When I was a boy, we’d often go back to the Minnesota farm country where my dad grew up.
Getting there, to me, seemed like an endless series of gravel roads connecting towns and farms and, as we got closer to my grandma’s place, of family names.
One thing that I learned from my dad on these excursions was that once we got into farm country we’d give a small wave at everyone we met along the back roads, whether we knew them or not.
This was not a big wave, or any kind of a grinning hello, just a little polite wave of the hand from the steering wheel, or a nod.
Everybody who has lived in a rural area will likely know what I mean by this.
It’s just something that people do.
A courtesy.
A tradition.
Part of a way of life.
::
Given that this was the 1970’s, I suppose some of the people we encountered in Le Sueur County had voted for FDR and Truman, or even JFK.
I’d also say that it’s safe to guess that some of those same neighbors eventually voted for Ronald Reagan, and, now, Donald Trump.
I bring this up mostly to remark that this was a different time and place, and I’m sure that I’d reflect about that political layer much more now when I revisit those roads.
It goes without saying that we didn’t back then.
I don’t think it occurred to us.
::
Now, thinking on this memory, I find myself reflecting, for a moment, about how on September 8th, the Supreme Court, in a ruling on Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, eroded the protections of the Fourth Amendment:
Under the Fourth Amendment, government agents may not stop and detain people without reasonable suspicion that there is a legal basis to do so. A large-scale effort to round up undocumented migrants living in the Los Angeles area has raised the question of whether the Trump administration is violating that restriction.
Since June, the Trump administration has used roving patrols of armed, masked federal agents to carry out sweeps. The agents have detained people for questioning about their legal status, targeting apparent day laborers at Home Depot parking lots and workers at places like farms, carwashes and construction sites. -NYT
The Supreme Court, in this case, via a silent majority (aside from an explanatory opinion from Brett Kavanaugh, which I will explore below) sided with Donald Trump and his roving patrols of armed, masked federal agents.
What we’ve seen since that time, for all of us who have eyes and ears and support the United States Constitution, has been utterly chilling. Masked, anonymous federal agents in unmarked SUVs have swept through more than just their initial target of Los Angeles, and they have detained people without specific warrants in sweeps so broad and violent and arbitrary that the foundations of the plain language of the Fourth Amendment have been shaken:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It’s odd, reading that language again, quoting directly from Congress’ own website, constitution.congress.gov, almost seems foreign in a nation awash in propaganda from Kristi Noem and Kash Patel and Stephen Miller.
Masked ICE agents conducting random raids is simply un-American, and we all know it.
We all know in our bones what the founders meant with that language.
It’s at the core of what it means to be an American.
But this is where we are at now.
And that is my point.
In a nation where two hundred fifty years ago we came together around core values that had clear meaning, like the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, something has shifted.
It’s not just that the neighbor I wave at on a country road may have voted for a different candidate than me.
We live in a nation where our neighbors are actively being recruited by our government to violate the plain language of our constitution and our longstanding national traditions regarding personal liberty and our fundamental legal rights.
Those masked agents don’t just come from nowhere; they are being recruited and trained and paid with our tax dollars.
They are Americans, just like you and me.
Further, the political violence they deploy isn’t random or attributable to some individual ideology or factional grievance; the violence and violations of constitutional rights committed by armed ICE agents are sponsored by our government and, now, undergirded by our highest courts.
This is where we are at in October of 2025.
And there is a reason that we are here.
And that reason is not just Donald Trump.
::
Let’s look at the language that Justice Kavanaugh used to support the Supreme Court’s logic in ruling in favor of the Trump Administration.
It’s significant that Kavanaugh spells it out and specifically allows for de facto racial profiling by the government:
Whether an officer has reasonable suspicion depends on the totality of the circumstances. [...] Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English. Cf.Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S., at 884–885 (listing “[a]ny number of factors” that contribute to reasonable suspicion of illegal presence). To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors.
We’ve seen how this normalizing of racial profiling has played out ad nauseum. This Court has created a form of, and forgive the dehumanizing and vile language here, “open season” against people of Mexican or Central American descent.
