Guest Opinion | Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater: The Masked Enforcement of Fear: Authoritarian Tendencies in Plain Sight

The deployment of thousands of federal immigration agents into U.S. cities, including our own — often operating in plainclothes or masks, with vague mandates and limited local oversight — resembles practices more common to authoritarian regimes than to a constitutional republic. Recent events in Minneapolis, including the fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Alex Pretti by U.S. Border Patrol agents during an immigration enforcement operation, illustrate a dangerous slide toward normalized, anonymous force. Political leaders, religious leaders, and citizens have been saying this for months. We must not be cowed into silence, or gaslighted into doubting what we are seeing, which is precisely what tyranny seeks.

These agents appear out of nowhere, brandish weapons, don’t read any Miranda Rights, and don’t often have proof of wrongdoing. But as these operations unfold, the lines between immigration enforcement and militarized police actions have blurred, leading to lethal force being used against people exercising their constitutional rights to protest.

When law enforcement appears unmarked, when agents avoid clear identification, and when the public is left to piece together competing official and eyewitness accounts of shootings, authority shifts from legitimate governance to fear-based control. Alexis de Tocqueville warned about the dangers of unchecked centralized power; today, that warning echoes in the armored vehicles, crowd control tactics, and ambiguous command structures of federal operations that bypass local accountability.

Protests in Minneapolis and across the country are not simply reactive; they are proactive expressions of democratic principle. People are asserting the right to due process, to peaceful assembly, and to demand evidence and transparency when lethal force is used in their communities. Thousands of demonstrators in cities nationwide reflect a collective refusal to accept anonymous state power. I want to add to these protests by using a free press to express my outrage at what is happening on our streets, to our citizens, in our country. Even as this administration threatens other countries with military intervention to stop the assault and murder of citizens protesting in the streets, it is using the same tactics on the streets of the very country it represents.

Congress must insist on rules that require law enforcement to be identifiable, transparent, and accountable. Our representatives must reclaim their power as an equal branch of government. As religious and moral leaders have long taught — from Martin Luther King Jr.’s insistence that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” to the Jewish command to pursue justice with unwavering moral clarity — we have an obligation to resist the normalization of unchecked authority. Without such checks, anonymity becomes a shield for impunity, and fear becomes a tool of governance.

Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater is the CEO of Friends In Deed and board president of NRCAT, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. The opinions expressed here are solely his own.