Keep Out
When you have a business that is open to the public, inviting the public to come in and spend money, you can’t be picky about who comes in.
You can have rules—no shirt, no shoes, no service, for example—but you can’t deny people access due to their affiliation.
Apparently both a hotel and a McDonald’s restaurant in the Twin Cities recently banned federal ICE officials from their establishments…not allowing them to make hotel reservations in the one case, posting a sign on the restaurant door along with private security in place. The backlash was swift; the hotel lost its national franchise status, and the restaurant chain was targeted for boycott on social media.
To know that such a ban is wrong takes nothing other than substituting a designated group for the one targeted, ICE officials. What if you said no one of a certain gender was allowed? Or a certain religion? Or skin color?
Absent anything else, those sorts of prohibitions would clearly be wrong and criticized appropriately.
But there’s apparently a sizeable number of folks who have no problem with banning law enforcement officials from being served at such establishments.
There’s an awful lot to unpack concerning what’s going on in Minnesota—the fraud and the folks here illegally. But the way to fix it, or to lower the temperature, is not to ban paying customers broadly without further cause…because it in no way makes the situation less volatile.
