On Being American

DHS and The Soul of the United States

DHS Agent in Minneapolis, Seth Herald/Reuters, January 14, 2026

DHS has gunned down a second American citizen in Minneapolis.

Video footage of the shooting makes it clear that the individual killed was unarmed when a crowd of CBP officers shot him repeatedly—even as he lay motionless on the ground. The administration has attempted to smear the man killed as a domestic terrorist, hellbent on killing law enforcement officers. He was a nurse at the VA, and unless a phone is a deadly weapon, he did no such thing.

It was an unjustified murder of an American citizen by an agency—DHS—that has become a paramilitary organization operating outside the typical constraints of the State. It was another violation in a long line of abuses directed towards Americans. It was done for nothing other than a desire from the White House for pain to be inflicted upon their partisan enemies.

DHS—and those in the employ of ICE and CBP—are an affront to America.

Masked armed paramilitary members running around American cities and brutalizing their populations is anathema to the American spirit that I’ve long believed in. It is an outrage against anyone who believes in the promise of the United States. We ought to be a shining city upon a hill that strives evermore to be closer to our initial promises of liberty.

In contravention of our best traditions, DHS has, since the beginning of Trump’s term in office, openly used State power to trumpet its disdain and hatred of other Americans. They have used their social media platforms to attack specific citizens for opposing their policies. They have painted individuals they’ve killed as domestic terrorists. They have asserted the power to invade the homes of private individuals without a judicial warrant. They have accused pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter of defending pedophiles for her crime of not wanting her music used in their propaganda.

We have enabled the growth in our midst of an organization that has more in common with the uniformed thugs of Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts than with anything American¹.

DHS—as it exists now—exists solely to inflict pain on partisan domestic enemies. They have no law enforcement function. They are not civil servants performing bureaucratic functions for the State. They are gleeful goons terrorizing inhabitants of cities that the administration deems to be their political enemies.

They exist, as far as I can tell, outside the normal bounds of civic life. It has become an unrestrained and unaccountable organization that answers solely to the vindictive partisan directives of the White House.

Answering as a paramilitary arm of Stephen Miller—they stand at odds against the actual civic body of the United States.

Regular citizens on the streets opposing DHS—like Renée Good and Alex Pretti—embody what it means to be an American more than any CBP officer wearing the sort of kit reserved for the military ever could.

Despite the obvious physical danger that DHS has now evidently chosen to inflict on ordinary people, they have nevertheless gone outside with their phones in their hands. They have symbolized the best of America. They are regular people off the street rising to meet a moment well beyond what anyone could expect of them.

Like the citizen-soldiers who once jumped into Normandy, the best of America has been broadcast by commonplace nurses, dental assistants, taxi drivers, baristas, and bartenders. It is not some warrior caste or a group of exalted aristocrats that exemplifies the best of us, but normal people who are choosing to do the right things when the moment arises.

I’ve thought about Xenophon’s Anabasis quite a lot lately. When Clearchus—the original leader of the Greek expedition into Persia—is killed by the Persians, the remaining Greeks are initially left dispirited and leaderless in the wastes.

It takes Xenophon and a handful of other Greek captains, realizing that nobody else was coming to their salvation, to spur them into rallying the Greek Army on their march homewards.

Coming together, they managed to create a system of leadership—in a completely ad hoc manner—that propels the Greeks into motion in the march to the sea.

The polity, to Xenophon, was the people.

It wasn’t an abstract Greek Army, but it was the flesh and blood soldiers who struggled their way back to Greece who embodied what it meant to fulfill the highest virtues of civic life.

The point, I guess, is that nobody else will make our community what it should be. It is incumbent on any of us—me or you—to do things, even at potentially mortal risk, that make America the place that it is meant to be.

A political community only thrives when there are members of that community who are willing to display the civic virtue necessary to sustain our highest ideals.

If America continues to be a free republic filled with other citizens I’m proud to call neighbors—it will be because of people who have been willing to endure risks.

It is an awful thing to have to confront a paramilitary in the street who can gun you down for doing nothing more than recording them. It is, however, intolerable to live in a nation where the citizenry no longer believes in the righteousness of doing so.

1. I am well aware of the slave catchers and the police in the South during segregation. I mean that a federal paramilitary force that is nakedly used to inflict pain on partisan enemies is a new phenomenon.