Commentary: When Latter-day Saints say to comply with ICE incursions, we’re forgetting our own history

In the wake of two recent high-profile deaths in Minnesota at the hands of immigration enforcement agents, I have seen fellow Latter-day Saints speak out against protesters, insisting that compliance with the government is the only acceptable answer. Some have even suggested that the protesters who died got what they deserved.

It is a sign of how members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have assimilated so well into the nation in the 21st century that we’ve forgotten our own history. Latter-day Saints were once defined as lawbreakers and traitors after they settled in Utah Territory.

As someone who teaches Utah history at the University of Utah, I think about such issues historically. Events in Minnesota have repeatedly brought one protracted episode of Utah history to mind, when Latter-day Saints captured national attention. Over the course of roughly 19 months in 1857 and 1858, they resorted to blockades, sabotage and fire to resist federal authority over Utah Territory. Their tactics were well beyond the type of protests witnessed in recent weeks in Minnesota.

When Latter-day Saints deemed actions emanating from Washington, D.C., to be significant breaches of constitutional norms, they didn’t comply — they resisted.

In 1857, the Latter-day Saints’ Territorial Legislature declared, “Resolved that we will maintain the Constitution and laws of the United States, so far as they are applicable to our Territory, but we will not tamely submit to being abused by the Government Officials, here in this Territory; they shall not come here to corrupt our community, set at defiance our laws, [and] trample upon the rights of the people.”

President James Buchanan’s administration interpreted this response harshly. To him, it seemed to indicate that Latter-day Saints were in rebellion against the federal government and that this meant war.

By May 1857, Buchanan ordered a 2,500-man Army to Utah and appointed Alfred Cumming of Georgia to replace church leader Brigham Young as the territory’s governor.

Historians refer to the ensuing armed intervention as the Utah War, the most extensive and expensive military expedition between the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and the Civil War (1861-65). It was aimed at U.S. citizens and foreign-born immigrants in Utah Territory.

In the present, an echo from the past

There are no perfect parallels, but the rhetoric the Trump administration has used to justify a massive influx of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota today seems an echo from the past. It’s eerily familiar to the way Washington politicians tried to justify the Utah War.

In June 1857, Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas pushed the Buchanan administration forward. He said 90% of the people of Utah Territory were “aliens by birth who have refused to become naturalized, or to take the oath of allegiance.” He called them “outlaws and alien enemies, unfit to exercise the right of self-government.” Douglas also called for a thorough investigation into Young’s alleged crimes and said if any proved true, Congress should “apply the knife and cut out this loathsome, disgusting ulcer.” Swap out Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for Young and Minnesota for Utah, and the echo begins to reverberate.

On July 24, the Latter-day Saints learned that the Army was on its way to Utah. In response, Latter-day Saint leaders ordered Nauvoo Legion troops, their territorial militia, to obstruct and paralyze the U.S. Army.

What the Latter-day Saint resistance looked like in practice was far more brazen than anything we have witnessed in Minnesota to date.

“Proceed at once to annoy them in every possible way,” Latter-day Saint leader Gen. Daniel H. Wells ordered. “Use every exertion to stampede their animals, and set fire to their trains. Burn the whole country before them and on their flanks. Keep them from sleeping by night surprises. Blockade the road by falling trees, or destroying the fords when you can.” Wells insisted that they “take no life” in these acts of protest.

In September 1857, Young declared martial law against the U.S. Army. “We are invaded by a hostile force, who are evidently assailing us to accomplish our overthrow and destruction,” he said. He decried “corrupt officials, who have brought false accusation against us to screen themselves in their own infamy.” Young argued for the Constitution to be upheld in Utah and forbade “all armed forces, of every description, from coming into this Territory under any pretense [whatsoever].”

In reaction, in December of that year, a federal grand jury indicted Latter-day Saint leaders for “high treason.” The indictment indicated that Latter-day Saints “unlawfully, falsely, maliciously and traitorously did compass, imagine, and intend to raise and levy war, insurrection, and rebellion against the said United States.”

A bloody and lingering legacy

It was a tense standoff that had the potential to escalate even further until cooler heads prevailed in 1858, when senators in Washington began to speak out. Sen. Sam Houston of Texas called the war “an intolerable evil,” while Sen. Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania said it was a “war of the administration,” which had “committed a great blunder.”

By April, Buchanan appointed a peace commission to visit Utah. Commission members offered the Latter-day Saints a pardon as long as U.S. troops remained in Utah Territory and the church’s leaders were willing to submit to U.S. law.

Even though Latter-day Saints and the Buchanan administration found their way to a resolution, there were no real winners, and terrible long-term ramifications resulted. Federal forces remained in Utah Territory, and Young was removed as governor. Worst of all, in the context of war hysteria, Latter-day Saint militia members killed roughly 120 innocent migrants on the Overland Trail in southern Utah on Sept. 11, 1857 [in what came to be known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre].

The Utah War also left a lingering legacy in Utah — a mistrust of federal authority and a proclivity to shake our collective fists at the government. Some Utahns love to complain about federal overreach or grouse about federal land ownership in the West. Yet those voices have gone silent in the face of unprecedented assertions of federal power over the past year. Where has the “don’t tread on me” resistance to the erosion of constitutional norms gone? Where are those voices who have long championed states’ rights over federal power? What happened to small government, local control, due process and the rule of law?

The assertion that the concentration of forces in Minnesota is about rooting out criminals loses credibility in light of President Donald Trump’s pardoning of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the U.S. His administration also pardoned the rioters who attacked Capitol Police on Jan. 6, 2021, including some rioters who had “prior convictions or pending charges for crimes including rape, sexual abuse of a minor, domestic violence, manslaughter, production of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking.”

Before the latest presidential election, Congress was on the verge of passing comprehensive immigration reform. But according to William A. Galston at Brookings, “it took less than four days for its support among Republicans to collapse. Why? The easiest explanation is that Republicans in both the House and Senate yielded to objections from their all-but-certain presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump.”

Republicans now control the House, the Senate and the White House and yet have not passed immigration reform. Rather than fixing what is wrong, they’re using immigration as a guise to flex federal power and erode constitutional norms. After all, if this was purely about immigration, then why deploy 3,000 agents to Minnesota — a state that, according to Pew Research Center, in 2023 had an estimated 130,000 immigrants in the country illegally versus Florida with 1.6 million or Texas with 2.1 million?

I echo the resolve from the 1857 Utah Territorial Legislature, this time in solidarity with Minnesota. We as a nation cannot “submit to being abused by Government Officials … they shall not come here to corrupt our community, set at defiance our laws, [and] trample upon the rights of the people.”

Note to readers • W. Paul Reeve is the Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies and former chair of the history department at the University of Utah, where he teaches courses on Utah history, Mormon history and the history of the U.S. West. He’s the author of multiple books. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.