In a tribute to Renee Macklin Good, her wife, Rebecca Good, wrote of her final encounter with ICE: “On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns.”
Good’s observation has become a well-known shorthand for the situation unfolding in Minnesota. To anyone in South Minneapolis, the asymmetry between the protestors and immigration authorities is hard to miss. They have guns. And batons. And pepperballs. And tasers. And chemical weapons. And FlexCuffs. And more than $165,000,000,000.
Yet despite all their violent potential, these tools have shown that they can halt individuals, never movements.
A whistle may be far more consequential: it can sound as a greeting, a warning, and a call to action, activating and reactivating through the clarity of its ringing until it drowns out fear, crackling through the frozen air. I am reminded of the chiflas, the familiar whistles that proliferate in Mexico, used to call across a crowd, eliciting attention and drawing connection across chaos. A clear series of trilled notes that can communicate “hello,” “I see you,” “come here,” “back up,” and most importantly—“watch out!” A whistle will not stop a bullet, or many. But it can do away with isolation. It cannot shield a body, yet it can draw bodies near, transforming vulnerability into presence and presence into power.
The guns, of course, are not new. Violence has always been the core of law’s unspoken grammar. What has changed is not the weapon, but where it is aimed. Techniques once reserved primarily for those presumed to sit outside of racial, citizenship, and property boundaries now travel inward, toward those who have long believed that the law would provide for their safety and security.
Here, too, law and order are being produced, not by courts that rapidly retreat from confrontation under a presumption of regularity, or agencies that disclaim responsibility for their own violence, but by collective practice that emerges precisely when formal guarantees prove selectively unreliable. When the state withdraws protection from some while preserving it for others, security does not disappear, but is reorganized. The most marginalized communities have long understood this—safety was never presumptive, accountability was never assured, and survival required coordination beyond the state.
What feels destabilizing in the present moment is not the breakdown of legal protection, but the migration of those cracks inward, from the margins toward the center. The presumed safety of White middle-America, long treated as neutral and apolitical, now appears contingent and revocable. That recognition is disquieting for some. It is also clarifying. It reveals the degree to which the security promised by law has always depended on its uneven distribution.
The erosion was gradual, described by Courts at each step as maintenance: pretext became routine; “officer safety” matured into immunities; immigration exceptionalism converted civil administration into a proxy for punishment. Each decision eroded the Constitutional floor, one sedimentary layer at a time. The Fourth Amendment slowly morphed from a security against the government to a securitization against its people.
The question, then, is not whether violence has intensified, but why it can now appear without disguise. Practices long concentrated at the border and in communities deemed expendable have traveled inward, meeting people who once believed law would shield them. What confronts us is not a new logic, but an old one that no longer feels the need to whisper.
That migration from margin to center is visible not only on the street but in constitutional doctrine itself. A ten-page concurrence by Justice Kavanaugh in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo exemplifies the shift. Through an unsigned emergency order, the Court stayed a district court injunction that had barred immigration agents from relying on four factors—apparent race or ethnicity, language or accent, location, and type of work—to establish reasonable suspicion of unlawful presence. The order offered no reasons. But Kavanaugh’s concurrence supplied one, and, in doing so, did something far more consequential than simply resolve a procedural dispute. It treated these race-coded traits as objective “common sense” inputs into Fourth Amendment reasonableness for interior immigration stops. What prior doctrine worked to keep outside the objective calculus—race as evidence of suspicion—Kavanaugh stepped out of his way to embrace.
For decades, the Court has maintained a brittle compromise: it has insulated racially motivated enforcement while preserving the formal premise that race could not be the constitutional reason for a stop. Whren helped sustain that arrangement by separating subjective pretext from an ostensibly race-neutral objective inquiry. Brignoni-Ponce, fashioned as a rebuke against racial profiling, permitted only narrow reliance on “apparent ancestry” near the border and alongside meaningful corroboration. Kavanaugh’s concurrence discards the limiting premise that made the compromise constitutionally legible. It does not merely tolerate racial bias, but recasts racialized identity markers as mutually reinforcing indicators of suspicious status, importing an already flawed border logic into the interior.
This is erosion made explicit. The ground did not suddenly collapse; it was hollowed out gradually, and then—at a certain point—someone stopped pretending that the surface would hold. The Court’s majority may have preferred this hollowing out remained in the shadows, but Kavanaugh drew it into daylight. His concurrence did not invent racial profiling in immigration enforcement. It did, however, abandon the need to deny it.
There is ample evidence that his logic has already been implemented by law enforcement, unconcerned about its actual precedential value. In Minneapolis, for example, a Somali-American man waiting for a rideshare fare near the airport was questioned about citizenship because agents, including U.S. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, suggested his accent was not American. He held his ground and eventually they left, but he astutely noted when later asked about the encounter, “They couldn’t hear my voice when they knocked on my window, but they could see my color.”
