The Department of Education referred its Minnesota transgender athletes investigation to the Justice Department on Monday, a major step toward pulling funding for the Democrat-run state’s education and high school sports agencies.

Minnesota has so far refused to negotiate with the Trump administration on the issue after the federal government found that the state violated Title IX by allowing boys to compete against girls. Now, Minnesota is close to losing its federal funding from the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, The Daily Caller reported. The DOJ referral comes as the Trump administration targets Minnesota in its immigration enforcement operation and over allegations of massive fraud.

“As Minnesota reels from a fraud scandal, @GovTimWalz is fighting to keep men in women’s sports,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote on X. “Now, he’ll have to make his case in court.”

The Education Department and HHS said last September that their investigation found the Minnesota State High School League was in violation of Title IX by allowing boys who identified as girls to compete against girls in high school sports. Minnesota was the center of a sports controversy last spring when a male pitcher dominated the girls’ state softball tournament. The Trump administration also said that Minnesota allowed boys to compete against girls in Alpine skiing, Nordic skiing, lacrosse, track and field, and volleyball.

The Minnesota Department of Education has argued that Title IX “requires schools provide transgender students with the right to participate in…athletics in a manner consistent with their gender identity” and that “transgender and gender nonconforming students should be afforded the opportunity to use the restroom of their choice” — positions that directly contradict the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law.

“Despite repeated opportunities to comply with Title IX, Minnesota has chosen defiance – continuing to jeopardize the safety of women and girls, deny them fair competition, and erode their right to equal access in educational programs and activities,” McMahon told The Daily Caller.

“The Trump Administration will not stop until accountability is delivered for Minnesota’s students,” she added.

Minnesota leftist Attorney General Keith Ellison sued the Trump administration over the president’s executive order on keeping men out of women’s sports, arguing that the Trump administration is “bullying vulnerable children.” Ellison said last year that Trump does not have the authority to override Minnesota state law that allows trans-identifying athletes to compete in sports categories that match their gender identities.

Trump signed an executive order in February banning boys and men from competing against female athletes, threatening to strip federal funding from states that don’t obey the order. The Trump administration has also gone after Maine and California for violating Title IX protections for women and girls.

All hell has now broken loose in Minneapolis after another shooting on Saturday involving federal officers and a person who allegedly attempted to interfere with them in the pursuit of their legal duty.

That person’s name was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis man.

The Left continues to ramp up this chaos. They are doing this on purpose. There is no question that this is a purposeful attempt to undermine federal law enforcement in their pursuit of duty. And if that ends with ugly images on television, then that is exactly what they want.

They are desperate for ugly images on television because they believe the images will undermine the Trump administration’s immigration program and the Trump administration itself.

Let us be very clear. More people are being deported from red states than from blue states right now. But you’re not seeing these ugly images happening in red states.

Why?

Because red states are helping to facilitate the deportation of people who should not be here. Red states are helping to ensure that criminal illegal immigrants are not in the system. And when they arrest somebody for a crime and that person is an illegal immigrant, they then tell federal law enforcement, federal authorities, ICE, and Border Patrol, so the person can be deported.

Blue states, sanctuary cities, and sanctuary states are not doing that. That is what necessitates more boots on the ground from the federal government in these areas. And then local and state politicians have suggested that this amounts to a Gestapo-like occupation.

They’ve been driving their own supporters out into the streets. Some of those supporters are then obstructing federal law enforcement, committing federal crimes.

When that happens, the likelihood of terrible incidents goes way up. That is the simple logic, and that appears to be something that left-wing politicians want and are desperate for. It appears to be something that they think they can run on if they put ugly images on your television of immigration agents in confrontations with Americans.

And if some of those incidents end with death, then that means they will be able to undermine their political opposition.

That is despicable. It truly is. We should all — Democrats, Republicans, and independents — be in favor of criminal illegal immigrants going home, not being in the United States.

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This is not a controversial issue. The necessity for a larger federal presence or harder implementation measures is only being made necessary because there are Democratic politicians and members of the legacy media who have decided to ramp up the rhetoric to facilitate the chaos.

This is indeed planned. That is a reality. So that ends with bad situations.

We’ve been saying this for months. You have the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, coming out and saying that ICE agents are like the Gestapo or like the KKK. You have Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey saying the same, If you have all Democratic politicians suggesting that protesting ICE agents is not only a decent thing to do, but a positive and good thing to do, and then treating obstruction of federal law enforcement officers as a form of legitimate protest —which is the gray line they always seem to blur — you will end up with more confrontations, more violence, and more possible deaths under disputed circumstances.

There should always be a full investigation, not because I believe the officers are guilty of murder or manslaughter, but because I believe that it will exonerate the officers. And if it doesn’t, you need the full investigation to ensure that there’s continued trust in law enforcement.

Those investigations should go forward. They should be perfectly objective. They should not be railroading someone, as we have seen in the past with Derek Chauvin and George Floyd. The cases should not be adjudicated in the media.

That’s why the best response from everyone in the federal government to Walz to Frey should be a full, thorough investigation.

But of course, the biggest issue is why these incidents keep happening in the first place.

It is not just a matter of individual incidents that are randomly cropping up. This is not random. It is happening in a specific city at a specific time, in a specific place for a reason. 

It is being driven deliberately. I can’t emphasize this enough:  It is being deliberately driven by members of the Democratic higher echelons. It is being specifically driven by the legacy media.

I repeat: You are not seeing this in red areas, and more deportations are being carried out in those areas than in the blue areas. That’s a statistical fact. More deportations are taking place in Texas and Florida than are taking place in Minneapolis. 

But all the tape you’re seeing is from Minneapolis.

 Why is this not happening again in New Orleans? Why is this not happening in Dallas, Texas? Why isn’t this happening in red areas?

The answer is obvious. Tim Walz — who’s been absolutely abhorrent throughout this entire debacle, a terrible governor, a disgrace to the country, a man who was nominated for vice president of the United States by the Democratic Party — declared, “Minnesota has had it. This is sickening. The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.”

The basic idea here is that Walz won’t help by actively facilitating the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants. He’s going to facilitate the obstruction of law enforcement, and then, when things get violent, he’s going to tell federal law enforcement to pull out.

“They think they can provoke us into abandoning our values,”  he wrote on Facebook. “They are wrong. We will keep the peace. We will secure justice for our neighbors. And we will see this occupation end.”

I don’t think Tim Walz is interested in keeping things peaceful in Minnesota. I see very little evidence that he is. Walz is building an entire permission structure for violence against officers.

Over the weekend, he said, “Quit referring to these people as law enforcement. They are not law enforcement.”

What do you think he is saying to protesters? What do you think he’s saying when he says they’re not law enforcement?

He’s saying if they’re not, then what are they then? They must be lawbreakers because they’re wandering around committing crimes against other American citizens.

Thus, he creates a permission structure for all of this.

He compared illegal immigrant children in Minnesota to Anne Frank.

No.

Anne Frank was not attempting to immigrate to the country from which she was deported. Anne Frank was a citizen of the country in which she lived. She was sent to Auschwitz and then transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus. That is not the same thing.

American law enforcement agents, ICE officers, and Border Patrol agents are not Nazis. They are not the Gestapo.

This is a purposefully driven chaos operation pushed by Democrats for political purposes.