James Madison warned that “power is of an encroaching nature, and…ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.” In Donald Trump’s hands, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become the very embodiment of that encroaching power: an armed, masked, and increasingly unaccountable apparatus that kills a U.S. citizen in Minnesota, terrorizes communities, and dares the constitutional order to stop it. An agency that claims the mantle of law has slid into something closer to a standing force of intimidation, operating in a gray zone between policing and political control that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin would have recognized as the threshold of tyranny.
Madison, encroaching power, and the ICE state
Madison’s core insight in Federalist No. 48 was brutally simple: “power is of an encroaching nature” and “mere parchment barriers” are not enough to stop a determined branch from slipping its leash. He feared precisely what is visible today in immigration enforcement: a single executive apparatus accumulating practical control over lawmaking (through broad discretion), execution (through raids and detention), and adjudication (through executive‑run immigration courts). This “tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands,” Madison wrote, is the very definition of tyranny, whether wielded by a monarch or an elected president.
Under Trump, ICE has become such a concentration point. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations wing conducts raids, arrests, detention, and deportation. Policy memos from the White House and DHS effectively rewrite who is targeted and how aggressively, far beyond what most Americans imagined when Congress wrote the underlying statutes. Madison would not be fooled by the bureaucratic language. He would see an executive machine steadily expanding its reach, using the gaps between law on paper and practice on the ground to enlarge its power.
The Minnesota killing: when “enforcement” becomes lethal impunity
The killing of 37‑year‑old Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis is not an aberration; it is a revelation. Good, a U.S. citizen, mother of three and celebrated poet, was in her car when ICE agents confronted her on a residential street. Video shows an officer at her door while another steps in front of the vehicle and fires multiple rounds into the windshield at close range. Federal officials rushed to frame her as a threat who tried to run over agents, yet witnesses’ footage shows an officer shooting almost immediately as the car inches forward. The city’s mayor called it “reckless use of force” and told ICE to “get out of our city.”
Local leaders have emphasized that Good appears to have had no serious criminal record and was reportedly present as a legal observer monitoring ICE activity, while the Trump administration branded her a “domestic terrorist.” This is the logic of encroaching power: those who watch the state become enemies of the state. A federal officer can shoot a citizen in the face on a city street, then retreat behind a wall of official narratives and procedural reviews. Madison warned that when one branch operates with “overruling influence” and escapes effective checks, “dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community” follow. Good’s death is one of those oppressions, and the “minor party” is anyone the executive chooses to target.
The “law and order” defense — and why it fails
Defenders of ICE under Trump insist that such force and sweeping tactics are the price of “law and order.” They argue that agents face real dangers, that criminals will exploit any restraint, and that masks, unmarked cars, and aggressive raids are necessary to protect officers and communities alike. Madison and the founding generation would have recognized the danger in this argument: it turns necessity into a blank check.
Madison’s warning that power is “of an encroaching nature” was directed precisely at governments that invoke safety to justify permanent expansion of force. Hamilton cautioned that when the federal government “overpasses the just bounds of its authority and makes a tyrannical use of its powers,” the people must “appeal to the standard they have formed”—the Constitution—and seek redress. Franklin, for his part, wrote that the “means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” a line that lays bare what happens when law‑and‑order rhetoric licenses masked agents to kill a citizen like Good and terrorize entire neighborhoods. The question is not whether enforcement is needed, but whether it remains constrained by law, transparency, and accountability; when it does not, it ceases to be “order” in any constitutional sense.
Masks, unmarked cars, and the aesthetics of fear
The methods ICE now routinely employs reveal how far the culture of the agency has drifted from ordinary law enforcement toward something darker. Across the country, residents watch masked agents in plain clothes jump from unmarked vehicles, armed with rifles, surrounding people on sidewalks and in driveways. Even mayors describe these scenes as resembling “violent abduction,” not policing. The Department of Homeland Security insists that masks are needed to protect agents from doxxing and threats, pointing to cases where officers’ families were harassed after photos circulated online.
