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In Minneapolis, two recent fatal encounters with federal immigration agents have produced not only grief and anger, but an unusually clear fight over what is real.

In the aftermath of Alex Pretti’s killing on Jan. 24, 2026, federal officials claimed the Border Patrol officers who fired weapons at least 10 times acted in self-defense.

But independent media analyses showed the victim holding a phone, not a gun, throughout the confrontation. Conflicting reports about the earlier death of Renée Good have similarly intensified calls for independent review and transparency. Minnesota state and local officials have described clashes with federal agencies over access to evidence and investigative authority.

That pattern matters because in fast-moving crises, early official statements often become the scaffolding on which public judgment is built. Sometimes those statements turn out to be accurate. But sometimes they do not.

When the public repeatedly experiences the same sequence – confident claims, partial disclosures, shifting explanations, delayed evidence, lies – the damage can outlast any single incident.

It teaches people that “the facts” are simply one more instrument of power, distributed strategically. And once that lesson sinks in, even truthful statements arrive under suspicion.

And when government stories keep changing, democracy pays the price.

Lying in politics

This is not a novel problem. During the U.S. Civil War, for example, President Abraham Lincoln handled hostile press coverage with a blunt mix of repression and restraint. His administration shut down hundreds of newspapers, arrested editors and censored telegraph lines, even as Lincoln himself often absorbed vicious, personal ridicule.

The Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s brought similar disingenuous attempts by the Reagan administration to manage public perception, as did misleading presidential claims about weapons of mass destruction in the 2003 leadup to the Iraq War.

During the Vietnam era, the gap between what officials said in public and what they knew in private was especially stark.

Both the Johnson and Nixon administrations repeatedly insisted the war was turning a corner and that victory was near. However, internal assessments described a grinding stalemate.

Those contradictions came to light in 1971 when The New York Times and The Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, a classified Defense Department history of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam. The Nixon administration fiercely opposed the document’s public release.

Several months later, political philosopher Hannah Arendt published an essay in the New York Review of Books called “Lying in Politics”. It was also reprinted in a collection of essays titled “Crises of the Republic.”

Arendt, a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution and the very real risk of deportation to a concentration camp, argued that when governments try to control reality rather than report it, the public stops believing and becomes cynical. People “lose their bearings in the world,” she wrote.

‘Nobody believes anything any longer’

Arendt first articulated this argument in 1951 with the publication of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in which she examined Nazism and Stalinism. She further refined it in her reporting for The New Yorker on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a major coordinator of the Holocaust.

Arendt did not wonder why officials lie. Instead, she worried about what happens to a public when political life trains citizens to stop insisting on a shared, factual world.

Arendt saw the Pentagon Papers as more than a Vietnam story. They were evidence of a broader shift toward what she called “image-making” – a style of governance in which managing the audience becomes at least as important as following the law. When politics becomes performance, the factual record is not a constraint. It is a prop that can be manipulated.

The greatest danger of organized, official lying, Arendt warned, is not that people will believe something that is false. It is that repeated, strategic distortions make it impossible for citizens to orient themselves in reality.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie,” she wrote, “but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world … [gets] destroyed.”

She sharpened the point further in a line that feels especially poignant in today’s fragmented, rapid and adversarial information environment:

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” she wrote. “A lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history … depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge.”

When officials lie time and again, the point isn’t that a single lie becomes accepted truth, but that the story keeps shifting until people don’t know what to trust. And when this happens, citizens cannot deliberate, approve or dissent coherently, because a shared world no longer exists.

Maintaining legitimacy

Arendt helps clarify what Minneapolis is showing us, and why the current federal government posture matters beyond one city.

Immigration raids are high-conflict operations by design. They happen quickly, often without public visibility, and they ask targeted communities to accept a heavy federal presence as legitimate. When killings occur in that context, truth and transparency are essential. They protect the government’s legitimacy with the public.

Reporting on the Pretti case shows why. Even as federal government leaders issued definitive claims about the victim’s allegedly threatening behavior – they said Pretti approached agents while brandishing a gun – video evidence contradicted that official account.

The point isn’t that every disputed detail in a fast-moving, complicated event causes public harm. It’s that when officials make claims that appear plainly inconsistent with readily available evidence – as in the initial accounts of what happened with Pretti – that mismatch is itself damaging to public trust.

Distorted declarations paired with delayed disclosure, selective evidence or interagency resistance to outside investigations nudge the public toward a conclusion that official accounts are a strategy for controlling the story, and not a description of reality.

Truth is a public good

Politics is not a seminar in absolute clarity, and competing claims are always part of the process. Democracies can survive spin, public relations and even occasional falsehoods.

But Arendt’s observations show that it is the normalization of blatant dishonesty and systematic withholding that threatens democracy. Those practices corrode the factual ground on which democratic consent is built.

The U.S. Constitution assumes a people capable of what Arendt called judgment – citizens who can weigh evidence, assign responsibility and act through law and politics.

If people are taught that “truth” is always contingent and always tactical, the harm goes beyond misinformation. A confused, distrustful public is easier to manage and harder to mobilize into meaningful democratic participation. It becomes less able to act, because action requires a shared world in which decisions can be understood, debated and contested.

The Minneapolis shootings are not only an argument about use of force. They are a test of whether public institutions will treat facts and truth as a public good – something owed to the community precisely when tensions are highest. If democratic life depends on a social contract among the governed and those governing, that contract cannot be sustained on shifting sand. It requires enough shared reality to support disagreement.

When officials reshape the facts, the damage isn’t only to the record. The damage is to the basic belief that a democratic public can know what its government has done.

Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

A federal judge heard arguments on Jan. 26, 2026, as the state of Minnesota sought a temporary restraining order to stop the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation in the state. The administration has sent some 3,000 immigration agents to Minnesota, and attorneys for the state have argued, in part, that it amounts to an unconstitutional occupation, on 10th Amendment grounds. Alfonso Serrano, a politics editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Andrea Katz, a law scholar at Washington University in St. Louis, about the Minnesota lawsuit and its possible legal implications.

What’s the legal issue at stake in this court case?

In Minnesota v. Noem, attorneys for the state are arguing that the federal government is acting illegally by intruding on a sphere of state power (the police power). They’re claiming violations of the 10th Amendment, which is this idea that under the U.S. Constitution, states are reserved powers that existed before the Constitution was drafted, powers that are not delegated to the federal government.

They’re also making this rather new claim under what’s called the equal sovereignty principle, which is that states all have to be treated equally by the federal government. There’s also a First Amendment claim, and an Administrative Procedure Act claim, which is that the government is acting illegally in an arbitrary and capricious way. I think the 10th Amendment arguments are ones that I would say are kind of unprecedented, rather untested waters.

On that note, when does a federal law enforcement response cross the line and violate the 10th Amendment? Is there precedent for this?

