On March 12, 1933, a column of men in brown uniforms fanned out through the streets of Berlin, carrying clubs, not badges. They weren’t police. They were the Sturmabteilung, the brown shirts, the street muscle of a newly empowered political movement. Hours earlier, civil liberties had been suspended in the name of national security. Now, these men enforced that suspension, not by law, but by fear.
Their authority did not come from statute. It came from political permission. Once that permission was granted, the boundary between state power and partisan force disappeared.
History doesn’t repeat itself neatly, but it often repeats its logic.
Nearly a century later, in Minneapolis, on Jan. 7, 2026, Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of three, was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent during a Department of Homeland Security operation. Witnesses and video footage show Good was unarmed and smiling, not threatening. An autopsy revealed multiple gunshot wounds, including a fatal shot to the head.
Two weeks later, on Jan. 24, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen with no criminal record, was shot to death by Border Patrol agents during another DHS operation in Minneapolis. Pretti was filming the scene on his phone and attempting to help a bystander who had been pepper-sprayed. Video shows him holding a phone, not a weapon, moments before he was forced to the ground and killed. His final recorded words were not defiance, but concern: “Are you OK?”
Good and Pretti were neighbors, professionals and family members. Their deaths put a human face on a question that can no longer be ignored: when does federal enforcement become unconstitutional?
ICE and Border Patrol are civilian agencies created by Congress to enforce immigration law under specific statutory frameworks. But their deployment, marauding the streets of American communities, operating with military posture and lethal force, supersedes that mission and strikes at the heart of constitutional governance.
Larry Pino preferred 2017
Under the Constitution, the concept of a militia is a specific and narrowly circumscribed one. The Second Amendment and Article I both contemplate militias in the context of defense against invasion or insurrection, not as permanent enforcers of political priorities reporting to the Executive Branch. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act specifically prohibits military personnel from performing civilian law enforcement functions. While immigration agencies are civilian, their deployment as quasi-military units in domestic operations stretches that mission beyond its original intent, especially when regular local law enforcement is available.
When federal agents with wide latitude operate without clear statutory restraints — particularly when they are beholden to an invested political schema — the risk is that they become instruments of political agendas, rather than enforcers of settled law. That risk hazards several core protections: the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions on unreasonable seizures and use of force, the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process, and the 10th Amendment’s reservation of local police powers to states unless expressly authorized otherwise. A pattern of using immigration agents to confront and, in two recent high-profile cases, kill U.S. citizens is constitutionally prohibited.
No federal agency is constitutionally permitted to function as a standing militia beyond judicial review, regardless of political objectives. Critics argue, and evidence increasingly suggests, that DHS enforcement has been transformed from targeted immigration control into a domestic force deployed in politically identified jurisdictions.
This is not a partisan concern. It is a constitutional one. History teaches that when governments tolerate force untethered from law, institutions erode quickly. Nazi Germany did not collapse into tyranny at all. It normalized it.
The United States is not 1930s Germany. We have a written Constitution, an independent judiciary, and a long tradition of civil liberties. But those safeguards only function if enforced. When federal power is exercised without restraint, accountability or clarity, even strong systems will shatter.
Renee Good and Alex Pretti remind us that constitutional law is not abstract theory, or a moment in American history. It is the framework that protects us from the very violence a government claims to prevent. The lesson is not that the United States is becoming Nazi Germany. it’s that any republic — if it allows the state to wield force without constraint, accountability, or clarity — is in grave danger.
Our country, the historical beacon of freedom and democracy, is past a tipping point which, if not corrected now, may never be. It is up to each and every one of us to make sure that does not take place.
Larry Pino of Winter Park is an attorney and entrepreneur.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2026/02/01/commentary-when-the-guardians-become-the-militia/
