The Foundational Betrayal and What It Demands of Us
There is a contract at the center of American life. It is older than the Constitution, older than the Bill of Rights, older than the nation itself. It is the reason governments exist at all: you surrender a measure of your autonomy to the collective, and in exchange, the collective; through its institutions, its laws, and its agents, protects you. Not some of you. Not the convenient ones. All of you.
When a government breaks that contract; not through negligence, not through failure, but through deliberate choice, it has not merely made a policy error. It has committed the foundational betrayal that every democratic republic is designed to prevent.
That betrayal is happening now. And it is being committed in your name.
What the Law Actually Requires
Before we argue about what is happening, we need to establish what is supposed to happen.
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution states, without qualification, that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment extends that guarantee against every level of government. The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable seizure of persons. These are not aspirational suggestions. They are not guidelines for favorable circumstances. They are the supreme law of the land, the legal architecture within which every federal agency, every federal agent, and every federal official is required to operate. Always. Without exception. Without asterisk. Without partisan carve-out.
The Declaration of Independence goes further, reaching beneath the law to its moral foundation: governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and they exist — they are created, sustained, and empowered for the singular purpose of securing the rights of the people. Not the rights of agencies. Not the institutional interests of enforcement bodies. The rights of the people.
Federal agencies exist within this framework, not above it. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement exists because Congress authorized it, within boundaries Congress defined, to enforce immigration law within constitutional limits. That is the mandate, enforcement of law, not unlimited authority, not unchecked use of force, not the power to operate above the framework that gives the agency its legitimacy in the first place. Power delegated by the people, through their representatives, within the law: that is the only power any federal agency legitimately holds.
This is what “American” means in its most precise, defensible, constitutional sense. It means the rule of law over the rule of men. The moment any government body is permitted to act without consequence, to harm, to kill, to lie, and to be shielded, it ceases to function as an American institution and becomes something the founders spent a revolution rejecting.
The Video Problem
We live in an era where the oldest refuge of powerful institutions, ambiguity, has been substantially eliminated. Video evidence does not have political allegiances. It does not respond to spin. It does not care which administration is in power or which agency needs protecting. It simply records what happened.
When an agency’s official account of events directly contradicts documented video evidence, there are exactly two explanations. Either the agency is so profoundly incompetent that its leadership cannot accurately describe what its own agents did on camera, or it is lying. There is no third option. There is no charitable interpretation that accommodates both the video and the narrative simultaneously, because the video is the record of what occurred.
An agency wielding lethal authority, one whose agents carry firearms and operate with the power to detain, to separate, to use force, cannot be permitted either of those explanations without consequence. Incompetence at that level costs lives. Deliberate falsehood about the use of lethal force is not a public relations problem. It is a cover-up. And a government that responds to a cover-up by defending the institution doing the covering is not protecting law enforcement. It is attacking the concept of objective truth as a governing principle.
The crisis deepens when official credibility begins to collapse. When video evidence contradicts the story an agency tells about its own conduct, the public trust that democratic governance depends on erodes in ways that are difficult, sometimes impossible to repair. Public trust is not a bureaucratic asset to be managed. It is the living currency of democratic governance, and it is spent every time an official narrative asks citizens to disbelieve their own eyes.
We have been here before. For decades, dashcam and bodycam footage contradicted official police narratives about use-of-force incidents, and for decades, institutional loyalty was reflexively extended to the badge rather than to the evidence. We know what that cost. We know the communities it destroyed, the accountability it prevented, and the trust it annihilated. The lesson is not complicated: institutions that lie and face no consequence do not stop lying. They escalate. The misconduct grows to fit the protection provided.
When Enforcement Becomes Tyranny
ICE has a mandate. That mandate is immigration enforcement. It does not extend to American citizens. It cannot constitutionally, legally, or morally be used as justification for the detention, the harm, or the killing of people whose citizenship places them entirely outside the agency’s legitimate jurisdiction.