The question you just posed is one that the district judge, Kate M. Menendez, seems to be nervous about having to hear. This is essentially asking a federal judge to sift into different buckets that which is federal power and that which is state power. And I can say there’s not a lot of case law on this issue.

The most filled-out doctrine under the 10th Amendment is the anti-commandeering doctrine. It holds that the federal government cannot use the state government as a sort of puppet. The federal government can’t use state officers forcibly against the state’s will to enforce the law. Now that is not, strictly speaking, what’s going on here, because Minnesota is complaining about the presence of federal agents enforcing the laws in ways that it thinks are illegal.

And so it seems to me that the 10th Amendment has been most developed in this area that Minnesota is not touching on, and so for that reason, I think their invocation of it is pretty unusual. They’re essentially claiming that the 10th Amendment protects their police powers and that the federal government is intruding on that. I think that’s a novel argument in court, and my suspicion is that it is not likely to be a winning argument in court.

The Trump administration has dismissed the state’s legal theory, saying the president is acting within his authority, correct?

Yeah, I think that’s correct. Again, I want to make clear that Minnesota has made many arguments against the Trump administration, and I’m just focusing on the merits of this 10th Amendment argument.

There was a sort of undeveloped strand of cases in the mid-20th century where the Supreme Court tried to develop this idea of core state powers. And so it said the federal government couldn’t act in a way that violated a state’s core powers, like where to put your state capital, or control over natural resources, or defining salaries for state government employees. The court said these are core state powers.

But then in a famous case called Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, in 1985, the court overruled itself and said – and this is still where we are – federal courts cannot be in the business of defining what constitutes a core state power. It’s too open-ended, undefined. It’s a political inquiry. It’s not something that’s appropriate for a judge.

And so I think on this 10th Amendment argument, Minnesota is essentially asking the courts to revive this core state powers doctrine, which I think the court is unlikely to do.

What repercussions could the judge’s ruling have?

Minnesota has already filed, in a case called Tincher v. Noem, a more conventional set of claims, which is that ICE agents broke the law, are violating rights, acting in excess of their authority. They have already gotten preliminary relief on this first set of claims, although Judge Menendez’s order is now on hold, pending appeal before the 8th Circuit court.

That is different from this 10th Amendment claim. In the 10th Amendment argument, one of the arguments that Minnesota has made is the equal sovereignty principle. The equal sovereignty principle was articulated in the 2013 case, Shelby County v. Holder. This is the famous case where the Supreme Court struck down an important part of the Voting Rights Act that prevented Southern states from restricting the vote, apparently on the basis of race. In Shelby County, the court said that the Voting Rights Act, which subjected certain states with a pattern of racial discrimination on the vote to a preclearance process where the federal government had to approve their laws before they passed them, treated different states differently.

Of course, in that case, the federal government said those are states that have a history of discrimination, so the federal government was justified in treating them differently.

But Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Shelby County opinion, said the 10th Amendment means that the government can’t treat different states differently.

Now it’s not a well-regarded doctrine, so it’s kind of shocking that Minnesota is invoking it here. For one reason, the equal sovereignty principle has not been well developed since Shelby County. The second reason it would be a big deal – quite shocking to me, if the judge enforced it – is that Shelby County was talking about legislation that treated different states differently.

If we pass a rule where the executive branch can’t treat different states differently, you’re essentially denying the existence of discretion in enforcement, which is very quintessentially an executive power, right?

It could, for example, lead to states saying that federal agents can’t come in to help people in a natural disaster. So again, I think this argument, like the rest of the 10th Amendment arguments, suffers from being undeveloped in the case law and potentially carrying a risk of kneecapping the federal government’s ability to enforce the law, which sometimes does, for totally good-faith reasons, require treating different states differently.

Any final thoughts?

The first Trump administration was highly disorganized and didn’t take concerted action for a while. The second Trump administration was the precise opposite of that. They acted quickly and in a very organized fashion, pushing power as far as it can go in a number of agencies.

And I think the question this gets back to is how the federal courts have reacted to this barrage of executive orders, of new applications of old laws, of new forms of government power exercised in a way that threatens federalism.

The federal courts usually grant deference to the president when the government issues statements in the context of litigation. Court doctrine is to defer to those statements as being entitled. It’s a presumption of regularity, of accuracy. And I think we’re already seeing in the district courts some suspicion by the judges of the government’s version of things.

To me, this is sort of a brave new world, whether we’re going to see courts relax their deference toward the executive branch. And I mean, we are in kind of a brave new world. We have videos all over the internet showing the facts of the Alex Pretti shooting. But I just want to note that, from a separation of powers point of view, it’s very interesting to see federal judges seeming to distrust official accounts of events from the executive branch. I think this is an area in which the doctrine seems to be moving, and we’re watching it in real time.

Andrea Katz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When it comes to political polarization in the United States, the Pittsburgh region offers a useful window into what communities can do about it.

Pittsburgh is a “comeback city.” The once-prosperous steel industry may have declined, but universities, hospitals and technology are driving reinvention and a new emphasis on manufacturing.

It’s also a city where people’s economic situation and political orientation often depend on where they live and how their community and neighborhood are doing. Different neighborhoods experience different levels of safety, school quality, housing stability and responsiveness from public services. In the region’s hardest-hit communities, this shows up not only in frustration with local institutions, but in shifting voting patterns and growing openness to populist messages of renewal.

Our research at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets examines Rust Belt revitalization and how economic decline reshapes civic life and political conflict in communities such as Pittsburgh and its surrounding mill towns.

It also shows how local government performance shapes trust and political conflict in distressed communities across the Pittsburgh region.

We’ve found that the region’s polarization is often less about culture war debates and political ideology and more about whether people think local institutions still work for them. It also grows out of economic despair, eroding trust and the feeling that the rules of the game no longer produce a future worth believing in.

This polarization plays out most visibly in practical disputes about safety, housing, schools and basic public services. Residents split between calls for tougher law enforcement and demands for alternative approaches to criminal justice; between building more housing and regulating affordability; between consolidating schools and maintaining neighborhood anchors; and between higher spending on basic services such as construction costs and frustration over government’s ability to deliver.

National politics do matter here, but local conflicts are where politics become tangible and where trust rises or falls based on performance. Those decisions happen locally through city departments, school boards, neighborhood meetings and county agencies.

Not just ‘blue city, red suburbs’

At its core, Pittsburgh is really about the differences in the neighborhoods and communities. This shapes how communities perceive fairness and whether they trust that the government is capable of solving problems.

In some neighborhoods, civic institutions are strong and residents feel empowered in public life. In others, decades of disinvestment have weakened the foundations of everyday governance.

Squirrel Hill is one of Pittsburgh’s most civically vibrant neighborhoods. It is affluent and educated, and it has a number of synagogues, bookstores, immigrant service organizations and active civic groups. When political conflict emerged in the aftermath of the Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting, residents had networks to absorb disagreement rather than let it spiral into hostility.

