John Oliver took a moment during the Sunday night return of “Last Week Tonight” to applaud an “excellent” anti-ICE demonstration at a live AEW wrestling match this year.
“It is, frankly, no wonder anti-ICE sentiment has spread to places that you might not even expect,” Oliver said near the top of Sunday’s show, referencing ICE’s polarizing actions in Minnesota in January and February, which resulted — among other things — in the deaths of Minneapolis residents Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. To prove his point about the recent, growing wave of anti-ICE sentiment, Oliver pointed to a clip of a televised, live AEW match being interrupted early by its crowd’s “f—k ICE” chant.
“Excellent! Well done to everyone involved there,” Oliver said with a laugh. “From the crowds getting their point across in the perfect way to [wrestler] MJF going full Jim from ‘The Office’ into the camera.” The “Last Week Tonight” host went on to blast the Trump administration for provoking widespread anger in a state as famously nice as Minnesota, telling his viewers, “To the extent they ever had it, ICE and Border Patrol have clearly lost the public’s trust.”
“You know you are acting like a bunch of dicks when you’re provoking that level of response in Minnesota, a state whose whole thing is being ‘Minnesota Nice.’ They put it on merch! Other states couldn’t pull that off, especially because ‘Florida Nice’ sounds like a brand of pills you buy from the gas station that makes your heart explode,” Oliver joked. “This does seem like a turning point for this administration on immigration.”
“Polls show the majority of Americans do not approve of what’s been happening and nor should they,” Oliver continued. “For all Trump’s talk of targeting the worst of the worst, that rings pretty hollow when you see agents doing things like dragging a U.S. citizen out of his house and his underwear through the snow and taking a 5-year-old into custody.” You can watch the full “Last Week Tonight” segment yourself below.
Oliver celebrated Border Czar Tom Homan’s withdrawal of ICE agents from Minnesota, but warned that things may not get any better. “I am glad for any draw down that takes place in Minnesota, if it indeed happens. But even if every agent leaves town, much larger problems are going to remain both there and on the national level,” Oliver explained. “We are going to continue to see this administration obsessively pursue Stephen Miller’s stated goal of racking up 3,000 arrests a day.”
The “Last Week Tonight” host subsequently launched into a “long overdue” exploration of the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that ICE is a part of and which was formed following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City. While he spent much of the segment criticizing DHS and the “sweeping powers that we’ve given it,” Oliver did find himself at one point sympathizing with 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, who explained in a 2014 documentary the logjam that DHS faced not long after its creation when its agents found themselves answering to “100 bosses.”
“That does make sense. Having an endless cavalcade of rapidly changing bosses would clearly be a distraction, though, I’ve got to say … you do eventually get used to it,” Oliver joked, as a Warner Bros. Discovery banner appeared next to his head. That image was followed by one featuring both Netflix and Paramount‘s logos, which prompted Oliver to note, “I don’t even know which of these companies is going to be my new business daddy yet. It’s like a ‘Mamma Mia!’ situation, except less fun and way less sexy.”
“Incidentally, if it is indeed Netflix, sorry for all the times I called your catalog a ‘Who’s Who of the F—k Is This?’” Oliver added. “Love the ending of ‘Stranger Things,’ by the way. Very brown!”
