Donald Trump’s ICE is sending armed agents to the homes of Americans who criticize the agency. David Streever is a United States citizen from Rochester, New York. In January, after an ICE officer named Jonathan Ross shot and killed a Minneapolis resident named Renee Good during an anti-ICE demonstration caught on video, Streever sent a three-paragraph email to Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE, calling Lyons a monstrous human being and comparing him to Reinhard Heydrich. In June, while Streever was on a trip to Finland, two ICE officers showed up at the Streever home and presented his wife with a federal warning notice informing him the email was being treated as a threat. When Streever came back into the country and tried to check into a hotel in New York City, federal agents tried to confront him there; the hotel staff turned them away. On Monday the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., naming ICE and the Secretary of Homeland Security as defendants. The case is the operation. The country is watching it happen.

The case is not the first. Paigelynne Gonyea is a poll worker in Syracuse. In June, two federal officers showed up at Gonyea’s polling place during the state’s primary elections and told her that a social media post about ICE was under investigation. The post included the words “I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted” over a picture of the same Jonathan Ross who shot Renee Good. A DHS spokesperson, Lauren Bis, said publicly that Gonyea had “committed a federal crime by posting the address of an ICE law enforcement officer online” and warned that “if you doxx our officers, we will investigate you, and you will be brought to justice.” The post did not contain the officer’s address. The case in Rochester is the case in Syracuse is the case the country is going to be reading about for the rest of the summer. Federal officers showing up in person at the homes and workplaces of United States citizens because of what the citizens have written, posted, or emailed is the operation. The First Amendment is the text the operation is testing. The text is older than the agency. The text will outlast the operation.

The substantive act is not complicated. A citizen of the United States sent a sharply worded email to a public official criticizing the conduct of the agency in the weeks after the agency killed a person in the street. The email named the official a monstrous human being. The email compared the official to a Nazi. The email said the official would never know peace. None of those statements is a threat of force. None of them is a call to violence. None of them is doxxing. None of them is a crime. The First Amendment protects all of them. The agency’s response was not to answer the criticism in writing, not to dispute the comparison on the record, not to ask a court to find the email crossed the line the First Amendment sets. The agency’s response was to send two armed officers to the home. The visit was the answer. The visit is the cruelty the prophets named when they were put in the stocks at the gate of the city.

The prophets of the Hebrew Bible knew the operation. Amos was told by the priest of Bethel to stop prophesying at the royal sanctuary because his words irritated the king. Isaiah’s counsel to Hezekiah was unwelcome in the court, and the court tried to make it stop. Jeremiah was put in the stocks at the gate of the city for telling the truth about the conduct of the officials. Hosea was told the king’s officers would treat his prophecy as sedition. The men who warned the court that the court was doing what the prophets named as evil were answered by being told to stop. The tradition the Hebrew Bible preserves is the tradition that knows: the speech that names state wrongdoing is the speech the state will try to silence, and the moment the silencing begins is the moment the state has begun the move toward the wrongdoing the speech was naming. The ICE officer at the door of David Streever’s house in Rochester in June is the modern American form of the priest at Bethel telling Amos to be quiet. The officer did not invent the operation. The officer is the present tense of it.

Heschel said it plain in January of 1963 in Chicago, on the way back from the march in Birmingham: few are guilty, but all are responsible. The officer at the door of the Streever house is not the only person who is responsible. The supervisor who assigned the visit is responsible. The public-affairs officer at DHS who wrote the statement denying the agency was suppressing speech is responsible. The official who wrote the words “Anyone who assaults or threatens our law enforcement officers will face the consequences” is responsible, because the official is using the words “assaults or threatens” to describe a three-paragraph email — no threat of force, no incitement, no doxxing, no call to action — that the First Amendment plainly protects. The Streever email is a sharply worded criticism of a public official. The agency’s response is to treat a sharply worded criticism as a threat. The agency’s response is the cruelty. The agency’s response is what the tradition names when the speech that names state wrongdoing is answered with state force.

Archbishop Romero in his last homily in March of 1980, in the cathedral of San Salvador, said to the soldiers carrying out the killing in his country: a law that commands you to kill your own brother peasants, you are not obligated to obey it. The officer who handed the warning notice to the wife of David Streever at the doorway in June is the officer Romero was speaking to. The law that commands the officer to deliver a warning notice in person to the family dwelling of a U.S. citizen because the citizen wrote a sharply worded email to a public official is a law the conscience the officer was raised on refuses to obey. The officer is bound by the same tradition that bound the soldiers in San Salvador. The supervisor is bound. The spokesperson is bound. The officer can decide on the next visit that the conscience will give a different order than the agency. The door of return is open.

King wrote in the letter from the Birmingham jail in April of 1963 that the great stumbling block in the stride toward justice is not the operator of the system but the citizen who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace that is the absence of tension to a positive peace that is the presence of justice. The Streever case is the country being asked to choose between the order the agency is offering and the justice the agency is suppressing. The order the agency is offering is: do not write sharp emails to public officials, or armed officers will come to your home. The justice the Constitution protects is: a U.S. citizen may write a sharply worded email to a public official, the public official may answer in writing, and no armed visit will be made. The order the agency is offering is the order King named. The justice the Constitution protects is the justice King named. The country is being asked to choose. The country has not yet chosen.

What a free country requires is plain. A sharply worded email to a public official is answered in writing. Armed officers are sent to the homes of the dangerous, not the critical. The visit ICE made to the Streever house in June is the visit the Constitution was written to prevent.

Those of us who came up in the bipartisan political Catholicism that funded the immigration enforcement machine across thirty years helped build the climate in which an agency can put armed officers at the door of a U.S. citizen in response to a three-paragraph email. The Obama removal pace, the Trump first-term removal pace, the Biden enforcement continuity, the Title 42 invocations across the partisan switch — the bipartisan machine built the agency into the kind of institution that treats a critical email as a threat that requires an armed visit, and the bipartisan machine was funded by the same kind of political Catholicism that could not find its voice against the removals when the removals were somebody else’s responsibility. The naming of the present operation does not exempt the prior years, and the prior years do not soften the present operation by a single ounce.

Agent who showed up at the Streever house in June: the man whose home you visited is a U.S. citizen. The email he wrote is protected political speech. The visit you made is the kind of visit the Constitution was written to prevent. You are a person. The conscience you were raised on is the conscience of the soldier in San Salvador and the citizen in Birmingham and the prophet at the gate of the city. The next time the agency gives the order to visit the home of a U.S. citizen because of what the citizen has written, you can decide that the conscience gives a different order. The door of return is open. Spokesperson who wrote the statement that the agency was not suppressing free speech: the agency sent two armed officers to the home of a U.S. citizen in response to a political email. The statement is not true. The statement is what the agency is doing. You are a person. The door of return is open.

The hotel in New York City turned the agents away. The country holds the agency to the Constitution, or the country is not the country. The house stands.