Now shift to the South Side, where gentrification shapes politics differently. The South Side Flats evolved from a blue-collar neighborhood into a place with many renters and younger residents. People are civic-minded, though local debates often revolve around nightlife, public safety, rising costs and development.

Carrick remains politically mixed, reflecting tensions in a working- and middle-class community navigating demographic change and uncertainty about the future. Local concerns include schools, traffic, infrastructure and neighborhood stability, but national polarization shapes how issues are interpreted. Potholes become a service complaint and a symbol of being left behind. Housing projects become flash points for who belongs.

Homewood is a historically Black neighborhood shaped by decades of disinvestment. Deep challenges include poverty, blight and long-standing concerns about safety. Yet it also shows civic resilience through churches, nonprofits, health centers and grassroots leaders who have kept public life intact even when government capacity falls short. Even in heavily democratic neighborhoods like Homewood, citizens feel a sense of being overlooked.

Different neighborhoods experience “Pittsburgh” through different governing realities. The suburbs and mill towns are part of the story, too.

In Braddock, where U.S. Sen. John Fetterman once served as mayor, the collapse of the steel economy severely damaged the tax base and weakened local capacity to provide reliable services. When municipal governments are forced to govern with fewer resources, politics become a battle over shortages of basic services, such as trash collection. Civic participation declines, and frustration is unabating.

In Aliquippa, the closure of major steel employers contributed to long-term economic contraction and political realignment. Communities once firmly Democratic have become more open to conservative populism, including among working-class and minority voters attracted to messages of economic renewal. This shift often involves less dramatic ideological conversation than a search for a political language that takes economic loss seriously.

And in McKeesport, a former manufacturing hub, economic distress combines with infrastructure decay and opioid addiction. Yet McKeesport also shows that polarization does not erase cooperation. Community organizations build partnerships around practical concerns, such as youth programming, small-business support and downtown development.

The Pittsburgh region is not “blue city, red suburbs.” Deindustrialization did more than eliminate jobs: It reduced mobility, strained families, shrank tax bases, weakened local civic institutions and made daily life feel less stable.

A lesson from Pittsburgh’s new mayor

Corey O’Connor, Pittsburgh’s new mayor, has emphasized economic revitalization, but also has argued what many officials forget or ignore: Residents judge government first by whether it delivers basic competence.

For many Pittsburghers, a government that cannot clear streets after a storm, fill potholes or maintain a functional snow removal fleet does not feel capable of managing large-scale economic revitalization or building civic trust. Snow removal and filling potholes aren’t trivial issues, but a test of whether public authority is reliable and fair.

When basic services cannot be provided in real time, mistrust becomes almost inevitable.

Rebuilding legitimacy from the bottom up

Escaping polarization requires a long-term strategy to rebuild opportunity, restore institutional credibility and strengthen civic infrastructure.

For Pittsburgh and its region, this depends on fostering frameworks for civic participation by expanding job training programs and delivering public services effectively, including through municipalities helping each other out to provide them.

Research shows that competence in the everyday work of government is a significant way to rebuild trust in public institutions. Starting with the basics in local government demonstrates that cooperation is possible and institutions can solve problems.

The lesson of Pittsburgh is that economic stability is civic stability. When it collapses, politics become less about disagreement than respect and recognition. Polarization is a consequence of people not feeling seen, heard or treated fairly by the institutions that govern them. Communities cannot wait for Washington to solve problems that are experienced – and addressed – locally.

Ilia Murtazashvili does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Over the past year, images of masked, heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting men, women and children – outside of courts, at schools and homes – have become common across the United States.

The video of an ICE agent shooting and killing Renee Nicole Good – a U.S. citizen – in Minnesota on Jan. 7, 2026, is one example of the brazen, sometimes deadly tactics that the agency employs.

Part of the reason why recent ICE tactics have shocked Americans is because most people haven’t seen them before. Historically, the country’s militarized immigration enforcement practices have played out closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. And for decades, agents with Customs and Border Protection have carried out most deportations near the border, not ICE.

From 2010-2020, nearly 80% of all deportations were initiated at or near the U.S.-Mexico border. During the COVID-19 pandemic, that number jumped to 98%, as both the Trump and Biden administrations utilized Title 42, a public health statute that allowed the government to rapidly deport recently arrived migrants.

But Trump during his second presidency has greatly shifted immigration enforcement north into the interior of the U.S. And ICE has played a central role.

As international migration and human rights scholars, we have examined recent federal immigration policy to determine why ICE has become the main agency detaining and deporting migrants as far away from the southern border as snowy Minnesota.

And we have also explored how the transition in immigration control from the southern border to more Americans’ front lawns could be shifting the public’s views on deportation tactics.

Migration as a threat

ICE is a relatively new agency. The 2002 Homeland Security Act, passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, created the Department of Homeland Security, known as DHS, by merging the U.S. Customs Service – previously under Treasury Department control – and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, formerly under the Justice Department.

DHS has 22 agencies, including three that focus on immigration: Customs and Border Protection, ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which manages legal immigration and naturalization.

There is no inherent reason that immigration enforcement should fall under homeland security. But immigration was deemed a national security matter by the George W. Bush administration after 9/11.

In a 2002 presidential briefing justifying DHS’s creation, Bush said, “The changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.”

The U.S. government has viewed immigration from this national security perspective ever since.

The full impact of the deportations

The Trump administration in early 2025 set a goal of deporting 1 million people during its first year.

But with so few crossings, and thus deportations, at the U.S.-Mexico border, the administration instead has focused its efforts on the U.S. interior.

Trump’s 2025 tax and budget bill reflected this reprioritization, allocating US$170 billion over four years to immigration enforcement, compared to approximately $30 billion allocated in 2024.

Roughly $67 billion goes toward immigration enforcement at the border, including border wall construction. But the largest percentage of the bill’s immigration funding – at least $75 billion – goes toward arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S.

The Trump administration did not initiate deportations from the U.S. interior. They have formed part of other administration’s policies, both Democratic and Republican.

Interior border enforcement increased under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s with the introduction of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which widened the criteria for deportations. And former President Barack Obama was referred to as the “Deporter in Chief” after his administration carried out more than 3 million deportations over his two terms, with roughly 69% of deportations occurring at the border.

But the astronomical growth of government funding toward migration control – at the border and in the U.S. – got the country to where it is today.

Between fiscal year 2003 and 2024, for example, Congress allocated approximately $24 toward immigration enforcement carried out by ICE and CBP for every $1 spent on the immigration court system that handles asylum claims.

The new money allocated under the 2025 budget bill, and the reprioritization of immigration enforcement from the border to the interior, partly explains why Americans are now seeing the long-term consequences of border militarization play out directly in their communities.

Americans may not know about the experiences of migrants who are quickly deported near the border, but it is harder to ignore recent images of people snatched up within their own neighborhoods.

