Why Minneapolis marks a line in the sand for U.S. citizens

I grew up watching grainy scenes of the civil rights movement in history class — dogs and firehoses unleashed on demonstrators, federal troops escorting children into newly integrated schools. Those images felt distant, almost unreal. They were offered as evidence of a chapter the nation had confronted and corrected. That’s how a kid absorbs that lesson. I felt a settled certainty that the wrong thing we’d done had since been made right. I did not yet understand how uneven that progress had been, or how differently those same events were lived and remembered by others.

That sense of certainty no longer holds. Today’s footage — circulating in real time on social media and argued over just as quickly — feels harder to explain away as the necessary friction of progress. It raises a more unsettling question: Will these scenes be taught as evidence of another moment the country struggled with the limits of its own power? Or will they be remembered, stripped of context and controversy, as something unfortunate but necessary?

When Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent during a federal operation in Minneapolis earlier this month, the facts of her death were quickly overshadowed by the government’s response. Instead of confronting the use of lethal force that took Good’s life, attention was deliberately shifted toward impugning her personal life and associations. Senior administration officials — including President Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem — publicly characterized Good’s actions as “disrespectful to law enforcement” and as “domestic terrorism,” fixing a narrative of threat and culpability almost immediately.

Rather than face an appropriate reckoning, the administration sought to recast Good in ways that would narrow sympathy and foreclose inquiry. Multiple senior Justice Department attorneys resigned rather than participate in those efforts, signaling resistance to how the case was being handled.

This moment is more than a dispute over protest or order. It marks a fundamental shift in how power is exercised and justified. Actions that once demanded explanation are increasingly treated as legitimate by default. Calls for restraint are reframed by the president and administration officials as impediments, or as evidence of disloyalty. Questions about process and accountability are cast by senior officials as threats to order, rather than the normal work of citizenship. We are expected to internalize the idea that certain uses of power are simply beyond question.

This is an extraordinary claim to authority. Large-scale force is being exercised by ICE agents, in our name, with little opportunity for challenge. It is carried out by armed personnel who conceal their identities, sweep broadly through communities and operate with limited transparency. When citizens respond with peaceful protest and legitimate questions about proportionality and restraint, those citizens are reframed as threats.

The Constitution does not treat citizens as passive bystanders to state power. It assumes the opposite: that the governed have both the right and the responsibility to question how force is used in their name. Public dissent and demands for investigation are not signs of disorder; they are among the mechanisms by which democratic legitimacy is preserved. When ordinary acts of citizenship are recast as disloyalty or met with intimidation or harm, the danger we face is the inversion of democratic norms.

What is being normalized instead is a governing posture that treats the use of force as routine and strips away the transparency and oversight that once restrained it. When force is insulated from scrutiny altogether, the problem is no longer one of policy or tactics, but of the legitimacy of state power itself.

That legitimacy is being tested now. Whether one agrees with a particular enforcement strategy or not, the question the people must answer is whether we will tolerate a framework in which violence carried out by the state is presumed justified and those unsettled by its use are cast as enemies rather than citizens. This is not a debate over outcomes; it is a struggle over the conditions under which government power may be exercised.

A nation can survive disagreement. It cannot survive disagreement being disallowed or even punished. If force no longer requires explanation, if accountability becomes optional, and if consent is replaced by demanded compliance, there is nothing left to debate. What remains is submission.

The question before us is not whether the government should ever use force. It is whether that force still answers to the people in whose name it is used.

The answer says everything about what kind of country we have become.

Jon Duffy is a retired naval officer. He writes about leadership and democracy.