For decades, the United States has enforced its immigration laws—sometimes aggressively, sometimes clumsily, but largely without tearing at the constitutional fabric of the republic. Previous administrations deported millions of undocumented immigrants. They did so without turning major American cities into de facto occupation zones, unleashing roving federal forces untethered from due process and normalizing the idea that constitutional rights are negotiable when politically inconvenient.
What we are witnessing now is something different.
The chaos surrounding the current deportation policy is not an inevitable byproduct of immigration enforcement. It is the consequence of a deliberate choice: to empower federal agents to act with breathtaking disregard for the rights of American citizens themselves.
Over the past nine months alone, federal judges have ruled in at least 2,300 cases that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) illegally detained individuals without bond or due process, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. These are not abstract statistics. These are cases that survived long enough to reach court, meaning they represent only a fraction of the unlawful detentions that actually occurred. Due process violations that never see a courtroom leave no paper trail, no judicial rebuke and no remedy.
At the street level, the pattern is even uglier. ICE agents have been documented entering homes without judicial warrants, directly undermining core Fourth Amendment protections. Americans have been stopped, questioned and detained on sidewalks for no reason other than their skin color, their accent or the suspicion, often wrong, that they “look foreign.” This is racial profiling by any honest definition, dressed up in the language of law enforcement.
And now, it has turned deadly.
In just the first three and a half weeks of the year, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents shot two people in Minneapolis. Contrast that with the Minneapolis Police Department, which last year recovered roughly 900 illegal firearms, arrested hundreds of violent offenders and managed to get through the entire year without killing a single suspect in the line of duty. The comparison is not meant to sanctify local policing—it is meant to underline how extraordinary the federal conduct has been.
Both people killed by federal agents were American citizens.
In both cases, agents did not respond with shock, restraint or regret.
In the killing of Renee Good, a video captured an agent referring to a dead woman as a “fucking bitch.” In the killing of Alex Pretti, an agent was seen clapping. This is not the behavior of disciplined law enforcement officers operating under the weight of tragic necessity. It is behavior that suggests a profound absence of accountability.
A detailed investigation by the Wall Street Journal further dismantles the official narrative surrounding Pretti’s death. Video evidence shows him holding a mobile phone in one hand, the other raised in a gesture of deference. He did not threaten officers. He did not charge them. He did not reach for a weapon. The confrontation began only after an agent chased a woman leaving the scene of the protests and shoved her aggressively. When Pretti intervened to help her, he was swarmed by half a dozen agents—and killed.
The Trump administration’s defenders, both in conservative media and within government itself, quickly latched onto one detail: Pretti had a gun.
What they did not say is that he never brandished it, never touched it, never reached for it—and had a valid concealed carry permit. In other words, he was doing exactly what conservatives insist is a fundamental constitutional right: lawfully carrying a firearm for self-defense.
This is where the moral collapse becomes impossible to ignore.
The same voices that spend years warning that gun registration is tyranny, that the Second Amendment exists to guard against government overreach, now justify the killing of an American citizen because he merely possessed a firearm—legally, passively and without threat.
The conservative movement’s own rhetoric indicts it. Consider a March 3, 2018 tweet by conservative icon Charlie Kirk: “The 2nd Amendment is not for hunting. It’s not for self-protection. It is there to ensure that free people can defend themselves if God forbid government became tyrannical and turned against its citizens.”
If those words ever meant anything, this is the moment they were meant for.
The issue is no longer immigration. It is whether constitutional rights themselves have become conditional. Across the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, enforcement has become selective—applied when politically convenient, abandoned when inconvenient. This pattern constitutes a wholesale erosion of constitutional governance that is still unfolding in real time.
The United States is undergoing a constitutional stress test, and a coalition of administration officials and MAGA-aligned voices has shown a willingness to subordinate fundamental rights to favored policy outcomes.
This is not America’s tradition.
We are not Russia, Iran or Belarus—states where civil liberties are openly constrained and brutal policing is a feature, not a bug, of governance. And yet, the instincts driving this administration’s domestic policy increasingly align with its foreign-policy posture: a readiness to discard norms and constraints in the name of expediency, whether abroad or at home.
Deporting undocumented immigrants is not unconstitutional. Previous administrations proved that it can be done at scale, without chaos and without turning federal agents into judge, jury and executioner on American streets.
What is unconstitutional, and profoundly un-American, is abandoning the very rights that define the republic in pursuit of political theater.
This trajectory is not inevitable. It reflects a set of choices about how power is used and how limits are interpreted. And it can still be reversed. However, such a reversal requires more than restraint. It requires the administration to recognize that it is destroying not just procedural norms but also the trust of moderate Republicans and independents who want immigration addressed, not abandoned to chaos. The voters who delivered this majority did not sign up for federal agents clapping over dead Americans on city streets.
Immigration enforcement can be carried out at scale without breaking the rules that define the system. Previous administrations showed that deporting millions is possible without turning the Bill of Rights into a suggestion. The question was never whether to enforce the law. It was always about how to do it without eroding the legitimacy that makes enforcement sustainable in the first place.
The answer is not complicated. Enforcement aimed at the right target produces different results. Instead of relying on broad field discretion—which has led to the abuses documented here—policymakers can shift the focus to the labor market, where the incentives for unauthorized migration originate. Employers who knowingly hire unauthorized workers are not bystanders; they are participants. Clear, enforceable rules with a defined compliance window, followed by steep per-employee penalties and the credible threat of losing operating licenses entirely, would make compliance a condition of doing business rather than an afterthought. Running alongside that framework, limited and predictable legal pathways—structured guest worker programs tied to verified employment and prioritizing longstanding, law-abiding workers already embedded in communities—would reduce demand for unauthorized labor without mass enforcement operations. Previous administrations implicitly relied on this model, prioritizing systemic incentives over discretionary force.
The goal is not to weaken enforcement. It is to make it lawful, predictable and accountable, which is all the Constitution has ever asked.