Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visits at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Chicago (October 3, 2025) | Tia Dufour / Department of Homeland Security / United States Government Work
If you saw an armed stranger in body armor forcing his way into your neighbor’s home at dawn, dragging a screaming mother away from her children while pointing a rifle at the family, would you have the right to stop him? By any means necessary?
Now the forbidden version: What if that armed stranger has a badge?
Most of us have been trained to defer to law enforcement, especially when things look urgent. We figure they must know something we don’t, that compliance now beats resistance even when what’s happening looks wrong. But what happens when the agents themselves are violating the constitutional limits that supposedly legitimize their authority in the first place?
On January 7, Renee Good, a 37-year-old white poet, mother of three, and US citizen, was shot three times and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. Video evidence analyzed by the New York Times, Bellingcat, and the Washington Post shows that when Good started to drive away from agents who had surrounded her vehicle, her car was turning away from Officer Ross, not toward him. He fired through her windshield and window anyway, hitting her in the chest, arm, and head.
President Trump called Good’s actions “vicious.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled them “domestic terrorism.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, after watching the video, said bluntly: “This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.”
Here’s what I want to consider: What if Good had the moral right to resist? Could she have been justified in noncompliance, even if she had hypothetically used potentially deadly force against the agents to defend herself? This is not to ask whether this would be pragmatically wise, or to suggest that she could have made this judgment under chaotic conditions—obviously, Good was simply trying to leave the escalating situation to get to safety. Rather, it is to ask whether moral justifications for such an option exist.
Seven years ago, philosopher Jason Brennan laid out what he calls the moral equivalence thesis: Government officials are subject to the same moral principles as everyone else. The rules that determine when you can use defensive force against private wrongdoers also apply to government wrongdoers. There’s no special moral immunity that comes with a badge.
This principle already exists in military ethics. The Uniform Code of Military Justice requires service members to refuse orders that are “patently illegal”—orders whose illegality would be obvious to anyone with basic sense. “I was just following orders” has been dead since Nuremberg. When Senator Mark Kelly publicly stated that military personnel should resist or disobey unlawful orders—literally just restating basic military law—the blowback showed how dangerous it’s become to even acknowledge that obedience has limits.
Yet we maintain this weird double standard: Soldiers in combat zones must refuse unlawful orders, but civilians facing unlawful force from domestic law enforcement must submit. Brennan’s conclusion cuts through this: If an agent commits an injustice comparable to what a civilian might commit, civilians have the same moral permission to resist. The badge doesn’t change the underlying moral math.
Before we accept this, let’s deal with the strongest counterargument. The administration frames immigration enforcement as responding to an invasion: millions of illegal entries threatening sovereignty, requiring extraordinary measures. In this view, ICE agents aren’t civil servants but defenders against an assault on the nation. Military tactics become appropriate. Civilian interference becomes intolerable. Casualties become inevitable.
But this argument collapses on inspection. First, immigration isn’t war. Unlawful entry—even at massive scale—involves no armed force seeking territorial conquest, no foreign government directing hostile action. The Constitution gives Congress power over immigration precisely because it’s a civil regulatory matter. Courts have consistently rejected attempts to suspend constitutional protections on emergency grounds. Second, even if we accepted the emergency premise, constitutional constraints don’t just vanish. Ex parte Milligan established during the Civil War that martial law can’t exist where civilian courts are functioning. Japanese internment—the go-to example of “emergency” justifying constitutional violation—is now universally recognized as a catastrophe, not a model. Third, if ICE operations were truly like military action, agents would face stricter rules of engagement, not looser ones. Military personnel require positive identification, proportional force, minimization of civilian casualties—with court-martial for violations. The emergency framework doesn’t justify current practices—it exposes that they can’t be justified under any constitutional standard.
What’s actually happening on the ground confirms this. Between July 2025 and January 2026, immigration agents shot at or into civilian vehicles at least 25 times, killing six people. Agents conduct dawn raids using only administrative warrants, which explicitly don’t authorize entry into homes. They detain US citizens based on “location, occupation, and physical appearance.” A federal judge ruled in November 2025 that Border Patrol’s use of force had been “excessive” and officials’ accounts “misleading and unreliable,” finding that Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino “lied multiple times” under oath.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable seizures. Graham v. Connor requires that force must be “objectively reasonable,” proportional to the threat. When ICE agents violate these constraints, they’re not exercising legitimate state power. They become, in Brennan’s words, “private aggressors in government costume.”
