This Isn’t About Immigration
It’s about restraint, due process, and who we’re willing to call an enemy
Many of us watched the video from Minneapolis this week and felt the same tightening in the chest.
The footage is hard to watch precisely because it isn’t chaotic. It’s steady. It’s close. It’s clear. And it leaves you with that particular kind of nausea that comes when something irreversible happens in plain view.
My stomach turned as I watched—partly because I could sense where it was heading, partly because I already knew the outcome, and still couldn’t make myself look away.
Many of us rewound it—because we wanted to be wrong.
Reporting based on verified bystander footage shows Alex Pretti holding a phone as he’s pepper-sprayed and pinned down, even as federal officials claimed he posed an armed threat. What makes people sick isn’t only that a man is dead. It’s that, almost immediately, we were told a story that didn’t match what so many could see with their own eyes.
And that dissonance—the insistence that reality bend to an official narrative—has become its own kind of national sickness.
And even if one believes—rightly or wrongly—that Alex Pretti or Renée Good were doing something illegal, that still doesn’t explain the most basic moral rupture here. In a constitutional democracy, the answer to suspected wrongdoing is due process: detention, arrest, charges, a hearing, accountability. Not death in the street. Not lethal force that becomes the first and final verdict. The whole point of law is that it is slower than fury—and more humane than power unrestrained.
This isn’t about immigration policy; it’s about whether restraint still governs power.
This is not a story about one man alone. It is a story about power—how it is exercised, how it explains itself, and what happens when explanation gives way to insistence.
The Knock Matters Because the Home Matters
In a liberal democracy, there are places where power is supposed to slow down. The home is one of them.
For centuries, the idea has been simple: if the government wants to enter your home, it must first persuade a judge. Not an agency supervisor. Not itself. A judge—someone outside the chain of command, charged with restraint.
That pause is not red tape. It is dignity, formalized.
Which is why recent reporting on an internal ICE memo has landed with such force. The memo asserts that immigration officers may forcibly enter homes in certain cases without a judge’s warrant, relying instead on an administrative warrant signed within the agency.
This is not a technical dispute. It is a fundamental one.
A government that no longer believes it must ask permission before crossing the threshold is a government that has stopped seeing restraint as a virtue.
What I’ve Noticed in Us
I’ve noticed something in myself over the past year, and I don’t think I’m alone.
The unthinkable keeps trying to become normal. The clip that should stop a country cold becomes something we watch between meetings, between errands, between dinner and bedtime. There’s a temptation to scroll, to compartmentalize, to tell ourselves it’s complicated and move on.
Sometimes that’s not wisdom. It’s a coping mechanism.
And coping mechanisms—when they become civic habits—are how norms erode without a fight.
It’s easy to believe your side is the exception—until it isn’t.
When Enforcement Stops Explaining Itself
Most Americans believe immigration should happen legally, and wanting the government to enforce the law is a valid concern.
That point matters. It deserves to be said plainly.
But enforcement is not defined only by what is enforced. It is defined by how.
When the people enforcing the law no longer feel obliged to explain themselves—to show a judicial warrant, to accept oversight, to welcome independent review—enforcement begins to resemble intimidation. The method becomes the message: we do not need to persuade; we only need to act.
You can feel the shift when official explanations are offered not to clarify, but to override what is visible.
I try to remember that many people caught in propaganda loops aren’t malicious; they’re afraid, overwhelmed, and being fed certainty when what they actually need is patience and truth. And if we want our neighbors to come back to reality, we can’t talk to them like they’re monsters.
The Pattern Comes Into Focus
By the time we reach this point, most readers already know who is responsible for the direction of federal power in this moment. This is happening under the administration of Donald Trump.
What distinguishes this period is not simply policy severity, but a consistent posture toward limits themselves. Oversight is framed as sabotage. Accountability is dismissed as weakness. And increasingly, the executive branch insists that its own judgment is sufficient—that explanation is optional, that restraint is for suckers, and that power need not justify itself to anyone outside the room.
Minneapolis has already lived through another killing this month: Renée Good, a U.S. citizen, fatally shot by an ICE agent earlier in January. Two deaths. Two official explanations. And a growing sense that accountability is slipping further out of reach.
This is how democracies change: not overnight, but by exception. An exception becomes a habit. A habit becomes a posture. And then, one day, the thing we would have once called unthinkable feels ordinary.
The Question We Keep Avoiding
There is a question many Americans have been quietly asking themselves over the past year, even if they haven’t said it out loud:
If those on the Right get their way, what do they believe should happen to their enemies?
And the mirror question matters just as much:
If the Left were in power tomorrow, armed with the same logic, what would happen then?
This is not rhetorical excess. It is the unavoidable end of “enemy” politics. Once fellow citizens are framed as threats rather than neighbors, restraint becomes optional. Process becomes inconvenient. Harm becomes justifiable.
History is clear on this point: the category of “enemy” always expands.
Language That Prepares Permission
Democracies depend on pluralism—the hard, often frustrating reality that people with fundamentally different views must live together without trying to dominate one another.
When leaders begin speaking of “real Americans” and “enemies within,” they are not merely venting. They are preparing the ground. They are teaching people which lives deserve protection and which do not.
This language does not stay rhetorical. It becomes operational.
If we can’t protect due process for people we dislike, we won’t have it when we need it ourselves.
When Shame Disappears, Power Spreads
There was a time when leaders felt compelled to explain themselves—to offer legal justifications, to respect appearances, to pretend that limits mattered even when they strained against them.
That pretense served a purpose. It slowed the slide.
When power no longer blushes—when it insists, without hesitation, that what you see is not what happened—democracy enters a far more dangerous phase.
As a small corroboration: if the stated goal is simply to concentrate enforcement where unauthorized populations are largest, Minneapolis is an unexpected focal point. Minnesota’s unauthorized population is roughly 100,000, while Texas and Florida are in the millions. That doesn’t settle what enforcement should look like—but it does raise a reasonable question about priorities.
Resistance Without Rage
The response this moment requires is not panic or tribal fury. It requires something more demanding.
Resistance looks like courage without contempt. It looks like refusing to let your heart be trained to hate, even while your conscience stays awake. It looks like telling the truth plainly—without turning your neighbors into villains—because you still want to live with them when this is over.
A Few Small, Concrete Steps
If you feel awake right now, don’t waste that clarity.
Refuse “enemy” language—even when it’s aimed at people you dislike.
Ask one clarifying question when officials narrate over video evidence.
Insist on warrants and oversight as a baseline American standard.
Call one elected official and say: I support immigration enforcement that follows the law, and I oppose tactics that bypass judicial oversight.
Support one accountability institution you trust.
Democracy doesn’t survive because people agree. It survives because people insist on restraint—especially when it is inconvenient.
The Door Still Matters
Here’s what I still love about this country: most of us want to live in neighborhoods where we can borrow a tool, watch each other’s kids for an hour, and disagree about politics without fearing what the other side will do to us.
That ordinary, fragile goodness—community even when we don’t all agree on everything—is not guaranteed. It is protected by norms we rarely think about until they’re gone.
And that’s why this matters. Not because I’m trying to win an argument. Because I want us to keep living together.
The door still matters.
Pluralism still matters.
Restraint still matters.
If we keep calling our neighbors enemies, what do we think we’re giving ourselves permission to do?