Now the visible targets of border enforcement are increasingly immigrants who have built their lives in the U.S. – neighbors, friends, co-workers – as well as anyone who opposes ICE’s tactics, like Renee Good.

Changing political attitudes

In fact, the violence of Trump’s mass deportation campaign may be changing how Americans view immigration.

Just before the 2024 presidential election, a Gallup Poll found that 28% of Americans believed that immigration was the most important problem facing the nation – the highest percentage since Gallup began tracking the topic in 1981. This number dropped to 19% in December 2025, reflecting how more Americans see immigration as a routine issue that the government can manage rather than a crisis that needs to be dealt with.

This is supported in the academic literature. Migration scholars have shown that voters often support strict immigration policies in the voting booth but resist and protest when governments attempt to implement those policies in organized immigrant communities.

In 2002, for example, migration scholar Antje Ellermann documented that immigration officers reported it was more difficult to detain and deport people in Miami – because of resistance by a politicized immigrant community – compared to relatively conservative and less organized communities in San Diego.

But in both places, Republican and Democratic lawmakers were influential in intervening in individual cases to prevent deportations. This is because senior immigration officials, Ellermann noted, were influenced by media attention and pressure by members of Congress to grant relief.

Support for Trump’s handling of immigration is trending downward. Only 41% of Americans approved of Trump’s approach to immigration as of early January 2026, compared to 51% in March of last year, according to CNN polling.

This declining support for Trump’s tactics comes as Republican senators such as Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Joni Ernst of Iowa have criticized ICE and its operations in Minnesota.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents continued to use aggressive and sometimes violent methods to make arrests in its mass deportation campaign, including breaking down doors in Minneapolis homes, a bombshell report from the Associated Press on Jan. 21, 2026, said that an internal ICE memo – acquired via a whistleblower – asserted that immigration officers could enter a home without a judge’s warrant. That policy, the report said, constituted “a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.”

Those limits have long been found in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed Dickinson College President John E. Jones III, a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 2002, for a primer on the Fourth Amendment, and what the changes in the ICE memo mean.

Okay, I’m going to read the Fourth Amendment – and then you’re going to explain it to us, please! Here goes:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Can you help us understand what that means?

Since the beginning of the republic, it has been uncontested that in order to invade someone’s home, you need to have a warrant that was considered, and signed off on, by a judicial officer. This mandate is right within the Fourth Amendment; it is a core protection.

In addition to that, through jurisprudence that has evolved since the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, it is settled law that it applies to everyone. That would include noncitizens as well.

What I see in this directive that ICE put out, apparently quite some time ago and somewhat secretly, is something that, to my mind, turns the Fourth Amendment on its head.

What does the Fourth Amendment aim to protect someone from?

In the context of the ICE search, it means that a person’s home, as they say, really is their castle. Historically, it was meant to remedy something that was true in England, where the colonists came from, which was that the king or those empowered by the king could invade people’s homes at will. The Fourth Amendment was meant to establish a sort of zone of privacy for people, so that their papers, their property, their persons would be safe from intrusion without cause.

So it’s essentially a protection against abuse of the government’s power.

That’s precisely what it is.

Has the accepted interpretation of the Fourth Amendment changed over the centuries?

It hasn’t. But Fourth Amendment law has evolved because the framers, for example, didn’t envision that there would be cellphones. They couldn’t understand or anticipate that there would be things like cellphones and electronic surveillance. All those modalities have come into the sphere of Fourth Amendment protection. The law has evolved in a way that actually has made Fourth Amendment protections greater and more wide-ranging, simply because of technology and other developments such as the use of automobiles and other means of transportation. So there are greater protected zones of privacy than just a person’s home.

ICE says it only needs an administrative warrant, not a judicial warrant, to enter a home and arrest someone. Can you briefly describe the difference and what it means in this situation?

It’s absolutely central to the question here. In this context, an administrative warrant is nothing more than the folks at ICE headquarters writing something up and directing their agents to go arrest somebody. That’s all. It’s a piece of paper that says ‘We want you arrested because we said so.’ At bottom that’s what an administrative warrant is, and of course it hasn’t been approved by a judge.

This authorized use of administrative warrants to circumvent the Fourth Amendment flies in the face of their limited use prior to the ICE directive.

A judicially approved warrant, on the other hand, has by definition been reviewed by a judge. In this case, it would be either a U.S. magistrate judge or U.S. district judge. That means that it would have to be supported by probable cause to enter someone’s residence to arrest them.

So the key distinction is that there’s a neutral arbiter. In this case, a federal judge who evaluates whether or not there’s sufficient cause to – as is stated clearly in the Fourth Amendment – be empowered to enter someone’s home. An administrative warrant has no such protection. It is not much more than a piece of paper generated in a self-serving way by ICE, free of review to substantiate what is stated in it.

Have there been other kinds of situations, historically, where the government has successfully proposed working around the Fourth Amendment?

There are a few, such as consent searches and exigent circumstances where someone is in danger or evidence is about to be destroyed. But generally it’s really the opposite and cases point to greater protections. For example, in the 1960s the Supreme Court had to confront warrantless wiretapping; it was very difficult for judges in that age who were not tech-savvy to apply the Fourth Amendment to this technology, and they struggled to find a remedy when there was no actual intrusion into a structure. In the end, the court found that intrusion was not necessary and that people’s expectation of privacy included their phone conversations. This of course has been extended to various other means of technology including GPS tracking and cellphone use generally.

What’s the direction this could go in at this point?

What I fear here – and I think ICE probably knows this – is that more often than not, a person who may not have legal standing to be in the country, notwithstanding the fact that there was a Fourth Amendment violation by ICE, may ultimately be out of luck. You could say that the arrest was illegal, and you go back to square one, but at the same time you’ve apprehended the person. So I’m struggling to figure out how you remedy this.

John E. Jones III is affiliated with Keep Our Republic’s Article Three Coalition.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

During the protests that ripped through Iran in January, one person who gained attention was Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi, who lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., is the son of the late shah of Iran, who ruthlessly ruled the country before being deposed during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Pahlavi emerged during the recent upheaval as a prominent political dissident in exile who encouraged and inspired Iranians to demonstrate. It remained unclear, however, what level of popular support he commanded inside Iran, not to mention whether he was, in fact, dedicated to democracy as the descendant of a monarch.

While some Iranians perceived Pahlavi as an opposition leader, others considered him an opportunistic figure with monarchical designs and a mixed track record.

Crown prince to political dissident

Born in Tehran in 1960, Reza Pahlavi was the eldest son of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife, Queen Farah Diba, making him the crown prince.

From 1941 to 1979, the shah ruled Iran with an iron fist. With funding and training from France, the United States and Israel, he established and deployed a secret police force, the SAVAK, that subjected political opponents to surveillance, imprisonment, torture and execution.

