In January 2026, federal immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis and beyond became impossible to ignore. Not because they represented a sudden departure from history, but because the stories used to justify them began to fail under their own weight.
For some of us, nothing shifted. What changed was visibility. The seams that had long been held together by narrative, denial, and selective attention began to split in public.
As a Black woman in America, especially one raised in the South, the idea that state power can turn violent, arbitrary, or cruel without warning is not theoretical. It is inherited knowledge. It is lived memory. What has changed is not the nature of power, but the ability of others to continue pretending they did not see it.
In Minneapolis, Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, was shot and killed by a federal immigration enforcement agent on January 7 while driving near her home. Official explanations were issued quickly, but video footage and eyewitness accounts raised serious questions about the necessity and proportionality of lethal force. Her family and community rejected the government’s framing and demanded accountability.
Just weeks later, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen, was fatally shot by a Border Patrol agent during an enforcement operation tied to immigration activity. Once again, conflicting narratives emerged. Once again, the public was asked to accept explanations that did not align cleanly with what witnesses described or what video appeared to show.
Alongside these killings came the detention of children and families. A five-year-old boy, Liam Conejo Ramos, was taken into federal custody with his father after returning from preschool, later transferred to a detention facility far from home. School officials, family members, and advocates described the incident as traumatic and destabilizing, particularly given the child’s age and circumstances.
When mothers and nurses are killed, when children are removed from the ordinary rhythms of their lives and placed behind fences, the abstraction of policy collapses. Not because enforcement suddenly became violent, but because the language used to soften it could no longer hold.
For some, this moment feels shocking.
For others, it feels familiar.
What we are witnessing is not a break from precedent, but the unraveling of the stories that once kept the consequences contained.
There is an old warning from Voltaire about moments like this, about what happens when people are taught to accept absurdities long before they are asked to live with their consequences.
II. The Moral Premise We Were Asked to Accept
What followed these events was not silence. It was justification.
Almost immediately, the deaths, the detentions, the visible harm were folded into familiar language: necessary, unfortunate, lawful, protective. The public conversation did not center on whether something had gone wrong, but on whether the outcomes could be defended in service of a larger goal.
This is where the real fracture appears.
Many people were not arguing that harm hadn’t occurred. They were arguing that it didn’t matter. Or more precisely, that it mattered less than the idea being protected. The goal: border control, enforcement, order, was treated as self-justifying, while the method was framed as regrettable but acceptable.
That framing requires a specific moral move: separating intention from consequence.
It allows someone to say, “I don’t like how this looks, but I support it,” without sitting with what this actually entails. It permits agreement with a policy while disavowing responsibility for how that policy manifests in real bodies and real lives.
This is not neutrality.
It is moral outsourcing.
At this point, belief stops being reflective and becomes defensive. The question is no longer Is this right? But how do I explain this without having to change my position? The work shifts from discernment to preservation of identity. Of allegiance. Of narrative.
This is where Voltaire’s warning becomes operational.
The absurdity people are asked to accept is not that enforcement exists, but that enforcement carried out through violence, rights violations, and the detention of children can still be called protection. That a system producing death and trauma can be defended as morally intact if the stated goal sounds reasonable enough.
Once that premise is accepted, almost anything can be justified.
What makes this moment so dangerous is not disagreement over policy. It is the normalization of cognitive shortcuts, where people stop evaluating actions on their own terms and instead defer to labels, authority, or team loyalty.
You see it in the refusal to say, plainly, this is wrong.
Even among those who agree with the goal, there is a growing inability to name when the method has crossed a line. To do so would require admitting that the story they were given does not hold. That what they accepted as order now looks like harm.
So the language tightens.
The defenses harden.
The seams strain further.
And the question quietly shifts from What do we believe? to something more unsettling:
Are these beliefs freely chosen, or simply inherited, repeated, and protected at all costs?
That is the moment where sovereignty begins to fail. Not because people lack opinions, but because they no longer feel entitled to revise them in the face of reality.
III. The Line That Cannot Be Crossed
There is a point at which debate ends, not because questions disappear, but because the answer becomes clear.
That point is reached when enforcement requires the suspension of fundamental rights. When due process becomes optional. When bodily autonomy is disregarded. When children are detained to facilitate compliance. When lethal force is explained away as procedural error. When freedom itself becomes collateral damage.
At that moment, the issue is no longer immigration.
It is legitimacy.
For me, legal and lawful are not the same thing.
Legal describes what has been authorized by power.
Lawful describes what remains aligned with justice, restraint, and human dignity.
Something can be legal and still be unlawful in the deeper sense, because it violates the very principles law is meant to protect. History has made this painfully clear. Slavery was legal. Segregation was legal. Internment was legal. None of these were lawful.
So when enforcement demands the violation of individual rights, when due process is suspended, when children are detained, when violence is normalized, legality stops being a defense. What remains is authority without legitimacy.
I am not obligated to defend what is merely legal.
I reserve my allegiance for what is lawful.
And when legality outruns lawfulness, consent is no longer owed.
This is the distinction too many refuse to make. A system can function and still be fundamentally flawed. It can be defended and still be indefensible. Order, when purchased through rights erosion, is not order at all. It is coercion. Period!
This is where sovereignty asserts itself, not as rebellion, but as refusal.
Refusal to accept harm as a necessary cost.
Refusal to outsource conscience to authority.
Refusal to pretend that ends can cleanse methods that violate something irreducible.
To say “to hell with the law” at this point is not an embrace of chaos. It is a defense of the only thing that gives law its meaning in the first place: the protection of individual freedom.
A society does not collapse because people question unjust enforcement.
It collapses when people stop questioning it at all.
And that is the final danger Voltaire was warning about, not disagreement, not disorder, but the quiet agreement to absurdities that make atrocities feel inevitable.
This is where I stand.
Not against order.
Not against law.
But against any system that asks me to abandon my humanity in order to defend it.
That is the line.
And it has been crossed.
IV. Withdrawal of Consent
There is a moment when continued participation becomes a choice rather than an obligation.
That moment arrives when a system asks you to override what you can see, what you know, and what you would never accept if it were happening to someone you love. When it demands that you subordinate conscience to compliance, and calls that maturity.
This is where consent matters.
Not the symbolic consent of voting cycles or party affiliation, but the daily, quieter consent that shows up in what we excuse, what we defend, and what we refuse to name. Systems do not survive on force alone. They survive on the willingness of ordinary people to rationalize what should disturb them.
That is why this conversation is not really about immigration. It is about whether people still believe they have the right, and the responsibility, to say no when something violates their moral threshold.
I am not interested in purity politics or ideological alignment. I am interested in limits. In lines that do not move simply because authority demands it. In the recognition that a society cannot be held together by procedures alone if those procedures hollow out its humanity.
When people insist that harm must be tolerated for the sake of order, what they are really saying is that they have decided some lives are expendable in service of an idea. That decision may be legal. It may be popular. It may even be normalized.
It is not lawful.
Withdrawal of consent is not chaos. It is not rebellion for its own sake. It is the last remaining act of sovereignty available when every other lever has been pulled and failed. It is the refusal to lend one’s moral weight to something that no longer deserves it.
A free society does not require unanimity.
It requires conscience.
And conscience does not ask whether a position is defensible.
It asks whether it is livable.
This is where I stand, not because I have all the answers, but because I refuse any answer that requires the abandonment of my humanity.
That is not extremism. That is the minimum.
The Conscious Underground 
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