But civil‑rights advocates and local officials note that masked, anonymous armed men seizing people off the street “compound fear and chaos” and “evade accountability for agents’ actions.” When the state sends masked figures in unmarked vehicles to carry out its will, it deliberately blurs the line between law and terror, between a warrant and a snatch‑and‑grab. Madison’s insistence that power must be visibly separated, checked, and identifiable is not satisfied by a small “ICE” patch on a vest. A power that hides its face from the public it serves is already behaving as if it is above that public.
“Law enforcement” without law
Formally, ICE is a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, charged with enforcing immigration and customs laws and “preserving national security and public safety.” In practice, the Trump‑era posture has treated “law enforcement” as a talisman that justifies almost any method, while the rule of law—the predictable, proportionate, rights‑respecting application of statutes—often appears as an afterthought. Raids at homes, hospitals, and schools, family separation as leverage, and lethal force against a nonviolent U.S. citizen all point to an institution where the executive’s will is the primary law.
The Founders knew that “law enforcement” can become a mask for oppression. Hamilton warned that when the federal government “overpasses the just bounds of its authority and makes a tyrannical use of its powers,” the people must “appeal to the standard they have formed”—the Constitution—and seek redress. Franklin cautioned that “the means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” a sentence that reads today like a prophecy of post‑9/11 security agencies turned inward on vulnerable communities. The question is not whether ICE fits the bureaucratic definition of “law enforcement,” but whether its conduct still reflects the deeper law of a constitutional republic.
The Founders’ moral horizon: liberty, asylum, humanity
For the founding generation, liberty was universal and inseparable from the dignity of the person. Franklin wrote that “equal liberty” is “the birthright of all men,” language that sits uneasily beside images of children taken from parents and locked in detention centers because those parents lacked the right papers. Jefferson spoke of the United States as an “asylum” for the oppressed and warned that if the federal government claimed ungranted powers over aliens and others, Americans would end up “living under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority.”
The killing of Renee Good and the masked‑raid culture around ICE mark a moral break with that vision. A government that can shoot a citizen observer in the head, on disputed facts, and then march agents back into the streets wearing masks to “ensure their safety” while whole neighborhoods live in terror has ceased to see liberty as a birthright; it sees public fear as a tool. Madison’s warning that “when the people fear the government, there is tyranny” is no longer a distant abstraction. It is a description of what residents of immigrant communities, and now even citizen observers like Good, experience when they see a DHS badge.
The Madisonian response: draw the line
Madison understood that “mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits” is never enough; it is the vigilance of citizens, legislators, and courts that prevents encroaching power from hardening into permanent despotism. The ICE that kills a Minnesota mother, moves in masked formations through American cities, and claims the absolute mantle of “law enforcement” while operating in legal and moral gray zones is exactly the kind of institution that must be confronted in Madisonian terms.
To “appeal to the standard” of the Constitution, as Hamilton urged, means demanding transparent investigations and prosecutions where warranted in the Good case, legislative restraints on raids and use of force, and judicial scrutiny of policies that turn communities into occupied zones. It also means a civic refusal to accept masked, nameless agents as a normal feature of democratic life: insisting on clear identification, recorded operations, and public accountability whenever armed federal staff operate in local neighborhoods. If Madison is right—and the history of republics suggests he is—then the line must be drawn now, before the encroaching power that killed Renee Nicole Good becomes a permanent, accepted feature of American government.
Americans now face a test that previous generations knew only in theory: whether loyalty belongs to a leader and his armed agents, or to the Constitution and the republic it binds into being. The blood spilled at Lexington and Concord, on the fields of Antietam and Normandy, in Selma and at Kent State, was not offered to sanctify a regime of masked men in unmarked vehicles, but to preserve a nation of laws where power answers to the people. When ICE can kill a citizen like Renee Good on a quiet Midwestern street, when families live in terror of raids more reminiscent of juntas than of justice, the United States drifts toward a resemblance it has long condemned in others: the look and feel of the very dictatorships it claims to oppose. The choice now is stark and inescapable: either citizens, churches, cities, states, and courts rise in open, principled defense of the constitutional order—demanding that this government once again fear its people, not the other way around—or the encroaching power Madison warned against will finish its work, and the republic so many men and women died to preserve will quietly become something else.
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©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.
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