Democracy on ICE

       The Supreme Court majority recently in essence decided Americans are guilty unless and until they can prove themselves innocent.

      The court split 6-3 in a decision that at least temporarily allows ICE agents to conduct massive immigration sweeps that round up suspects not on the basis of evidence but on the basis of their skin color, their accent and the places they work.

      In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor condemned the high court majority’s ruling.

      “Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote.

      She added, ‘We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

      U.S. District Court Judge Maame E. Frimpong had ruled that ICE could not rely on such factors, alone or in concert, in making mass immigration stops in the Los Angeles area. The plaintiffs in the case before her included two U.S. citizens who had been swept up in such raids. In making her ruling, Frimpong referenced what she called “a mountain of evidence” that agents were “indiscriminately rounding up numerous individuals without reasonable suspicion,” The Times reported.

      The Supreme Court ruling seemed an apt complement to the crazed meme President Donald Trump’s posted that showed his pleasure in the pain ICE agents inflict as they abduct and move quickly to deport thousands of immigrants, most of whom have no criminal records. Many held jobs and paid taxes. Some of them have been children. Others have lived in the U.S. for decades.

      Rather than making an effort to hide the cruelty of ICE’s campaign, Trump increasingly appears intent to revel in it. He posted a meme on Truth Social titled “Chipocalypse Now” that began, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning … Chicago [is] about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

      It was a takeoff on the dark and surreal Francis Ford Coppola film, “Apocalypse Now,” in which Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” after ordering a massive napalm strike in Vietnam. Napalm was a defoliant that denuded Vietnamese villages, burning women, children and the elderly alike, and leaving those American soldiers exposed to it with serious lifelong illnesses.

      Creepy as Trump’s post clearly was, it was not surprising. The crescendo of ICE crackdowns across the country has been building for months. It started with powerful and intimidating personal stories, like the abduction of a Tufts University graduate student by masked men on a Somerville, Mass., street. Her crime: co-authoring an op-ed in the college newspaper.

      There was the deportation of a Maryland father and construction worker to a notorious El Salvadoran prison along with 200 Venezuelans alleged to be gang members. (They reported being tortured there though subsequent news reports showed many had nothing to do with gangs.) Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s tragic story continues as the Trump Administration tries to deport him to Africa.

      There was the arrest of an 18-year-old high school volleyball player and honors student, pulled from his car in Milford, Mass., on his way to a Saturday morning practice. He was released from a Burlington, Mass., ICE detention center after the entire town rallied to support him.

      Now the Trump Administration has escalated to widespread raids and occupations by ICE and National Guard troops in swaths of Los Angeles and the entire city of Washington, D.C., and threats of new massive intervention in blue state cities from Chicago and Baltimore to Boston.

      The Supreme Court’s cavalier rejection of a federal district court judge’s restraining order appears to have given a green light to the militarization of other city streets and centers, making it all the more likely elsewhere. Already, preliminary Census Bureau data analysis by the Pew Research Center suggests that more than 1.2 million immigrants disappeared from the U.S. labor force during the first seven months of 2025. The figure included documented as well as undocumented immigrants. And that was before the massive surge in ICE hiring after Trump’s big budget bill and before the occupation of American cities began in force.

      Yet the battle over our Constitution and our freedom is far from over.

      Judges of both major political parties at levels below the Supreme Court continue stubbornly to uphold the law. A few weeks ago, for example, a U.S. District Court judge in the District of Columbia issued a two-week temporary restraining order blocking the deportation of more than 600 unaccompanied children to Guatemala even as dozens sat in planes on a Texas runway.

      Michael Scherer, in an article in The Atlantic, titled “The Anti-Trump Strategy That’s Actually Working. Lawsuits, Lawsuits and More Lawsuits,” wrote: “A legal resistance led by a patchwork coalition of lawyers, public-interest groups, Democratic state attorneys general and unions has frustrated Trump’s ambitions. Hundreds of attorneys and plaintiffs have stood up to him, feeding a steady assembly line of setbacks and judicial reprimands for a president who has systematically sought to break down the limits of his own power.”

      Americans continue to rally at pop-up protests across the country on village greens and in towns, small cities and metropolises. Even as the massive urban demonstrations of past movements from Civil Rights to the women’s march have remained noticeably sparse, weekly protests have become much more a constant part of the rhythm of community life.

      In the nation’s beleaguered and occupied capital, The Washington Post reports, “resistance … is taking many forms.” These include “ringing bells in the masked faces of law enforcement, scribbling signs to warn drivers about ICE checkpoints, bombarding social media with footage of arrests, and employing art and humor to build consensus—and momentum.” In some parts of the city, for example, residents gather on street corners, in parks or on front porches every night at 8 p.m. to bang pots and pans as a sign of their opposition.

      In Massachusetts and other states, citizen teams are racing to the site of reported ICE stops and arrests to witness, record and challenge (but not obstruct) the masked federal agents grabbing without warrants or any semblance of due process those they believe to be immigrants.

      And now organizers of the massive, millions-strong No Kings protests that rolled across the United States on June 14 are calling for Americans to again take to the street in force on Oct. 18.

      The barriers before the American people are formidable: A president and administration hellbent on unchecked dictatorial powers, a Supreme Court that with few exceptions bends to that president’s will, a Republican-controlled Congress that’s cowardly and complicit in his autocratic actions and a Democratic Congressional opposition too often enfeebled by his threats.

      Taken together that puts a tremendous burden on we, the people, on the media, on those public servants and not-for-profit organizations unwilling to bend. It is a burden and struggle, however, that the founding fathers would tell us is worth every ounce of our strength.

      “Liberty, once lost, is lost forever,” our second president, John Adams, wrote in a letter to his wife in 1775.

      This reminder to us all hangs from lamp posts up and down Main Street in my hometown of Falmouth, Mass.

      I hope you’ll take it to heart.