DHS Secretary holds an immigration press conference in a windowless basement room while hundreds protest outside.

The Secretary of Homeland Security flew to the Twin Cities on Friday to give a press conference about Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. She did not give the press conference at the federal courthouse. She did not give it at the field office of ICE, downtown, where the press had been parked for weeks. She gave it at Fort Snelling. In the Whipple Building. In a windowless room in the basement of the Whipple Building.

Hon. I had to look up Whipple. The Whipple Building is one of the few federal facilities in the Twin Cities with a perimeter that the Secretary’s detail considered defensible against a public crowd. The location was selected, as far as anybody can tell, for the perimeter.

The crowd on the perimeter, when she landed, was several hundred people. The Reformer, which is a small but careful local paper, put it at “hundreds.” The chants, it reported, “did not reach the windowless room of the Whipple Building where Noem spoke.”

That is the sentence. That is the whole sentence. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, in a building with no windows, in a room with no view of the protest she chose her venue to avoid, on a Friday in October.

I have been a waitress for thirty years. I have served politicians in the diner. The good ones, the rare good ones, will sit at the counter where everyone can see them, even when there is heat on the door. The medium ones will sit at the booth in the back, quiet, hoping nobody recognizes them. The not-good ones will go to a different restaurant entirely and have an aide tell the press where they are.

This was the third option.

The argument from DHS will be that the Secretary’s security required the indoor venue. The argument has merit. The Secretary’s security does require careful planning. The Secretary, on Friday, had advance notice of a planned protest, and the Secretary’s planners had options.

You ever notice how the people who tell you they want to communicate with the public always seem to do their communicating on the side of the building where the public cannot reach them.

That ought to concern you. Fort Snelling, which is the site she chose, also happens to be the site where in 1862 the U.S. Army interned 1,600 Dakota people. The Secretary chose the building. The history was already there.