With nearly every GOP and Democrat governor thus far supporting open borders and even more refugees at a time of record legal and illegal immigration, the fight now moves on to the counties. This is the opportunity for the grassroots to be heard and to demand of county officials that they take a pause from lining the pockets of taxpayer-funded resettlement groups for a year. Beltrami County, Minnesota, is showing the way.

Earlier this week, the county in far north Minnesota became only the second jurisdiction in the nation to formally reject refugee resettlement. Pursuant to Trump’s order, an affirmative vote of support is needed in order to greenlight State Department funding for resettlement contractors in a given county, so simply doing nothing has the same result as a rejection. Nonetheless, it’s important that county governments be prodded to make a statement of rejection.

When the people are actually informed of what is happening to their communities, they overwhelmingly reject this racket. During the Tuesday night meeting at Beltrami County’s administration building, over 200 people turned out to watch the vote. At one point, Commissioner Craig Gaasvig asked for a show of hands from the crowd if they opposed resettlement. According to the Twin Cities Pioneer Press, “A clear majority of the crowd raised their hands.” The resolution to reject resettlement passed 3-2, with commissioners Richard Anderson, Craig Gaasvig, and Jim Lucachick voting in favor and Reed Olson and Tim Sumner voting against it.

Trump carried Beltrami County by 10 points in 2016, and it’s very much the sort of swing county he needs to hold in order to win re-election. Historically, it has voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Trump shifted the electoral balance by about 21 points from the 2012 election.

Minnesota is a very important state in the battle over fundamental transformation of our communities. Although Beltrami is far north of the population centers in the Twin Cities and hasn’t taken refugees in recent years, those who showed up at the meeting are undoubtedly aware of the cultural, social, and financial problems the state has had from the influx of tens of thousands of Somali refugees and thousands more as derivatives of chain migration. Not only has there been a terror-recruiting problem among Somalis in Minnesota, there is a lot of street crime, as some of the same clans who fought each other in Somalia are dividing along the same lines on the streets of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. Violent incidents spiked 60 percent from 2010 to 2017 in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, a trend authorities blame on a “simmering rivalry between St. Paul and Minneapolis East African gangs as a cause of much of the violence.”