Caffeinated Politics

In the Sunday edition of the Wisconsin State Journal, a story about what to know if you’re approached by ICE caught my attention. This weekend, when placing a couple of books into a Little Library station in our neighborhood, I saw brochures with the same information being provided to passersby. While I very much agree with making this information available, I find it awfully sad that this is our reality in 2026.

This moment echoes a painful reality that African‑American families have lived with for generations. It was probably 15 years ago that I had a meaningful conversation with a Black man who lived in Fitchburg. His name would be known. He was much respected in Dane County. Nice car and a nice home. But the number of times he was followed by local police as he drove his nice car to his nice home was more than weird. It was racial profiling playing out in our liberal county.

As I sat with him over dinner, I was told about how parents have long had to sit their children down, especially their sons, and explain how to survive an encounter with law enforcement. They rehearse what to do if a police officer trails them after a school dance, how to keep their hands visible, how not to move too quickly, and how to speak without sounding afraid or defiant. They teach their kids how to stay alive in situations that should never be life‑or‑death in the first place. That conversation, as the Fitchburg man told me, was a generational inheritance born out of fear and necessity. Now, countless families, many of them Brown, are being forced into their own version of that parental talk, also not because of crime or wrongdoing, but because their citizenship, or papers, their very belonging, their basic right to be here, is treated as suspect.

It has become disturbingly essential for people in this country to memorize their rights in case ICE confronts them, as if simply existing in public now requires being buttressed legally. That alone says something is VERY deeply off‑balance in a nation that prides itself on liberty. The idea that a person-any person- should brace themselves for an encounter where they may be asked to prove their right to stand on the sidewalk is a horrific betrayal of the very ideals we claim to cherish. Freedom is supposed to be our foundation, not a privilege granted only to those who can produce the right documents on command. When government agents can demand “papers” from people who look a certain way or speak with a certain accent, it chips away at the American promise until it feels hollow.

The fact that ordinary people, neighbors, coworkers, and classmates are being stopped, questioned, and pressured to prove their nationality is infuriating. It is not normal to carry citizenship papers in your pocket. It is not normal to fear that a knock on the door might be an agent demanding proof of who you are. And it is absolutely not normal for people to be targeted because of their skin tone, their accent, or their last name. This creeping expectation that people must be ready to defend their right to exist in this country corrodes the American way of life. It replaces trust with suspicion, freedom with surveillance, and equality with selective scrutiny.

There is something profoundly sad about watching a nation built on the idea of liberty drift toward a culture of racial interrogations. When people must study their rights like a survival manual found in a Little Library, when families rehearse safety scripts with their children for encounters that should never happen, when the simple act of walking home becomes a potential legal confrontation, it becomes clear that something is breaking wide apart in this land we call home. Along with the righteous anger, knowing it doesn’t have to be this way. A free society should not require its people to constantly prove they deserve to be treated as human.