshal to have a suspected fugitive arrested, at which point the detainee would be brought before federal judges, or, just as often, federal appointees known as “commissioners,” who would hear the case.