As popular discontent against the shah grew in 1974-75, Amnesty International estimated there were between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners in Iran.

Although the shah stated during the 1979 revolution that he would rather flee the country than fire on protesters, his security forces killed approximately 500 to 3,000 Iranians – though those figures are lower than those killed in the latest Iran protests.

In 1980, the shah admitted to mistakes, including acknowledging that his regime had tortured Iranians.

The shah and his family fled Iran in 1979, and the Islamic Republic subsequently was established. After the shah died in 1980, Reza Pahlavi declared himself the next shah and started his political activism against the Islamic Republic from abroad.

More recently, he attempted to organize and unify a divided opposition composed of ethnic and religious groups, leftists, rightists, centrists, republicans and, of course, monarchists. In the process, Pahlavi also aspired to raise his public profile.

From 2013 to 2017, he served as co-founder and spokesperson of the Iran National Council, an umbrella organization of opposition groups, headquartered in Paris. It reportedly suffered defections from some groups, which stifled its ability to accomplish much. In February 2019, Pahlavi helped establish the Phoenix Project of Iran, a think tank in Washington, D.C., dedicated to regime change and a transition plan in Iran.

During the 2022-23 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, sparked by the death of the young Iranian woman Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the morality police, Pahlavi called for rallies against the Iranian government in the United States, Canada and other countries. Leading opposition figures spoke at these rallies, and thousands of people participated.

That same year, some high-profile activists and celebrities, including some his father had imprisoned, endorsed Pahlavi as a leader or figure who could unite the opposition.

Presence and politics

In April 2023, Pahlavi made his first official visit to Israel, where he was hosted by Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The visit was condemned by Iranians, from regime supporters to anti-government activists, who were opposed to monarchy and unsympathetic to Israel.

After Pahlavi’s participation in the February 2025 Munich security conference was nixed, he and his supporters gathered in the city that month and in the summer to unify the political opposition and plan a post-regime transition. For Pahlavi, the meetings may have been simply a face-saving measure after the security conference snub.

As a political dissident, Pahlavi continually called for a popular uprising, regime change and a secular and democratic state. At the same time, he did not rule out the return of the monarchy, albeit a constitutional one, based on a national referendum and constituent assembly.

In an attempt to appease other opposition groups and some anti-monarchy Iranian citizens, Pahlavi occasionally insisted he was “not a political leader” and was “not personally seeking political office” in Iran if the regime fell.

On the foreign policy front – and following in his father’s footsteps – Pahlavi has advocated for Iran to align itself with the United States and Israel.

Unclear support, mixed record

As Pahlavi became more politically active abroad, questions surfaced about his viability as an opposition leader in Iran.

Discounting a 2023 poll conducted by a pro-Pahlavi institute indicating he was widely popular in Iran, it remained difficult to determine his support in Iranian society.

In a 2022 poll conducted by an independent, nonprofit research foundation with 158,000 respondents in Iran, Pahlavi received the highest percentage – 32.8% – among 34 candidates listed to serve on a transitional solidarity council, should the regime collapse.

At the same time, Pahlavi apparently lacked a serious monarchist movement and a strong connection with local opposition leaders and activists in Iran. He purportedly had little, if any, support among reformist or liberal groups in the country.

The lack of clarity concerning support for Pahlavi in Iran explained the hesitation of U.S. officials, including President Donald Trump, to engage with him. That did not deter Pahlavi from attempting to persuade them to abandon diplomatic talks and negotiations with the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program.

Despite the debates outside Iran about Pahlavi’s support within the country, pro-monarchy slogans increasingly appeared in Iranian social media postings and anti-government protests, including those in 2017-18, 2019-20, and 2022-23.

During the 2019-20 protests, the security forces arrested members of monarchist groups around the country and acknowledged their rising popularity and ability to infiltrate the government. Some reformist intellectuals suggested that monarchist slogans were merely a means for Iranian youth and other citizens to channel their anger and frustration at the authorities rather than expressions of true support for Pahlavi.

The slogans also reinforced the regime’s efforts to delegitimize the protests by portraying them as a plot by external and internal enemies, including the monarchists, to destabilize the country.

Throughout the 12-day war in June 2025 between Iran and Israel, which claimed the lives of 1,190 Iranian civilians and injured and displaced thousands more, Pahlavi publicly lamented the destruction of Iran’s military infrastructure that his father had initially built and the price its people paid for a war he blamed on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the regime.

At the same time, he was criticized by prominent political prisoners and other Iranian activists and citizens for betraying his country by supporting the Israeli strikes and failing to condemn them.

After the war, Israeli investigative journalists uncovered an influence operation conducted and funded by Israeli public and private entities to promote – among Persian-speaking audiences on social media – Pahlavi as a potential leader in a post-Islamic Republic Iran. The disinformation campaign created cynicism and controversy concerning Pahlavi’s true popularity inside the country and his tacit connection with Israel before and during the war.

Latest protests and future prospects

During the most recent protests, Pahlavi expressed support for protesters and encouraged them to demonstrate at certain times in the evening. The timing of the protests and demonstrations was intended to increase turnout by accommodating people’s work schedules and to maximize media coverage by aligning with news cycles.

Thousands of protesters turned out in the streets at those times, with some chanting anti-government slogans and others pro-monarchy ones.

His role in the protests was reduced after the regime cut off the internet and telecommunications between the people of Iran and the outside world, as well as among activists inside the country.

While some people praised Pahlavi for inspiring protesters, others asked whether he was responsible for sending them to detention and possible death, as some believed Trump was for similarly encouraging the protesters.

For the last 15 years, Pahlavi has intensified his efforts to unify the political opposition and gain greater exposure, culminating in him emerging as a central figure in the latest protests.

Yet there remain questions about whether he is viable as an opposition leader or is simply an opportunist.

His message about a democratic future for Iran has been largely consistent. However, his father’s repressive and imperial legacy, combined with his own royal pedigree and American and Israeli proximity, prevent him from finding favor with Iranians who oppose monarchy and prioritize sovereignty.

Now, the prospect of Iranians across the country rallying around Pahlavi remains as much of an open question as whether they will succeed in creating the conditions for his return by toppling the regime.

This story has been updated to reflect that Reza Pahlavi lives in a Washington, D.C. suburb.

Eric Lob is affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Just before Christmas, President Donald Trump fired more than two dozen career ambassadors. The action was unprecedented, providing a clear signal that when it comes to diplomacy, Trump values loyalty above all else.

All ambassadors face a persistent tension in their roles – having to represent the viewpoints of the president while also winning the trust of leaders in the countries where they serve. Presidents, unsurprisingly, often favor loyalists, in whom they have greater confidence.

Trump has pursued this to an exceptional degree, making more purely political picks than normal. Of the nearly 70 ambassadors he has appointed to date during this term, fewer than 10% have been career professionals with experience in the Foreign Service.

