When is the last time the US government, or a fragment thereof, has truly been held accountable—not merely legally or politically, but morally accountable—for an act of violence, for its addiction to violence? Ever?

And what might that even mean?

These are not questions I’ve ever even asked until I began learning about a lawsuit that has been filed against Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director David Venturella. Technically, it’s a freedom of speech lawsuit, but it’s also so much more than that. At least that’s how it seemed to me, the more I learned about it.

The suit pulls back horrible January and the invasion of Minneapolis, aka, Operation Metro Surge, when armed and masked members of ICE and Customs and Border Protection began occupying the Twin Cities for the purpose of snatching and deporting (“allegedly”) undocumented immigrants, creating immense fear and chaos everywhere, and leading to huge protests.

This is militarism. The enemy dead are hidden behind patriotic propaganda and soon vanish from collective awareness. They’re subhuman; they’re evil.

As everyone knows, two of the protesters were murdered: Renee Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24. This was too much. The nation was outraged. The murders, combined with the fact that most of the arrestees were found to be in the US legally, quieted down the invasion—though hardly ending the arrests and deportations.

Five months later, David Streever, of Rochester, New York, was contacted—much to his stunned surprise—by agents from the Department of Homeland Security, who gave him a “Warning Notice: You May Be in Violation of Federal Law.”

Turns out, many months earlier, in the wake of the two protest murders, he had sent an email, titled, “What’ Next,” to Todd Lyons, who was the acting ICE director at the time. As quoted in The New York Times, this is part of what Streever wrote:

The director “will never know peace (and) will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher”—referencing the Nazi SS security chief, who is considered to be a principal architect of the Holocaust.

“Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness,” the email read.

“You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”

Sit with these words for a while. Yeah, I found them shocking. I even momentarily wondered if they had gone too far. But notice: There’s no actual threat in the words. Instead, the email is both a moral condemnation and a psycho-spiritual warning. Murder always comes back to haunt the perpetrator. As Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer at the Foundation........

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