Letters from an American - January 23, 2026

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

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January 23, 26, tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets today in bitter cold temperatures with wind chills of negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit, or negative 32 degrees Celsius, to protest the occupation of Minneapolis and St. Paul by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP. status coup news interviewed a protester walking down the street holding a sign that said classic nazi blunder invading in winter the protester compared ice agents to the kuklux clan noting that both wore masks and raided immigrant communities he went on you know there's like all this talk of revolution we're the counter-revolutionaries right he explained there is a minority who is trying to create a post-law orderless, lawless society where their might makes right. And because, you know, they have guns and are willing to use them, they think they can suspend the Constitution, suspend habeas corpus, suspend civil liberties, generally speaking.

He continued, there was a memo that came out that said that they think they can break into people's houses without warrants, you know, basically just like trust us, which is, you know, know, fundamentally against the Fourth Amendment. And so if you look at the amendments, I mean, they're trying to tear down the first. They've gassed people, they've shot people, you know, hit people with beanbag guns and batons for exercising their First Amendment rights. They don't want people to, you know, exercise their Second Amendment rights, and certainly their fourth, but also the 14th. You know, basically they're attacking the whole Constitution. In his assertion that the Trump administration is engaged in a radical attempt to remake the American government,

while those trying to stop them are protecting our traditional government, the Minnesota protester was echoing another Midwesterner from our history, who also had to contend with a minority that had seized control of the federal government and was trying to rewrite the history of the United States of America to justify using the government to enrich themselves. On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois spoke at New York City's Cooper Union. Five years before, in his controversial annual message of December 1855, Democratic President Franklin Pierce had ignored the Declaration of Independence,

and in service to the elite Southern enslavers who ran the Democratic Party, retold the founding of the founding of, of the United States as a republic of free white men. The rights and privileges of belonging to that republic did not include the subject races of indigenous or black Americans, the president said. He called out as fanatics and partisans, those Northerners living in free states,

who obeyed state-free laws and protected enslaved Americans who had escaped from the South. They were, radicals who rejected the federal law demanding their return to their enslavers. Even worse, they opposed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that overturned the 1820 Missouri compromise, prohibiting the spread of human enslavement to the American West. At Cooper Union, Lincoln rejected Pierce's rewriting of American history. He also retold the history of America. In his version, though,

That history was one in which the founders opposed enslavement and those who stood against those trying to create a white man's republic were the nation's true counter-revolutionaries. Resting his vision on the Declaration of Independence, the nation's foundational document, he defended the principle of human equality and told Democrats, you say you are conservative, eminently conservative, while we are revolutionary, destructive,

or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by our fathers who framed the government under which we live. While you, with one accord, spit upon that old policy,

and insist upon substituting something new. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our government originated. Ligin was on solid historical ground when he reminded Americans of his era that those trying to impose a new system of white nationalist oligarchy on the nation were the true radicals, while those defending equality were consistent. conservatives. The colonists who threw off the rule of King George III also stood firmly on the idea that they were protecting longstanding principles of self-government that British officials were trying to replace with tyranny. In the Declaration of Independence, the founders called out a long train of

abuses and usurpations that evinces a desire to reduce them under absolute despotism. and said it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. After enumerating the many ways in which the king had usurped the powers of Englishmen that had been established over centuries, beginning with the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta, the founders launched a new nation. and then when the framers wrote a constitution for that new nation, they were careful to place within it a bill of rights to protect Americans from the rise of another tyrant. Now the Trump administration is made up of radicals

who are ignoring that constitution and that bill of rights in their open attempt to create a white nationalist nation. The man on the streets of Minneapolis today was right to call out the administration's assault on the First Amendment that protects freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right of people peaceably to assemble. Thanks to an unsealed State Department memo, we learned today that the administration revoked the visa of Tufts University student Ramesa Ozturk and detained her for six weeks solely because she co-authored an op-ed in the student newspaper calling

for a ceasefire in Gaza. The administrative The administration concluded that her op-ed may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization. Ice agents arrived in Maine this week, and one took pictures of a legal observer's car, prompting her to remind him that it is legal to record their actions and ask why he was taking her information. he answered, because we have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist. He appeared to be referring to Trump's September 25-2020 memo NSPM 7 that describes opposition to the administration's policies, opposition protected by the First Amendment, as domestic terrorism.

Rachel Levinson Waldman of the Brennan Center, noted that this drive, dramatic expansion of the legal framework for domestic terrorism appears to be the administration's argument for suggesting Renee Good was a domestic terrorist after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed her. Secretary of Homeland Security Christy Noem falsely claimed that Good tried to run over Ross, calling it an act of domestic terrorism, and Vice President J.D. Vance suggested that protesters are engaging in domestic terror techniques. But as Levinson-Waldman explains, domestic terrorism has a specific definition in the law. Actions that are dangerous to human life violate criminal law appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence the government by intimidation

or coercion and occur primarily in the U.S. To be called a domestic terrorist, she writes, an individual must commit one or more of 51 underlying federal crimes of terrorism, which involve nuclear or chemical weapons, plastic explosives, air piracy, and so on. The Minneapolis protester was right about the administration's assault on the Fourth Amendment as well. On Wednesday, Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press reported that ICE has been breaking into homes under the authority provided by a secret memo of May 12, 2025, signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, saying that federal agents do not need a judge's warrant

to force their way into people's homes. This is a direct assault on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which says the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unruly. reasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and establishes that the government can violate those rights only after a judge agrees there is probable cause of a crime and signs a warrant. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, warned, every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door and storm into your home.

It is an unlawful and morally repugnant policy that exemplifies the kinds of dangerous, disgraceful abuses America is seeing in real time. In our democracy, with vanishingly rare exceptions, the government is barred from breaking into your home without approval from a real judge. Government agents have no right to ransack your bedroom or terrorize your kids on a whim or personal. desire. The Minnesota protester was also right to call out the administration's assault on the 14th Amendment, which guarantees that no state shall deprive any person, not citizen, but person, of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. It is this principle. It is this principle, that is the heart of the challenges

to the administration's rendering of immigrants to foreign countries without due process. Instead of rooting itself in the real history of the United States of America, Ali Breeland of the Atlantic noted on Wednesday, the Trump administration is embracing Nazi propaganda, trying to convince Americans that the nation's roots are not in human equality,

but in the hierarchical system of European facts. of European fascism. Rejecting the idea of liberty and equality proposed in the Declaration of Independence and defended by people like Abraham Lincoln as the nation's foundational principle, they are trying to define the United States of America in an entirely new way, one made up of white Protestants

who, in their minds, belong to the land here. Rather than a nation based in ideals, they want a nation based in blood and soil. In the 1770s and again in the 1850s, everyday Americans recognized the radicalism of those extremists who were trying to erase the nation's principles and the rule of law, ignoring the long-standing rights of the people to liberty and equality and instead trying to impose a despotism. Today, a protester in Minneapolis, one of the tens of thousands who filled the streets in below zero weather to demand that ICE end its violent occupation of their city and its abuse of immigrants and people of color, made it clear that Americans in 2026,

still believe in the nation's founding principles of equality and the rule of law, and they utterly reject the right wing's blood and soil radicalism. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.