This isn’t just rhetorical flourish. Think through the implications. An ICE agent who forces entry into a home using only an administrative warrant—which lacks judicial authorization for entry—is committing an unlawful act. If that agent threatens violence to carry out an unlawful detention, the homeowner faces the exact same moral situation as if a private individual were breaking in to kidnap someone. Standard self-defense principles apply: Defensive force must be necessary, proportional, and likely to stop the immediate threat. The badge doesn’t change whether force is morally justified.
Now apply this to Minneapolis. For six weeks, residents had watched ICE operations escalate. The Department of Homeland Security had deployed 2,000 federal agents in “Operation Metro Surge.” Unmarked vehicles circled schools. Armed agents in tactical gear conducted forced stops. When Good’s vehicle was surrounded by these agents, could she reasonably perceive an imminent unlawful threat?
Here’s the question that makes everyone uncomfortable: What if someone in Minneapolis had shot Officer Ross before he shot Good? By Brennan’s principle, if Ross was committing or about to commit an unjust action comparable to what a private actor might commit, such defensive force could be morally justified. Not tactically wise—it would trigger overwhelming retaliation. Not legally protected under current law. But morally justified by the same principles that justify defensive force against private wrongdoers.
This isn’t a call to action. The practical realities are brutal: Resistance will fail, will be prosecuted, will trigger massive state response. But we need to be clear about the moral logic. If constitutional constraints are real limits on government power, their violation must sometimes justify the same defensive responses that other rights violations justify. Otherwise, we’re just admitting that Americans have no rights against federal agents—only privileges that disappear the moment an agent decides to violate the Constitution. The alternative position is incoherent: Government agents can violate constitutional law with impunity, but civilians commit a moral wrong by resisting those violations. That’s just “might makes right” dressed up in language about deference and order.
The usual objection—that permitting defensive resistance is too dangerous because ordinary people will misjudge situations—proves too much. Self-defense against civilians is equally error-prone, yet we don’t eliminate the right on those grounds. In fact, the same political coalition most worried about law enforcement authority typically defends expansive self-defense rights: Stand Your Ground laws, Castle Doctrine, broad interpretations of reasonable fear. All of these reflect acceptance that self-defense is inherently error-prone but still fundamental. You can’t coherently argue that civilians are competent to make life-or-death defensive decisions against private threats but incompetent to make similar decisions when the threat wears a badge. Either epistemic limitations eliminate self-defense rights generally, or they don’t eliminate them just because the attacker has government credentials.
And look at the historical record. The real cognitive bias runs the opposite direction: excessive deference to unjust authority. Milgram’s experiments, the Holocaust, My Lai, Abu Ghraib—the pattern is clear. Humans are systematically too deferential to authority figures, not insufficiently so.
So if practical considerations nearly always override moral permission to resist, what do we actually gain from Brennan’s argument? Several things. It establishes accountability standards: officers who kill civilians while violating Fourth Amendment protections are committing moral wrongs equivalent to civilian wrongdoing, which reframes debates around qualified immunity and prosecutorial discretion. It legitimizes protest and civil disobedience as assertions of fundamental rights rather than mere policy disagreements. It clarifies that government authority depends on adherence to constitutional constraints, and systematic violation undermines that authority. It matters for the rare cases where resistance actually succeeds—bystander intervention, collective action, documentation that prevents violence. And it prevents us from normalizing the view that badges confer immunity regardless of constitutional violation.
The gap between moral permission and practical wisdom is real. But moral principles don’t exist only to guide immediate action. They structure how we understand legitimacy, accountability, and the limits of state power.
Look what happened after Good’s death. At least six federal prosecutors in Minneapolis resigned, citing concerns that the Justice Department was investigating Good rather than her killer. The FBI revoked Minnesota investigators’ access to evidence. A still-active campaign for Officer Ross has so far raised $1 million. Meanwhile, DHS deployed tear gas against protesters, hospitalizing a 6-month-old infant.
When ICE routinely violates Fourth Amendment protections, operates with minimal oversight, deploys disproportionate force, and faces zero accountability, the question isn’t whether Good’s resistance was tactically wise. The question is whether government agencies that systematically violate constitutional constraints still get the presumption of legitimacy that makes submission morally obligatory. The state can’t simultaneously ignore constitutional limits and demand absolute submission. Government authority comes from adherence to law, respect for fundamental rights, and proportional use of force. When these conditions fail systematically, the state’s claim to obedience weakens accordingly.
Brennan’s argument clarifies what’s at stake: Either constitutional protections are real constraints on government power—in which case their violation must sometimes justify resistance—or they’re merely decorative, in which case we should stop pretending Americans have rights rather than revocable privileges. The choice is between a constitutional republic and something else entirely—something with constitutions and courts and elections, but where rights exist only until government finds them inconvenient.