But as I have argued in my book “Delegated Diplomacy,” there is value in working through diplomats who disagree with you.

A diplomat who unfailingly follows the Washington line contributes little to a bilateral relationship, becoming nothing more than an expensive substitute for a secure phone line. A skilled ambassador knows when to soften a message, recognizes when pushing too hard will backfire, and sees the value in compromise.

At times, this diplomatic approach may sacrifice short-run gains available through more aggressive means. But in precisely those moments when leverage is most necessary, an ambassador who’s established trust can push harder and gain more as a result.

All the president’s men

The idea that U.S. career diplomats place too much weight on foreign interests, rather than putting American, or presidential, interests first, is a perennial suspicion.

Presidents have felt this way themselves. In 1952, President Harry Truman wrote, “The State Department is clannish and snooty and sometimes I feel like firing the whole bunch.” Two decades later, President Richard M. Nixon told Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and soon-to-be secretary of state, that he intended “to ruin the Foreign Service. I mean ruin it.”

Neither of those presidents followed through. With his mass firing of career diplomats, Trump has come closer. His administration has made it clear that loyalty will dominate its diplomatic personnel policy, with the State Department itself asserting the “president’s right to ensure he has individuals in these countries who advance the America First agenda.”

Not only has Trump weighted the diplomatic corps with political appointees, but he’s often bypassed even his own ambassadors in favor of working informally through members of his inner circle.

The administration’s most delicate tasks, such as dealing with the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, have often been delegated to Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer whose primary qualification appears to be his close friendship with the president, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

Close personal ties

A preference to work diplomatically through intimates is understandable. Close personal knowledge of the president can provide credibility and weight to an envoy’s word. There is ample precedent for such selections, such as John F. Kennedy’s reliance in 1962 on his brother Robert as his crucial intermediary during the Cuban missile crisis, in which the U.S. ultimately convinced the Soviet Union to remove nuclear weapons from Cuba.

Such ties are likely to be all the more important in the current administration, where the president maintains such an openness to unconventional foreign policy choices. Career ambassadors who know no more about the president’s intentions than whatever the world can read in his latest Truth Social posts may not be able to do their jobs effectively, whether they ultimately keep them or not.

Career vs. political

American ambassadors receive their posts through two tracks. Historically, a minority of ambassadors have been political appointees selected by the president, often as the result of close ties to him. These ambassadors routinely leave their positions when a new administration takes office.

The majority of ambassadors – including those who were recently fired – are career Foreign Service officers, most of whom have spent decades working their way up through the ranks of the diplomatic corps under presidents of both parties. Selected internally by the State Department – but subject to White House sign-off – these ambassadors serve on a nonpartisan basis and nearly always complete their tours of duty, informally set at three years, regardless of presidential turnover.

Diplomats have value to the president precisely because they have cultivated relationships, trust and expertise overseas through a willingness to understand and sympathize with foreign audiences. But this also means that they may rarely be in lockstep with the president’s view of the world. Hence, the friction ambassadors face in their in-between role.

Loss of experience

It is one thing to fire ambassadors who have impeded the president’s agenda in some way; it is quite another to clear them out preemptively as Trump did in December. Ultimately, the loss of the expertise and relationships accrued by career diplomats will likely bite.

Professional diplomats are trained and acculturated to set aside their own views. As former Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat once observed, Foreign Service officers “bend over backward to follow every U.S. president’s leadership, even when they disagree with specific policies.”

This is precisely why previous administrations have not fulfilled their fantasies of dismantling the Foreign Service. Truman, despite his contempt, conceded that “it requires a tremendous amount of education to accomplish the purposes for which the State Department is set up.” During Kissinger’s time as secretary of state, the Nixon administration ended up selecting an uncommonly high number of careerists for key positions.

This has not been Trump’s approach. It’s unlikely that will change. He demands loyalty throughout his administration, but diplomats have given him particular reason to think they might flout his wishes. In 2017, a thousand U.S. diplomats signed on to a message arguing that the administration’s travel ban would be counterproductive. A similar number joined a message this year protesting the administration’s closure of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Clearly, some officers will dissent so vigorously as to be unwilling to advance certain policies. They can be expected to resign, as many of their colleagues have done already.

But the career diplomats who remain will speak with a louder voice on the international stage precisely because the world believes they are not lapdogs.

David Lindsey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The question the First Amendment keeps asking, across wars and panics and moral crusades, is whether a democracy can tolerate the possibility of persuasion.

There’s a certain school of thought that says no. Persuasion is too perilous.

I call this way of thinking “swallow-a-fly logic.” I’m referring, of course, to the popular children’s song where a woman ingests a fly and then keeps devouring bigger animals to fix it, until she dies from eating a horse.

It leads to the “old lady who swallowed a fly” theory of obedience: If we let someone with a message we don’t like speak out, people might be persuaded. If people become persuaded, they might stop supporting the war, the president, the government, itself. If support evaporates, enlistment drops or compliance weakens as the state loses leverage. If enlistment drops, the government might fall. And if there is no government, then who cares about the First Amendment?

By this way of thinking, free speech is dangerous because the public is too influence-able, and influence is too unpredictable, and security is too precious.

The constitutional tradition of free speech, when it is working at its best, says yes anyway, go ahead and speak. The alternative is a politics in which the state survives by making dissenters illegitimate as citizens.

That’s what happened to Renée Good when she was shot and killed by ICE in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. Her resistance had made her menacing.

Dissent as a virus

I’m a professor of public service and vice chair of the National Communication Association’s Communication and Law Division. My research examines how news institutions shape civic life and how freedom of expression is both a fundamental human right and a fundamental part of democracy.

In modern First Amendment doctrine, the government usually cannot punish speech unless it crosses narrow lines like incitement.

But when national security is invoked, the rules for speech appear to change. Dissent is treated less as persuasion to be debated and more like a virus to be contained before it harms public morale. That containment logic, either overt or covert, has repeatedly reappeared whenever protest has become politically inconvenient and unpalatable to those in power. It’s the kind of thinking that led to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after poking fun at President Donald Trump.

A terror memo. A protest. A killing.

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, issued by the Trump administration in September 2025, relies on logic from the lady and the fly. It frames “domestic terrorism” and “organized political violence” as national security crises. It tells federal agencies to work together to investigate and stop suspected threats, a framework that enlarges the set of things the state can plausibly treat as suspect, including the freedoms of association and belief.

The language in the memorandum affirms legitimate counterterrorism work while leaving room to treat political dissent as out of bounds. But the First Amendment protects protest speech.

Still, if the language of the Trump memo is somewhat abstract, Minneapolis has provided a brutally concrete example.

When an ICE agent shot and killed Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, federal officials characterized the encounter as an act of self-defense by an agent afraid of being run down by Good in her car.

Local authorities have disputed that framing.

