ICE Out

Congress must awaken and respond to the overreaching, unlawful, and cruel tactics used by ICE in Minneapolis and around the country. ICE should step back and deescalate, which is the will of the American people as reflected in numerous polls and the massive protests in Minneapolis — included hundreds of clergy from around the country.

Individual members of Congress should speak out and Congressional committees should hold hearings. Legislatively, Congress should cut ICE’s funding. With a FY26 budget more than CBP’s and the FBI’s, ICE is creating an unaccountable secret police where so many of its public justifications are provably false and racist. Unconscionable and un-American.

It’s long past the time for Congress to develop a rational immigration policy:

• ICE agents should not be allowed to wear masks.
• Per the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment, people must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, given due process rather than immediately “disappeared” to a detention facility for deportation. Anyone detained must be afforded full due process before being deported.
• Detention facilities must provide respectful treatment, with adequate food, water, and medical care. Agents who abuse detainees should be prosecuted.
• Immigrants who have applied for asylum or otherwise have their cases being reviewed by the courts should remain in the U.S. without detention until their cases are adjudicated. To speed adjudication, hire more judges to evaluate cases, not more ICE police.
• Immigrants who have established lives in the U.S. and have been here for — say 5, 10, or 15 years — should be eligible to legally remain in the country with a path to citizenship.
• Those who are registered under the DACA program should have a path to citizenship.
• So-called “dangerous criminals” should be deported. However, that does not mean someone in the U.S. simply without proper authorization, or with a traffic violation, or exercising their free speech rights. Truly, someone convicted of a serious crime.

As Jamelle Bouie recently wrote in The New York Times:

It is worth remembering that immigration enforcement is a civil procedure and that most people detained by ICE do not have criminal records. In the main, these are not violent people threatening the safety and integrity of the nation; they are ordinary men, women and children who have been caught in an authoritarian dragnet. Their treatment is less a necessary part of immigration detention than it is a punishment — deliberate pain inflicted on migrants in order to force them out of the country, whether or not they have a legal right to be here.

Masked ICE agents swarming cities, haunting neighborhoods, going door to door, separating young children from their parents, and attacking peaceful protesters are desecrating our American values, much like the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. ICE is creating a travesty eerily similar to the horrors of the secret police rounding up the Jews in Nazi Germany.

Will you be complicit in this tyranny or raise your voice for “the least of these brothers and sisters of mine?”

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Sent to my Congressional representatives on Saturday, January 24, 2026: Rep. Mike Rogers, Sen. Katie Britt, and Sen. Tommy Tubberville.

Heartbroken

I am heartbroken knowing a six-year old will grow up without a mother, recalling how insecure I was at that age.

I am heartbroken knowing her other two children lost their mother, a wife lost her wife, parents lost a child.

I am sickened an overzealous ICE agent exercising unrestrained power shot Renee Nicole Good three times and then desecrated her life with the epithet “f^&#ing b&#ch!”

I am sickened the would be king, vice president, and all the sycophants of the regime express no sympathy, only blame the victim and lionize the shooter, then callously launch a spurious investigation of her wife.

I am sickened that Republicans in Congress are obsequiously enabling the regime’s massive push for unrestrained power, ignoring the Constitution.

No principles. No integrity.

What do you tell your own children about the future of their America?

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Sent to Alabama Senator Katie Britt on January 15, 2026.

Venezuela: Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3?

Following my email to my Congressional representatives (see earlier post), I received a prompt response from Senator Britt. Unsurprisingly, she supported the military incursion into Venezuela, the rationale being eliminating the head of Venezuela’s drug cartel, restoring democracy, and reducing the influence of China and Iran.

Beginning with the president’s news conference last Saturday, we’ve heard an incoherent string of rationales and intentions for what’s next, undermining the logic of Senator Britt’s response. I couldn’t resist replying to point this out:

Senator Britt,

Thank you for your response to my email opposing the U.S. intervention in Venezuela. While not surprised, I was disappointed in your full-throated justification of the administration’s talking points — which compels me to respond.

Maduro was a brutal dictator, yet his brutality primarily harmed countless Venezuelans. He did not “wage war” on Americans for decades. Maduro’s support of the drug trade didn’t justify a “necessary mission” at enormous cost and potential risk to our service men and women just to capture him for trial.

If stopping the flow of drugs into the U.S. was truly the objective — a narrowly targeted “law enforcement operation” — why did the president pardon the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of similar drug crimes and was serving a long sentence in prison? Stopping the flow of drugs is not a credible argument.

You wrote “the United States intends to oversee a peaceful transition and a return to democracy in Venezuela.” Yet, the administration has anointed Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president and now president, to lead the government. This leaves Maduro’s corrupt government and military in place and places no restraint on the drug cartels. Standing up democracy is not a credible argument.

It didn’t take long for the president to clearly state his motives: “oil, oil, oil.” He told The New York Times that the U.S. will be running Venezuela and extracting its oil for years, and he will decide how the proceeds will be divided among Venezuela and America, I suspect with a cut for himself. We’ll likely hear of a new Trump resort being planned for the Venezuelan coast, further enriching his family.

With a reality-TV demonstration of military power, the president has returned U.S. foreign policy to the colonial era where powerful countries dominate weaker nations. The U.S. has no legal right to the oil in Venezuela, yet we can threaten military force to establish a “deal” that gives us the “right” to plunder their oil. Stephen Miller affirmed that philosophy in a recent CNN interview, and the president told The New York Times that the only limits on his power are “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

I’m disappointed you didn’t join five of your Republican colleagues to support limiting further military action in Venezuela without Congressional approval. I pray you will have the courage to vote for the resolution next week. If Republicans continue to bow down, I fear the president who sees himself as God may well end the American democracy before the country reaches its 250th anniversary.

They Are Rolling Over in Their Graves

I sent the following to Senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville and Representative Mike Rogers:

I oppose the president's invasion of Venezuela. There's no legal or moral justification to invade the country to capture President Maduro, even with the U.S. indictment.

The president’s claim that the U.S. will run Venezuela is absurd. It will defocus the administration from priorities at home and lead to another longterm engagement like Iraq, likely with the tragic loss of American lives.

The president has no legal basis to unilaterally claim Venezuela’s oil for the U.S., regardless of the business losses when the Venezuelan government nationalized its oil industry in 1976.

The president’s military action is giving Russian president Putin justification for his invasion of Ukraine and emboldening China to invade Taiwan. His threats against Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, and Canada are deranged, the dreams of an imperialist madman.

I urge Congress to respond strongly to limit the president’s actions. If you remain acquiescent and continue fealty to this president, you are abdicating your responsibility to the Constitution.

The Founders must be rolling over in their graves.