Some Things Are Worth Fighting For
- Josh "Bearheart" Hawk
- 8 minutes ago
- 8 min read
What's happening in America right now is scary and I've been trying to find the right words to do justice to what I've been feeling.
In 2011 I deployed to Iraq and spent 6 months in a combat zone. I had to worry every day if I was going to have a bomb dropped on my head as we took mortars or if the pile of trash on the side of the road was going to send shrapnel through my legs and leave me disabled or worse. I had friends who were killed by those and other threats like snipers, and a couple who took their own lives because of the stress.
Somehow, I made it home. Back into the arms of my wife and to my children who were too young to understand why daddy had to go away for so long. I thought nothing in this world could ever scare me the way that the possibility of never making it home to my family did, but I was wrong.
In November of 2025, millions of people in the United States voted for a man who many said would be the next Hitler. Someone who was close to those who'd written something called Project 2025 and who'd spent the majority of his life conning people out of money and failing in just about everything he did.
Most of them voted for him because they said that the things being spouted were hyperbole, that he was just riling up the left and that he would bring their grocery prices down and their wages up. They said he wasn't associated with Project 2025 and that all he was going to do was deport the worst of the worst criminals who were here illegally.
But they were very wrong.
Not only did he not lower grocery prices "on day one" as he'd promised, but he actually brought about price increases on many things through the abuse of the tariff system (HBS Pricing Lab, 2026). That same abuse caused many companies to pause hiring or lay off employees due to the instability in the economy and lack of trust in where things were going.
At the same time, he brought in a billionaire to cut government spending in ways that were unconstitutional and blind to the needs of the agencies they were cutting from (DeHaven, 2025). They called this program Doge, named after a meme-coin that was popular with trolls years ago, and used it to bring about massive layoffs and resignations across the government.
But things didn't stop at an economic level.
The administration would begin looking for ways to cause panic at a scale not seen in the United States since the days following events like 9/11/2001 and Pearl Harbor in 1941. They'd started this crusade on the campaign trail, planting the seed in their follower's minds that immigrants were coming to get them. They spewed lies about the rate of crime in the immigrant community (American Immigration Council, 2024), and about how "illegal" immigrants were taking all the good paying jobs.
The chaos started in cities like Los Angeles and spread to Chicago, Charlotte, Memphis, New York, and others. Each new invasion came with new stories of abuses of power, and when they didn't get the effect they were hoping for, they hijacked the National Guard units in states that refused to just take the punishment being doled out by a petulant toddler that didn't get enough cookies before his nap.
And the lies and fear mongering kept coming.
They justified it by saying that illegal immigrants had broken the law. If they'd only come in the "right" way they would have been fine.
But the right way turned out to be not at all as people with open asylum cases and those in the process of gaining citizenship were rounded up by the hundreds and many had no criminal record at all (Olivares & Craft, 2025). Even those who'd already become legal citizens were being taken in and shipped off.
Dozens, or maybe even hundreds at this point, have been shipped to places like El Salvador, where they were locked away in what amounts to a black site prison where it was said people never get out (Martínez-Beltrán & Rueda, 2025).
Many of the tactics they used were fought in court, and many of those court cases fell in favor of the plaintiffs who were arguing against the government's blatant abuse of power, but the administration wasn't going to give up that easily.
Things escalated in late 2025 as the immigration and customs enforcement agency, alongside border patrol and DHS, ramped up operations, targeting one city in particular - Minneapolis, Minnesota.
And this is where it's important to mention a couple of the laws in the constitution that the federal government has been outright breaking and ignoring.
For one thing, there's the fourth amendment to the United States constitution, which reads, "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." (Library of Congress, 1788)
What that means is that the government cannot search you or your property without first attaining a warrant from a judge, and to get that warrant they need probable cause that the warrant is related to something criminal. Probable cause can be a number of things, but it must satisfy the conditions the individual judge has set forth as convincing.
This prevents authorities from just going door to door looking for random violations and protects people from being harassed by those authorities.
And yet, ICE has been doing just that as well as stopping random individuals and arresting people without cause during their surge in Minneapolis (Santana & Balsamo, 2026).
Then there's the sixth amendment, which reads "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense." (Library of Congress, 1788)
This basically means that all persons accused of a crime have the right to a fair and speedy trial with a jury made up of people in their community, have the right to have a reading of the charges against them, and have the right to face their accuser and call witnesses to their defense. Many people who have been taken over the past year have not had any trial at all and have been denied representation (Rivers et al., 2026).
