To the Community: A Call to Action

Protect Our Neighbors, Uphold the Constitution

I speak today as a person of faith and conscience—committed to human dignity, the rule of law, and the constitutional principles that bind us together as a nation. I speak as one who has given his life to public and spiritual service as a Marine, police officer, and pastor. I speak today because I love my country and do not want to lose it.

I must state this clearly and without equivocation: agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are not police. They do not serve the same role, carry the same obligations, or answer to the same community accountability as local police officers. Calling them “police” blurs a line that should never be blurred.

ICE enforces civil immigration law. Its mission is detention and deportation—not community protection. Increasingly, ICE operations involve masked, unidentified agents using tactics that spread fear, fracture families, and undermine trust in public institutions. These actions do not make our communities safer. They make them more fearful—and less just.

Local police are different. Our police officers and sheriff’s deputies are sworn to protect life, uphold the Constitution, and defend the rights of all persons within their jurisdiction, regardless of immigration status. Their authority rests not only on law, but on legitimacy, restraint, and public trust.

I believe it is both a moral obligation and a constitutional necessity for local police leaders to act when federal actions cross the line into excess, abuse, or illegality. Silence in such moments is not neutrality. Silence is surrender—to the erosion of constitutional protections and the concentration of unchecked power.

Our shared faith traditions teach us that fear must never govern justice, and that a society is judged by how it treats the most vulnerable among it. Our civic tradition teaches the same lesson: unchecked power erodes freedom for everyone.

I call on you to stand with our undocumented neighbors and with the Constitution. Demand that your local police honor their sworn oath to defend the law and the people by documenting, publicly reporting, and intervening when federal immigration actions fall outside the lawful scope of authority and violate the laws of our state.

We must do this because democracy does not fail all at once—it fails when abuses are normalized, when institutions look away, and when good people remain silent. That moment is now.