Kavanaugh’s concurrence, and the Kavanaugh Stops it has produced, are but one example of doublespeak. In nearly the same breath, he suggests that race cannot be the sole basis for stops yet stays a district court injunction that found that ICE was engaged in exactly that practice, suggesting their actions were instead reflective of “common sense.” It is, in essence, an attempt to assert narrative control once the facts are already widespread and confirmed.
Of course, narrative control of deadly enforcement violence is not a new phenomenon. Following George Floyd’s murder, the early press release described his death as arising from a “medical incident during police interaction,” a fiction soon made untenable by Darnella Frazier’s now infamous bystander video. Today, however, video precedes the lie, yet the lie persists anyway. Official accounts of both Good’s and Pretti’s killings have doubled down against plainly contradictory footage; misinformation circulates from government channels; images are plainly doctored without embarrassment. The state is not lying to us in the hope we will not discover the truth. It is daring us to believe reality at all.
This brazenness rests on already thinned ground. Masked agents once operated in the shadows, concealing their identities to preserve the fiction of restraint. Now, the masks remain while the uniforms are displayed, performing impunity in the daylight as a language of terror. DHS and ICE now command resources that eclipse entire social sectors. Militarization of our interior is not a looming threat, or an accident, but an existing reality reflecting an investment choice. Reform proposals orbit optics tied to that choice—implementing body-worn cameras, training, procedural tweaks—all while federal authorities resist access and transparency to existing evidence. The problem is not the absence of existing oversight mechanisms. Instead, it is a legal order designed to treat oversight as interference.
This is the point at which law must be read honestly. As remedies evaporate, as accountability is deferred or denied, and as constitutional guarantees are contorted to legitimate rather than restrain violence, law reveals its operative commitments, playing out upon “a field of pain and death.” Legal actors can continue to describe this moment as aberrational, or they can confront the core of what Fourth Amendment and immigration doctrine have helped normalize long before these recent federal deployments: a regime in which racialized insecurity is simultaneously predictable, constitutionally generated, and legally insulated. To name only the ruptures without the continuities risks, in the words of el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, attending to the present situation by only pulling the knife out six inches.
The question we confront is whether our work will function as a warning or a silencer. Whether it alerts, coordinates, and mobilizes, or reassures those around us that the erosion beneath our feet is temporary, anomalous, and manageable. The consequence of this decision is not theoretical. It has names, dates, and addresses. It has been rendered most visible in the back-to-back killings of Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, in the refusal to investigate, and the redirection of scrutiny toward those that bear witness.
But this is not an expression of despair. It is a diagnostic question, posed here to a profession that has long claimed stewardship over constitutional meaning. If law is to function as anything other than a retrospective vocabulary for state violence, as a lens inverted to minimize and occlude the contours of such violence and its meanings, then it must be wielded deliberately—naming what is happening, clarifying what doctrine permits, and refusing to continually mistake restraint for good judgment.
When we refuse our boldest arguments, quieter ones prevail, leaving doctrine already in motion to grind on. In doing so, we do not merely misjudge the moment; we actively participate in the steady undoing of the ground that legal protection is said to provide, all while insisting that nothing fundamental has changed.
Our institutions are already weathered. The danger they pose in this moment is not sudden collapse, but familiar endurance—the slow violence that teaches us to mistake repetition for stability and reform for repair. Our security will not be restored by shoring up structures that depend on a patchwork of exceptions and violence to stand. It will be preserved by refusing to remain on ground that has been hollowed out, and by moving—collectively and deliberately—away from those that tunnel beneath our feet while leaving the surface intact.
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We have whistles. They have guns. The asymmetry is real, and the danger is not rhetorical. But the history of state repression does not turn on weapons and violence alone. It turns on whether isolation succeeds and fear fragments those subjected to it, or whether coordination interrupts that process.
A whistle cannot revive lives lost, but it can prevent disappearance. It generates witnesses, produces visibility, and transforms individual vulnerability into collective agency. It functions not as a substitute for law, but as a refusal to wait for law to secure what it has already failed to protect.
This is not a call for refinement or recalibration of immigration enforcement following months of federal occupation in Minneapolis. It is a call to name failure plainly. When ICE’s ordinary operations require protection from law rather than obedience to it, abolition is not a radical slogan but a natural conclusion. The whistle is being sounded in Minneapolis. The question before the legal profession is whether we will hear it, amplify it, and act accordingly, or rush to patch over the cracks before more bodies make structural collapse inevitable.
So, what are we doing here in Minneapolis, at the edge of law? Through the whistles, I hear clearly. Abolish ICE.
