Matt Brady reacts to the appearance of ICE in his area, and what that means for new responsibilities for educators.
ICE — invited by our State Representatives — came to my area recently with all their usual bluster, LARPing, and posturing.
Suddenly, it wasn’t a headline or “somewhere else.” Kids stayed home. Teachers got a bizarre “See Something, Say Something” style email letting us know we might need to report if armed men tried to enter the building.
That’s when the weight hit. Not the political weight — the human one. The realization that masked men with guns might intersect with my workday as a chemistry teacher.
And then, of course, the chorus: “This is how we find out who you would’ve been in 1938 Germany.” As if memes or influencers can diagnose moral courage.
With all due respect to the clickbaiters, the truth is more complicated — and more ordinary.
Where We Actually Are
My district has been so buried under the aftershocks of financial incompetence that the thought of ICE raids felt distant. But the country’s slow drift toward authoritarianism isn’t hypothetical anymore — it’s local.
We’re a blue island in a red state. We’ve dodged the worst of book bans and surveillance hysteria. Our parents, perhaps distracted by the district’s budget disaster, have supported teachers more than many around the country.
But authoritarian reality arrived anyway.
Our State Representatives invited ICE — the same ones who rigged election maps as a favor for the President, and still haven’t passed a state budget for this year. And they’re publicly asking ICE to come back to the state.
I know — it sounds dramatic.
Until it isn’t.
Authoritarianism doesn’t begin with jackboots.
It begins with the normalization of the outrageous.