When American citizens are harmed or killed by federal agents through mistaken identity, through reckless action, through deliberate targeting the government faces a choice that is not actually complicated. Its first obligation, its only legitimate obligation, is to those citizens. Not to the agency. Not to the narrative the agency has constructed. Not to the political cost of admitting that something went catastrophically wrong.
The unlawful killing of a citizen by an agent of the state is a constitutional emergency. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments are not invoked to protect the popular or the powerful. They exist precisely to protect people from state power exercised without justification, without process, and without accountability. Lethal force without legal justification does not represent aggressive enforcement. It represents a breakdown of constitutional order — the kind of breakdown the founders considered catastrophic enough to write protections against in ink that has lasted two and a half centuries.
Choosing institutional protection over citizen protection is not a defensible policy position. It is the government inverting its own purpose; protecting itself from the people rather than protecting the people from the state. And that inversion is the precise definition of tyranny, whether it arrives loudly or quietly, whether it is announced or rationalized into the bureaucratic language that renders the monstrous mundane.
What History Has Already Taught Us
The American record on this question is not ambiguous. It speaks with uncomfortable consistency: when government power expands without consequence, civil liberties contract.
The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was carried out by federal authority, defended as national necessity, and later recognized as a profound constitutional violation that the nation formally apologized for. COINTELPRO, the FBI’s covert campaign against civil rights leaders, journalists, and political organizations operated for years beneath official cover before public exposure forced a reckoning. The post-9/11 surveillance architecture expanded far beyond its authorized scope, as congressional oversight committees eventually confirmed.
In each case, the pattern was identical: an agency convinced of its own necessity and righteousness operated beyond its legal authority. Institutional voices that should have demanded accountability instead provided cover. By the time the full picture emerged, significant damage to lives, to rights, to the constitutional fabric had already been done.
The lesson is not that federal agencies are inherently corrupt. The lesson is that any institution operating without meaningful oversight is capable of abuses that no one inside it will voluntarily surface. Oversight is not an insult to good-faith enforcement. It is the structural precondition that makes good-faith enforcement trustworthy.
There is a further cost that history documents with equal clarity: when citizens lose faith that wrongdoing will be investigated, that evidence will be weighed fairly, that accountability is real rather than performative, they do not simply become cynical about one agency. They become cynical about democratic governance itself. That cynicism is not harmless. It is the environment in which authoritarian alternatives take root and find their audience. Every generation that has ignored this warning has paid for the oversight in human lives.
The True Meaning of Patriotism
There is a version of patriotism that is really institutional loyalty dressed in a flag. It says: support the agency, back the badge, don’t undermine enforcement. It is emotionally satisfying, politically useful, and constitutionally bankrupt.
Real American patriotism has never been about reflexive deference to authority. The founders were not deferential to authority, they wrote a revolution against it. The abolitionists who challenged the Fugitive Slave Act were not deferential to authority. The civil rights demonstrators who exposed the violence of state power to the watching world were not deferential to authority. What they all shared was loyalty to something deeper than the institution of the moment: loyalty to the principle that government power must be answerable to law, and law must be answerable to the people.
Demanding accountability for a federal agency is not anti-government. It is the most rigorously governmental position possible. It says: we believe in the rule of law enough to insist that it applies here, now, to this agency, in this circumstance. It says: the Constitution is not a rhetorical ornament, it is a binding commitment, and we hold you to it.
Supporting America means supporting its Constitution. Those are not two separate loyalties that sometimes come into tension. They are the same loyalty. The country and its founding law are inseparable. When an agency violates the Constitution, defending the agency while dismissing the violation is not patriotism. It is its opposite.
What “Un-American” Actually Means
The term “un-American” is routinely weaponized as a political blunt instrument, applied so broadly and carelessly that it has nearly lost its meaning. So let us use it with precision.
Un-American, properly defined, means acting in direct opposition to the founding principles, the constitutional framework, and the democratic accountability structures that constitute this nation’s legal and moral identity. By that standard, not a partisan one, not an ideological one, but a constitutional and historical one, the following conclusions are not opinions. They are derivations from the founding documents themselves.