The incident was captured on video that widely circulated and intensified public scrutiny. According to Good’s wife, the couple were protesters who confronted heavily armed agents determined to scare them away. No one tried to run anyone over, she said.

Amid this controversy, the story took a sharp turn. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good appeared to have been committing “an act of domestic terrorism.” Trump called Good “very violent” and “very radical.”

Reports claim that Department of Justice leadership pushed federal prosecutors to investigate Good’s widow, even as the department declined to open a civil rights probe into the shooting itself.

At least six federal prosecutors in the Minneapolis U.S. attorney’s office resigned in response.

Turning victims into suspects

The state has two choices when a death occurs that’s politically dangerous to the government.

It can investigate the killing with transparency and center the victim’s rights alongside public accountability as organizing principles. Or it can treat the killing as an opportunity to put the victim on trial in the court of public legitimacy.

The second choice avoids holding government accountable, shifts conversation toward the target’s supposed behavior and character, and expands the blame to include the people who loved and stood with the dead.

When this happens, the government does not have to win in court. It only has to keep the stigma circulating by asserting that a particular speaker undermines respect for elected officials. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons Trump offered for Good’s shooting by the ICE officer: “At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement,” he told reporters.

The United States has been here before. Around World War I, the U.S. Supreme Court issued several free speech decisions in cases mostly remembered as disputes over protest and draft resistance. But their underlying engine was the swallow-a-fly theory. Opposing the war might ruin the nation, so political dissidents had to be stopped, and the court affirmed the government’s right to silence strident speakers.

The Cold War era sharpened the same approach but made it about identity. The Smith Act, passed in 1940, curbed speech that advocated the violent overthrow of the government. In practice, Smith Act cases treated any type of communist sympathy as illegal, presumptively falling outside democratic tolerance.

The government did not have to prove a threat was real and required response. Instead, it had to show that certain ideas were too dangerous to be part of open conversation.

Finally, in Brandenburg v. Ohio from 1969, the Supreme Court went in the opposite direction, affirming free speech rights even for those advocating vile ideas.

The justices overturned the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader and held that the government cannot punish advocacy just because it is extreme, hateful or possibly perilous. Only speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” may be quelched, the court wrote. The danger has to be real, and it has to be happening right now. Otherwise, citizens are free to say what they will.

New ways to chill speech

So, if the Supreme Court has settled the issue, why does it feel alive again now?

Contemporary crackdowns rarely present themselves as crackdowns. They present themselves as “coordination,” “threat assessment,” “financial disruption,” “extremism prevention” and, increasingly, as necessary defenses against “domestic terrorism.”

The Trump administration’s September 2025 national security memorandum is exactly the kind of framework that makes these routes attractive, because it invites the state to treat political conflict not as disagreement but as a security threat – something to be managed by the tools and instincts of national security.

Seen in this light, the resignations of federal government attorneys in Minneapolis are not just a bureaucratic drama. They are a window into the government’s underlying theory of the case. Investigate victims and their associates instead of scrutinizing the state’s use of force. Frame the victim’s death as the inevitable consequence of being their type. As Trump said of Good: She was a “professional agitator.”

Minneapolis is not just a tragedy. It is a test of whether the country still backs the central promise of modern free speech doctrine. Government may not suppress speech and association simply because it fears what the public might come to believe.

Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Trump administration’s recent announcement that it is withdrawing from 66 international organizations and treaties is another blow to the global system where all countries unite to share concerns, agree on rules of conduct and determine agendas for collective action.

Coming on the heels of the U.S. attack on Venezuela – considered a violation of international law – the White House claims, without specific justification, that these organizations and initiatives “operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity or sovereignty.”

Some experts say many of these organizations are niche and peripheral initiatives. They say the groups receive little money from the U.S., anyway.

Additionally, most of the U.N. entities on the administration’s list are part of the U.N.’s main body, the Secretariat, which gets its funding primarily from membership dues that are required by legal obligations. In fact, the U.S. can’t technically withdraw from these groups without leaving the U.N. completely. It can, however, select not to participate in meetings of these bodies or finance them through additional funds.

Moreover, with the White House already defunding the foreign assistance that supported many of these organizations and the U.N. system, regardless of congressional appropriations, this stated withdrawal is unlikely to alter much for these organizations in the short term.

The loss is likely greater to America.

Foreign policy experts assert that leaving empty the U.S. seat at the table will result in an increasingly isolated America and enable its adversaries, such as China, to fill the void.

As a democracy and peacebuilding scholar, and from my years working at the U.N., I know U.S. withdrawal from these organizations also risks undercutting lasting peace and human rights accountability, especially for women and children terrorized by violence and conflict.

Women and children die first

Peace and human rights-related groups loom large on the list of organizations the U.S. has withdrawn from.

The list includes key U.N. bodies that seek to hold states accountable for rape and use of child soldiers in conflict, among other crimes.

The U.N. offices of the Special Representative on Children in Armed Conflict and on Sexual Violence in Conflict are unique global repositories of detailed reporting used by countries, courts and advocates.

These offices can identify violations and trigger action to prevent rape and violence against women and children. This can lead to targeted sanctions against people and other restrictions, national action plans compelling reform, and even international criminal prosecutions.

Additionally, the U.S. will no longer support U.N. peacebuilding efforts. That includes the Peacebuilding Commission and its attendant Peacebuilding Fund. Yet by virtue of its permanent member status on the Security Council, the U.S. is a member of the commission.

Established in 2005 to help countries avoid a return to conflict, the Peacebuilding Commission claims among its successes formerly war-torn but now stable countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, which had Africa’s first democratically elected female leader. These bodies prioritize women and youth engagement in building peace.

Also on the list is the United Nations group focused on gender equality and women’s empowerment, known as UN Women. Established in 2010, the agency promotes women’s rights and helps women and girls prosper. UN Women has helped improve laws and policies for women in 83 countries and leads major efforts, including the Spotlight Initiative that aims to end violence against women and girls in more than 25 countries.

More than half of UN Women’s current budget of over US$2 billion for 2026 through 2029 goes to empowering women in war-affected societies and tackling violence against women and girls.

The U.S. served multiple times on the UN Women executive board, which steers the direction of the organization, including between 2023 and 2025. It does this, in part, by approving its strategy, plans and budget.

With the U.S. leaving its seat in steering the organization, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently said that UN Women has failed “to define what a woman even is.”

With such an adversarial approach, the absence of the Trump administration seeking to spoil human rights protections might be advantageous for these groups in the short term.

But the lack of U.S. financial and political support may weaken these organizations in the long term, eroding their legitimacy and even opening the door for other countries to further undermine their efforts. That might endanger the already politically sensitive challenge of promoting accountability for serious violations of women’s and children’s rights.

‘Adapt, shrink or die’

The specter of the U.S. further abandoning peace and human rights efforts remains.

