01/16/2026
They didn’t hide it.
That’s what haunts me.
They didn’t whisper it in back rooms
or tuck it into fine print
or pretend it was a misunderstanding.
They held it up in the air
like a trophy.
MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW.
Black ink. Big letters.
A chant you could buy on a t-shirt.
A rally sign as a souvenir.
A promise you could clap for.
They told us they were coming for the worst—
and then they taught the country
to stop asking who gets called “worst”
when the powerful are hungry.
They fed us a steady diet of tragedy.
Selected,
repeated,
framed.
Fear became a reflex
and cruelty started to sound like policy.
Meanwhile the violence they never advertise
keeps happening in kitchens and bedrooms,
behind closed doors,
inside nice houses.
In places where nobody calls it an invasion.
They point away.
Always away.
Always toward the “other.”
Always toward the border.
Always toward brown faces
and learned English
and names they don’t bother to pronounce.
Now Minnesota.
Streets that look like ours.
Winter air that feels the same.
Neighbors watching the unthinkable
happen in daylight
while masked thugs and someone in a suit says
this is what safety looks like.
A mother dead.
A community rattled.
A country staring at the wreckage
like it’s weather.
Like this is inevitable.
Like it’s normal.
And that’s the part they perfected.
Not the violence,
but the making it ordinary.
This didn’t start with sirens.
It started with language.
It started with the slow corrosion of empathy,
the steady lowering of the bar,
the training of our nervous systems
to accept more and more and more.
First, it’s a joke.
Then it’s a talking point.
Then it’s a platform.
Then it’s a policy.
Then it’s a raid.
Then it’s a body.
And now it’s content.
Now it’s men with guns
shot from a low angle
so they look like heroes.
Now it’s soldiers rappelling
onto an apartment building in Chicago
like a movie scene,
or a mission.
Like something to cheer for
instead of something that should make us sick.
Now it’s videographers filming
forced entries door to door.
Battering rams cracking frames,
boots pounding over thresholds.
Broken windows and
broken bodies,
as terrified children whimper just
out of the frame.
It’s not enough to do it.
They have to romanticize it.
They have to make state violence look clean.
Disciplined.
Cinematic.
They’ve turned terror into aesthetics
so the audience doesn’t feel horror—
they feel satisfaction.
“Are you not entertained?”
Maybe the cruelty isn’t a side effect,
but the lever.
When you can provoke panic,
you can create chaos.
You can turn neighborhoods into war zones.
A person can reach for more power
with a straight face.
Emergency.
Security.
Restore order.
Then whisper about the Insurrection Act
a tool on a belt
that has been waiting for its moment.
Like the plan was always
to manufacture the moment.
Do this to make the public beg for the boot.
To make resistance look like “rioting.”
To make dissent look like danger.
To turn protest into permission
for a crackdown.
To normalize soldiers in our streets
the same way they normalized cages,
and raids,
and the lie that some people don’t count.
Strategic.
Purposeful.
Patient.
They rehearsed the story
until it sounded like common sense:
that violence is safety
as long as it’s aimed
at the right people.
But we are here
standing in the aftermath,
grief spilling into the snow,
watching neighbors hold signs with shaking hands,
watching mothers pull their children closer
because something in the air feels wrong
in a way we can’t name.
Here with the sickening knowledge
that it didn’t have to be this way.
And with the heavier knowledge:
but of course it’s coming to this.
They wanted a country
where we flinch less.
Where we feel less.
Where we accept more.
Where the line keeps moving
until there is no line left.
Where a human life
can be reduced to an argument
and then dismissed
because the crowd has already moved on
to the next clip,
or the next raid,
or the next performance of dominance
disguised as governance.
But I can’t move on.
Not past her little boy.
Or the screaming woman.
Or the hospitalized baby.
Or the zip ties.
Or kidnappings from courtrooms.
Or the kids afraid to go to school.
Or his unconscious body put into a van.
I can’t forget
that they told us who they were.
And I can’t forgive
how hard they worked
to make this feel normal.
