The relentless brutality of the Trump administration is threatening to debase us. I was posting on Bluesky about the horrors taking place in Minneapolis, sharing my sorrow, anger and frustration about the injustice. Someone responded, in a post that has since been deleted, advocating capital punishment for ICE officers.
I understood the instinct to make such a comment — what federal agents are still doing, across the country, is abhorrent. It is inhumane. I also understood that the Trump administration is hoping we will surrender to our baser instincts, in the same ways that it does.
It can be hard to stand up for what you believe in, and to do so consistently. But now, more than ever, we don’t have the flexibility for certain misjudgments. If human life is sacred — and I firmly believe it is — then all human life is sacred, from the best to the worst of us. We cannot demand justice for our undocumented neighbors, or rage against senseless murders, and in the next breath call for our enemies to die.
When we stand for what is right, we have to always stand for what is right, without exception. We cannot succumb to a worldview that embraces isolation, scarcity and control through fear.
In recent days, President Trump has “softened” his tone and has been slightly less overt in his disdain for immigrants. Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol’s commander at large, was ordered back to El Centro, Calif., to resume his previous duties. The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation. These gestures are meant to appease us without addressing the systemic issues and the fundamental rot of an obscene system designed to tear families apart, terrorize immigrant communities and silence dissent.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not left Minneapolis or other cities. The Trump administration has not really changed any policies. Mr. Trump and his minions haven’t apologized for their statements or actions. The gestures they are offering, reluctantly, do not lessen the grave moral injury of their actions.
If we are not careful, we could fall into numbness, apathy or worse. I’ve been thinking about how we talk about the people who are killed by law enforcement. Our first instinct is to invoke the myriad ways in which the deceased contributed to the world. We talk about their work, their character, their families — this is how we attempt to humanize people killed in such inhumane ways.
We have done this for Black people murdered by police, and more recently, we have done this for the men and women who are being killed or injured by federal law enforcement officers. The instinct to humanize the slain is instinctual. It is … human, just like the people for whom we craft these loving hagiographies. It’s a way of trying to make the atrocity of their deaths clear, as if the fact of their humanity is not enough. Because their humanity was not enough to save their lives.
But we have to remember that humanity is, always, enough. We have a right to protest, legally carry a firearm, drive while Black, walk in a neighborhood at night, play in a park, sleep in a bed or do anything else whether we are wonderful people, and beloved or not. Neither is citizenship status a factor in whether or not someone deserves to live. Some of us have forgotten this when making distinctions like “He was a citizen,” as if an American passport makes the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good more tragic.
The tragedy is that Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti are dead and their deaths were preventable and there will probably be little justice for them. The tragedy is that they were being human and humane and it did not matter. And that tragedy is compounded by the fact that in 2025, we know, 32 people died in ICE custody, and already in 2026 there have been at least eight deaths related to ICE enforcement. But we don’t hear much about most of the deceased, like Keith Porter Jr., killed by an off-duty ICE officer in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve. We don’t know what they did for a living, how they were loved or what they leave behind because we are being careless. We are facing a test of who we are and what and whom we value.
Trump’s surrogates — JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan — are gleefully indulging not only the president but their own cruelty, racism and xenophobia. They are drunk on power, trying to dictate a warped version of reality to suit their toxic narrative, even when we have ample evidence contradicting many statements that some have made about murderous undocumented immigrants, paid protesters who brandished weapons and domestic terrorists.
We do not have to adopt their tactics or mimic their lack of character or decency to stymie their efforts. I am not suggesting anything along the lines of going high when they go low. I am not suggesting that if we just try to understand them, they will see the error of their ways. Instead, I am saying that we don’t have to compromise ourselves, our values or our sense of justice to fight back. It is so easy to lose sight of this, to allow our justifiable rage to damage our moral compass.
ICE must be abolished. Congress must, once and for all, develop modern, humane immigration policies that create pathways to citizenship for anyone who wants to come to this land of abundance. And we must rethink what immigration enforcement looks like, divesting it from the private prison-industrial complex and greed and bigotry as catalysts for mass deportations.
We need to have zero tolerance for politicians who imply that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are anything but hard-working and law-abiding, or who deny that they make invaluable contributions to our country. We need to combat the rampant misinformation about undocumented immigrants bleeding the country dry through public social services for which they are, in fact, mostly ineligible. We have to be in community with our communities. Put another way, we need to make the country better. And we can.
When the tables turn, and they will, these bad actors will be held to account. We should afford them the due process they so willingly deny to their perceived enemies, and we will, I hope, ensure that these abuses of power can never happen again.
Supposedly, the American justice system is predicated on the idea of due process. We have laws that must be followed by everyone, including law enforcement. People are presumed innocent until proven guilty. We have a right to be judged by a jury of our peers. We have these rights, no matter who we are, no matter what we do for a living, whether we have families or not.
Undocumented immigrants have legal protections, though the current administration would prefer to elide that reality. These apply whether someone has a criminal history, and whether they are beloved or reviled. We cannot use respectability politics or bigotry or means testing to arbitrate justice.
And in our resistance, we do not need to use our own version of the Gestapo-like tactics of federal law enforcement. We do not need to thirst for our enemies’ blood or pretend that some lives matter more than others. We do not need to trample all over civil liberties, or cosplay as soldiers by wearing ridiculous amounts of body armor while masking our identities because we are ashamed of what we are doing.
The people of Minneapolis are teaching us, every single day, what resistance can look like. It is incredible to see so many people, from all walks of life, putting themselves into the frigid tundra that is a Minnesota winter, to protect the most vulnerable members of their community and to let federal agents know that they are being watched, they are not welcome, and they are wrong. The people of Minneapolis are reminding us that nonviolent protest works. It takes time and effort. It can be frustrating. It can be dangerous. But it works.
People often misunderstand nonviolent protest. It is not merely eschewing violence. It doesn’t mean that we are silent or that we are not angry. Instead, nonviolent protest means, among many things, that we understand who we are fighting. We know that nothing will reveal who they are more clearly than the contrast between their actions and ours.
What’s working so well in Minneapolis is that people are collaborating. They are caring about others simply because they are part of the local community, simply because they are human. There appears to be no hierarchy or vying for power. Instead, people are organized, communicating clearly, identifying problems and creating accessible solutions. They are showing up, as often and as loudly as they can. They are refusing to look the other way while atrocities are being committed in their name.
When our leaders are feckless, and amenable to criminality so long as that energy is directed toward the people they deem undesirable, it’s easy to lower our standards. It’s easy to decide that when in a dystopia, we should act dystopian. It is easy to lose sight of who we are and what we stand for when we see federal agents acting with impunity and armed with instruments of war as Mr. Vance and Mr. Miller declare (though Mr. Vance has walked this statement back) that federal agents are afforded immunity to carry out their duties.
It’s easy to want vengeance instead of justice when we see that people are being terrorized, afraid to leave their homes because they have Black or brown skin. It’s easy, for example, to compromise on prison abolition so long as we can soothe ourselves with the knowledge that our enemies will suffer, too. These are difficult times, so we must make the difficult choice to be different, and to be better.
The Trump administration is fighting a war of attrition on America’s soul, but it has vastly underestimated the strength, endurance and conscience of the people against whom it is waging this war.
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