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Everyone is just reacting every day, all the time. Doesn’t it ever get boring?
A five-year-old ends up in an ICE story and—like clockwork—people snap into their tribe’s script before they even know what happened. One side says the kid was bait. ICE/DHS says he was abandoned. There are competing accounts—and people are treating their preferred version like a confirmed fact. That’s the problem: the reaction comes first, and the facts get fitted later. [1][2]
The point isn’t which narrative “wins.” It’s how quickly people commit to a narrative without standards.
If your default lens is that everything the administration does is “fascist,” you’re not morally awake—you’re just captured by a story. And tossing around “fascist” like a party trick is a spit in the face to people who’ve actually lived under fascist regimes.
But the other side isn’t immune either. If your loyalty to authority is so undying that you take every official line at face value—no skepticism, no standards, no questions—you’re captured too.
If you can’t let daylight into your thinking, you can’t be taken seriously. At that point, you’re not persuading anyone—you’re just loud. And your noise is starting to land on deaf ears.
But my central concern is the acting out: people who don’t understand the law—and don’t care to—using chaos as a moral flex. That level of ignorance isn’t just embarrassing. It’s dangerous.
They react to outcomes while sidelining the upstream factors that produce those outcomes. They scream about consequences after the fact—detentions, removals, enforcement—without ever touching the legal and administrative inputs that make those consequences predictable.
If you refuse to understand the rules and constraints upstream, you don’t get to act shocked downstream. You’re not engaging a system—you’re throwing a tantrum at reality.
A few things to remember:
Illegal entry—crossing the border outside the legal process—is a federal crime, typically a misdemeanor for first-time improper entry. [3] If you reenter after removal, you may face felony charges, depending on the circumstances and your record. [4]
Overstaying a visa or parole is generally handled as a civil immigration violation, but it still carries serious consequences, including removal, and it’s a straightforward category of unlawful presence under federal immigration rules. [5]
People here unlawfully are entitled to due process in immigration proceedings, but they are not entitled to a government-provided attorney. If you want to argue for taxpayer-funded counsel in immigration court, fine—make that case. But stop pretending the current framework is some secret fascist glitch. The statute is explicit: representation is permitted, but “at no expense to the Government.” [6]
None of this is hidden. It’s the operating framework. If you want to posture as an arbiter of justice, then learn the laws of the country you claim should be a beacon of freedom—and stop treating it like your personal playground where rules don’t apply.
Understanding the law isn’t submission—it’s the minimum requirement for intelligent critique.
The irony of freedom is that it requires protection. Liberty has real, thin boundaries—and when you erode them, you don’t get a more humane society. You get disorder, backlash, and eventually heavy-handed enforcement.
And if you want a concrete example of what I mean by “eroding thin parameters,” look at the posture of unbounded compassion in immigration policies that invite numbers at a scale the system cannot realistically process, track, and enforce. The government’s own border statistics make the administrative reality obvious. [7]
Eventually, the levees break. And when they do, the response isn’t some enlightened outcome—it’s social distrust, political whiplash, and a demand for crackdowns.
Because administrative reality matters: at scale, processing and enforcement start to resemble running a second country inside the first. People become disaffected for a simple reason: they watch their government pour time, energy, and resources into people who aren’t even citizens while citizens are told to shut up, comply, and “be compassionate.”
That’s how the guardrails rot—slowly, through denial and moral theater—until the system snaps and everyone pretends they’re shocked.
So a lot of what you’re watching in Minnesota and elsewhere is political theater: people acting as though the law is optional when the cause feels righteous, while not even understanding the framework they’re screaming at—then staging moral outrage on top of their own confusion.
[1] Reuters — competing accounts in the Minnesota ICE child detention story (Jan 22, 2026) https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/ice-detains-four-children-minnesota-school-district-school-officials-say-2026-01-22/
[2] CBS News (CBS/AP) — DHS disputes “bait” claim; says child was “abandoned” (Jan 22, 2026) https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/5-year-old-boy-ice-custody-minnesota-abandoned-dis-claims/
[3] 8 U.S.C. § 1325 — Improper entry (statute text) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325
[4] 8 U.S.C. § 1326 — Reentry after removal (statute text) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1326
[5] USCIS — Unlawful presence and inadmissibility (definition + consequences context) https://www.uscis.gov/laws-and-policy/other-resources/unlawful-presence-and-inadmissibility
[6] 8 U.S.C. § 1362 — Right to counsel “at no expense to the Government”https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=prelim&num=0&req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title8-section1362
[7] CBP — Nationwide Encounters (official stats hub; includes definitions) https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/nationwide-encounters
Anthonoy Risco - Substack