Killing an American citizen without due process is un-American. Constructing a false official narrative about that killing is un-American. Defending an agency that kills and lies rather than holding it accountable is un-American. Dismissing video evidence that contradicts the official account because accountability is politically inconvenient is un-American.
These are not positions one can reasonably disagree with while maintaining fidelity to the documents and principles that define this nation. You cannot simultaneously claim to love America and defend the government’s right to harm its citizens and lie about it. The two commitments are mutually exclusive.
America is not defined by the force it can bring to bear. Force is available to every government on earth, including those that history has condemned. What has always distinguished the American experiment imperfectly, but persistently, is the commitment to restraint. The idea that power has limits. That law applies to those who hold power, not just to those subject to it. That the rights of the individual are not gifts from the state, revocable at will, but prior claims that the state is bound to honor.
What Must Happen and Why the Standard Is Simple
The path forward is not ambiguous.
It requires an independent investigation outside the chain of command that participated in constructing and defending the false narrative because an investigation conducted by those with an institutional stake in the outcome is not an investigation. It is theater. It requires congressional accountability hearings with subpoena power, because congressional oversight is not optional when federal agencies kill American citizens. It requires the suspension of leadership implicated in the cover-up, pending the outcome of that investigation.
It requires federal protection for whistleblowers who possess information contradicting official accounts. Because those individuals are, at this moment, among the most important people in the federal government, and they need to know that the law will protect them for telling the truth. It requires criminal referral where the evidence supports charges of civil rights violations, because the law does not have a carve-out for federal employees.
Alongside investigation, there must be a reaffirmation of principle: no agency is above the law. That reaffirmation cannot be rhetorical. It must be institutional; expressed through strengthened oversight mechanisms, independent review processes, and policy reforms wherever systemic failures are identified. The goal is not to punish an agency for existing. The goal is to bring it back within the constitutional boundaries that give it legitimate authority in the first place.
The standard, at its core, is simple enough to state in a single sentence: if a private citizen did what these agents did on video, they would be arrested. Equal justice under law is not a slogan. It is the explicit constitutional guarantee that gives law enforcement its legitimacy in the first place. The moment law enforcement exists outside the law it enforces, it has no legitimate authority. It has only force.
This is how constitutional democracies repair themselves. Not through denial, not through political loyalty that outlasts the evidence, but through the same principles written into the founding documents: accountability, due process, transparency, and the rule of law.
The Oldest Choice in the American Story
A government that kills its own citizens and then constructs a false narrative to protect the agents responsible has not made a policy error. It has declared, through its actions, that the people exist to serve the state, not the other way around. A citizenry that accepts this has not merely lost an argument. It has surrendered the Republic.
The constitutional violation that emerges from these events is not partisan. No political coalition owns the Fifth Amendment. No party has exclusive title to due process. The failure, if proven, belongs to the nation, and the response to it belongs to the nation as a test.
The test is not whether Americans will defend the agencies they prefer. History already knows what institutional loyalty looks like. The test is whether Americans will defend the Constitution when defending it is costly, when it requires scrutinizing powerful agencies, demanding answers from officials who would prefer silence, and insisting on accountability when every political incentive runs the other way.
The American experiment has endured because at critical moments, moments when institutional power asserted itself as its own justification, people refused. They refused to accept that the badge was the law. They refused to accept that the official account was the truth. They refused to accept that the comfort of the powerful was worth more than the lives of the governed. Those refusals were not easy. They were costly. They were the price of living in a country where law means something.
To demand that test be taken seriously now is not radical. It is not destabilizing. It is not anti-American. It is the foundational American position. The one that predates every agency, every political party, every administration, and every enforcement priority that has come and gone across two and a half centuries of this republic’s life.
The choice before us is not complicated. It is not novel. It is the oldest choice in the American story: a country governed by law, truth, and accountability, or one governed by whichever agency holds the most guns and the sitting administration’s favor.
History will record which one we chose.
So will the video.