These two breaches of the constitution on their own are enough to call for the removal from office of all those who have been a party to breaking them. This includes cabinet secretaries like Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and border czar Tom Homan as well as the President and Vice President of the United States as they have all had a hand in breaking these constitutional laws.
And here it is prudent to point out that when they took office they all swore and oath to support and defend the constitution. An oath they, among others in the current administration and government as a whole, have broken.
And here is where I come back around to why I am scared.
I took that same oath, and I upheld it when I went to Iraq and have continued to do so since the day I swore it. But I'm worried that others who took it didn't take it seriously, and that they are going to succeed in tearing down the thing they've sworn to protect.
Just in the past year they've broken the 2 amendments I mentioned above as well as several I've not even talked about in this post like the first amendment that protects freedom of speech, the press, and religious freedom. They've been attacking that amendment through various court challenges and intimidation tactics in a very mob-like way that is harder to prove in a court of law. There is also risk to the second amendment after a shooting by ICE agents in the streets of Minneapolis this past weekend where a man named Alex Pretti was shot and killed while carrying a firearm he was licensed to carry. He never pulled the weapon, and never threatened to use it, and yet the official administration stance is that he was a threat to ICE agents because he had a gun.
That kind of talk is the first stage of the attempt to take away the second amendment, and if we don't stand up to this tyranny now and do what we can to stop it we're going to lose that and a whole lot more.
But maybe you've somehow made it this far into this post and still think you'll be fine because you've not done anything wrong. Maybe you think that the people who are being arrested by masked agents deserve it and that the people who've been killed like Renee Good and Alex Pretti just should have fallen in line and they'd still be alive.
To that I have only this to say.
You are demonstrably, categorically wrong in every sense of the word.
You will be targeted at some point. One of your neighbors will get mad at you for not cutting your grass or making too much noise and will report you to the government for saying things you never said. They will come and arrest you and you will not have the chance to defend yourself in court and you will wind up being jailed as an enemy of the state.
It will happen because it has happened before (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2019).
You don't have to do anything wrong when a tyrannical government is in place to face the consequences of wrongdoing. All you have to do is exist and piss off the wrong person.
Maybe you make it through this wave, maybe you make it a year or two into the administration, but the time will come when you will wish you had spoken up when you had the chance. Speak up, protest, capture everything you see on video, write your representatives, and be a beacon for those who are lost in the darkness. There's still time, but we can't sit by and do nothing.
References
American Immigration Council. (2024, October 17). Debunking the Myth of Immigrants and Crime - American Immigration Council. American Immigration Council. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/debunking-myth-immigrants-and-crime/
DeHaven, T. (2025, February 20). DOGE and “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.” Cato Institute. https://www.cato.org/blog/doge-waste-fraud-abuse
HBS Pricing Lab. (2026, January 1). Tariff Tracker. Pricinglab.org. https://www.pricinglab.org/tariff-tracker/
Library of Congress. (1788, June 21). U.S. Constitution. Constitution.congress.gov; Library of Congress. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
Martínez-Beltrán, S., & Rueda, M. (2025, July 27). “Hell on Earth”: Venezuelans deported to El Salvador mega-prison tell of brutal abuse. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/27/nx-s1-5479143/hell-on-earth-venezuelans-deported-to-el-salvador-mega-prison-tell-of-brutal-abuse
Olivares, J., & Craft, W. (2025, September 26). Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in Ice detention. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-criminal-record-ice-detention
Ordoñez, F. (2026, January 19). Trump has rolled out many of the Project 2025 policies he once claimed ignorance about. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/19/nx-s1-5640006/trump-has-rolled-out-many-of-the-project-2025-policies-he-once-claimed-ignorance-about
Rivers, M., McDonald, J., & Garcia, A. (2026, January 19). Lawyers allege Dept. of Homeland Security is denying legal counsel to Minnesota detainees. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/US/lawyers-allege-dept-homeland-security-denying-legal-counsel/story?id=129335914
Santana, R., & Balsamo, M. (2026, January 6). 2,000 federal agents sent to Minneapolis area to carry out “largest immigration operation ever,” ICE says. PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/2000-federal-agents-sent-to-minneapolis-area-to-carry-out-largest-immigration-operation-ever-ice-says
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2019). How did the Nazis and their collaborators implement the Holocaust? United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/question/how-did-the-nazis-and-their-collaborators-implement-the-holocaust