It is obvious as plain day that the officers of the government we see on our screens are not carefully weighing “reasonable suspicion;” no, they are driving out into Los Angeles and Chicago and Portland, jumping out, and seizing people they vaguely suspect might gain them an additional arrest quota for the day. It is clear that there is simply no check on their repeated arbitrary and capricious abuse of power.
This has been no orderly enforcement of immigration laws; instead there has been an eruption of violent, often Keystone Cops-style chases featuring ICE agents brutalizing workers, families, children and aging parents.
I would ask my fellow Americans who, like me, do not easily fall under suspicion of being a recent immigrant:
What is to stop a government acting with impunity from coming after you next, if they so choose?
::
Now, ICE, in particular, has specifically targeted those who are following the law and showing up for court hearings.
I want to call that out. For decades anti-immigration forces have implored people to immigrate “the right way” (Kavanaugh even repeats this canard in his opinion). Now, this calls for ignoring the fact the “the right way” is mostly a series of long legal blockades and delays, only slightly less blocked than the inability of Congress to pass the comprehensive immigration reform our nation so sorely needs; however, now even those immigrants applying for papers and citizenship who are following the strict letter of the law and showing up in court are subject to the wiles and outright disrespect for that law and process by ICE.
We are arresting immigrants who are specifically following our laws.
This is un-American, a degradation of the rule of law and, ultimately, will undermine respect for our courts.
::
Despite all this, Justice Kavanaugh and the current Supreme Court majority seem confident that officers will be scrupulous and take a light touch with immigration enforcement.
What we’ve seen in practice has demonstrated, predictably, the exact opposite.
In particular, and this is crucial, Kavanaugh seems utterly cavalier about the impact of his ruling on US Citizens and others with documented status caught up in these ICE enforcement actions:
As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.
This, of course, has simply not happened.
US citizens have been detained, teargassed, manhandled, shoved, and held against their will without warrant, explanation, or cause by ICE and the DHS.
And for just one moment, please think of how pernicious and backwards Kavanaugh’s turn of phrase “individuals who are legally in the country” truly is.
Citizens, a free people, the very people who formed and have defended this constitution, whom our government and courts exist to serve, are now, in Kavanaugh’s mealy-mouthed turn of phrase, merely “individuals who are legally in the country.”
No.
That is not how we see it.
This is a nation of equals. When we wrote “We the People” we were not indicating some random coincidental legal status; we were exercising our most fundamental rights and prerogative as a free people to build a nation based on equality before the law.
No King, No Judge, and No President, or their representative, stands above us to exercise arbitrary power; in fact, there is no legal power without our consent, our democratic process, and the clear guardrails we have laid out in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
That is our tradition; and it is on this clearly-spelled out legal foundation that we have built our way of life.
The right of people to be secure in their person is absolutely clear. In myriad ways, that right is being trampled by the Trump Administration and this Supreme Court.
We have every reason to protest this weekend.
Not just on behalf of “No Kings” but against this Supreme Court that has lost its moorings and the respect of reasonable people.
::
In close, I’d like return to that gravel country road from my youth.
Those simple greetings.
A wave, a nod, a hello.
These gestures are as American as anything else in our nation.
They are a tradition probably as old as our founding documents.
They are not restricted by race or creed or sex.
These greetings represent a meeting between equals.
A greeting between two people at peace with each other and living on the land.
There is no race, no mask, no suspicion, no prejudice, and, above all, no arbitrary exercise of governmental power that should come between us and our core values and traditions as Americans.
We’ve struggled, however imperfectly, for centuries to expand our freedom and prosperity, and to live as equals with decency and mutual respect.
All of us of good will know that to our core.
Some have paid for that cause with their lives.
This president and this court and this administration are deliberately trampling on that.
And worse, they are recruiting our fellow Americans to participate in these injustices and violations of our Constitution.
Our message to all those tempted to join this president and this court, to put on the mask of oppression should be to put that mask aside and join us this weekend. There is room and time to rejoin our core tradition of liberty and freedom.
We are better than masked agents detaining people on our streets.
We are better than this.
We know it.
Our traditions are as old as a simple greeting between two people on a country road.
And if we forget this, we may well lose what is precious about our American way of life.