Rubio said on Jan. 7, 2026, that the administration’s review of additional organizations continues. That reinforces a recent State Department statement to the U.N. – “adapt, shrink or die.”

Some key international and U.N. entities that promote peace and human rights were not on the list, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the U.N.’s chief human rights institution – a bully pulpit that has been used sparingly against the second Trump administration so far.

But the U.S. has recently been disrupting long-standing, U.N.-mediated agreements on human rights concerns, including for children.

In 2025, it voted against 38 resolutions in the General Assembly’s human rights committee alone. For example, for the Rights of the Child resolution, the U.S. took the unusual and divisive step of calling for a general vote, even though text had been previously agreed upon. Despite the U.S. “no” vote, the resolution passed, with over 170 states voting in favor.

The Trump administration has also selectively funded certain U.N. peace efforts. For example, of its $682 million contribution to U.N. peacekeeping, it has earmarked $85 million for Haiti – around half of what it actually owes.

It cherry-picked the conflict areas to fund – excluding Yemen, Afghanistan and Gaza – with its $2 billion in humanitarian aid, a steep decline from the U.S. contribution of around $14 billion in 2024.

And it refused to participate in the U.N’s Universal Periodic Review – the only global peer review process for all countries’ human rights efforts. The group’s recommendations, though voluntary, often trigger action to improve human rights. Failure to show up in November 2026 for a postponed review would mean that America becomes the first country ever to undermine this singular means of accountability.

For now, most other U.N. member states are not following suit.

While the U.S. has been able to force changes to language on sexual- and gender-based violence in Security Council resolutions – where it holds a veto – its efforts have gained little traction in the broader body. Losing that language erases years of progress in recognizing that men and boys are also subject to sexual violence and exploitation and deserve international protection.

Most tellingly, the Trump administration’s new Board of Peace – ostensibly for Gaza – appears designed to displace the U.N. itself without reference to the core principles, including human rights, on which the U.N. Charter stands.

From May 2023 until July 1, 2025, the author served in the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance at the United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.).

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In a week filled with news about President Donald Trump’s aggressive moves to take control of Greenland, the world got a window into his thinking about the concept of “peace.”

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump said in the message to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.

Trump has long coveted the Nobel Peace Prize. In his second term as president, he has styled himself as a peacemaker, as his message to Støre demonstrates. But as I have learned from my work as a scholar of Roman history and rhetoric, the word “peace” can mean something entirely different when used by those wielding power.

In the year 98 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, “With lying names they call theft, slaughter, and plunder ‘control,’ and when they make a wasteland, they call it ‘peace.’”

This line, said of the Romans by an enemy of Rome in Tacitus’ work “Agricola,” has had a long and varied afterlife among those commenting on imperialism.

Nearly 2,000 years after Tacitus’ time, U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy used the phrase in a 1968 speech questioning the U.S. war in Vietnam; the Irish poet Seamus Heaney echoed it in a 1974 poem figuring his homeland’s centuries of desolation; more recently still, the HBO series “Succession” reworked the words into a critique of the show’s despotic central character.

The quotation has had staying power because it cuts to the core of how talk of peace can be used as a tool of war and power acquisition.

At the one-year mark of the second Trump administration, these words from two millennia ago speak as presciently as ever.

Time and again over the last year, Trump has branded acts of war with the language of peace. More broadly, his administration’s persistent styling of Trump as a “President of Peace” and his continuous claims of entitlement to the Nobel Peace Prize have moved in tandem with a growing agenda of military aggression, both foreign and domestic.

‘War is peace’

Tacitus, who lived from c. 55 to c. 120 CE, places his critique of Roman imperial rhetoric into the mouth of Calgacus, the possibly fictionalized chief of the Caledonians in northern Britain. The words, delivered in a speech before the Battle of Mons Graupius in 83 CE, anticipated what was to come: a crushing Roman victory and the devastation of the Caledonian people.

Calgacus’ aphorism gets at something fundamental about Roman imperial propaganda, which presented the cessation of war – on their terms – as “peace.” A physical representation of this is the Altar of Augustan Peace, from 9 BCE, which was built after the warlord Augustus’ victories in foreign and civil wars. A reconstruction of one of the monument’s friezes includes the personified goddess Roma sitting atop war spoils. Peace for Rome was tantamount to victory for Rome – or, as in this case, for one of Rome’s strongmen.

And while Tacitus, an accomplished Roman politician and provincial governor, was himself no opponent of Roman imperialism, it is significant that he crafts a speech for an enemy of Rome that gives the lie to the Roman rhetoric of peace. The non-Roman’s perspective on Romans’ “lying names” cuts through the posturing of the imperialist.

Calgacus’ critique thus puts into relief the jarring juxtapositions the world has seen and heard from Trump over the last year.

On Dec. 31, 2025, Trump declared that his New Year’s resolution for 2026 was “peace on Earth.” Three days later, he invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, a military action that left 100 dead and a humanitarian crisis looming. Apart from claiming control of some $2.5 billion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, Trump has provided few details about how he will personally “run the country.”

A similarly striking disconnect between rhetoric and reality came earlier in 2025 with the U.S.’s June 21 bombing of Iran, which the White House X account celebrated with the declaration “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!” Some seven months later, as the Iranian regime violently suppresses broad protests, Trump is weighing additional acts of war, saying that “the military is looking at it and we’re looking at some strong options.”

In Gaza, Trump is chairing a “Board of Peace” to oversee the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and to implement a new government. The Israel/Hamas War is one of eight wars Trump claims credit for ending.

As with the seven other cases, the claim to have brought peace in Gaza lacks substantiation.

From the announcement of the ceasefire on Oct. 10, 2025, through Dec. 30, 2025, 414 Palestinians have been killed and 1,145 injured by Israeli attacks. That is, the war rages on.

Now Trump, apparently out of resentment at not being award the Nobel, declares that he will seize Greenland “one way or the other” and that Cuba must accept his terms on Venezuelan oil shipments “before it is too late.”

At home, Trump ramps up the presence of ICE, whose violent approach to enforcement has had deadly consequences for 32 people in custody and one woman protester.

All this as FIFA, the international governing body for soccer, awards Trump its first-ever Peace Prize; and as he stamps his name on – after defunding – the U.S Institute of Peace.

Spread of ‘peace’ rhetoric

Today’s dizzying clashes in word and deed are illuminated by Calgacus’ searing words, which show how easily the rhetoric of peace can be used to cover for or distract from acts of war.

At the same time, Tacitus points readers to the prevalence and thus the normalization and commonness of this rhetoric, which can become an inseparable corollary of a program of making war.

Indeed, Tacitus presents similar indictments of Roman imperial rhetoric twice elsewhere in his writing, again from the perspectives of those threatened by Rome.

For both the Batavians, of modern-day Netherlands, in the “Histories” and another group of Britons in the “Annals,” the great menace to their peoples is Roman “peace.”

Timothy Joseph does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation