Demand Don’t Negotiate

What more evidence do we need?

New York Times reporter Thomas Gibbons-Neff did an analysis of the a photograph taken by John Locher of The Associated Press of heavily armed ICE agents confronting a woman who stands in the front door of her home. In a video analyzing the weaponry with which these agents are armed, Gibbons-Neff says:

I was looking at photos from federal operations in Minneapolis over the last week and this one picture stood out. Teyana Gibson Brown is standing in the doorway, obviously in distress. She’s wearing what appears to be scrubs. She has Crocs on and she’s holding her phone in her hand. These agents are basically dressed for an imminent threat. There were pieces of equipment on these agents’ weapons that seem more at home on the battlefield, and here they were on the doorstep of a woman’s house in Minneapolis. I cover gun culture and policy. Before that, I was in the Marine Corps for four years and deployed twice to Afghanistan.

With the last 20, 25 years, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia, technology that was used in those wars has kind of migrated into the police force. In this photo, there are two suppressors and the suppressor, also commonly known as a silencer. That was something that just kind of jumped out to me. They protect your hearing. They protect you from concussive blast coming out of your rifle. This is something that you would want to have at the end of your rifle barrel if you are in a house shooting in close quarters. When I was in the military, we were on the front line and we had wanted suppressors for my team, but they weren’t deemed important enough at the time. This kind of stuff is usually reserved for SWAT teams, hostage rescue teams, high threat environments. One of the things that is interesting on two of these rifles is this thing called the B.E. Meyers MAWLs.

It’s a daylight laser and an infrared laser that only you can see behind night vision. Things maybe you consider when you’re jumping out of a helicopter into bin Laden’s, compounded Pakistan in 2011. It’s that kind of technology juxtaposed with the doorstep. Video from the scene kind of showed a disorganized mess with a lot of yelling, but I think that’s kind of par for the course when you have people who are on the street opposed to operations, you have people in the house who are scared, and you have agents who are heavily armed. The agents arrest her husband. Four days later, he was ordered to be released as his fourth amendment rights had been violated.

As Gibbons-Neff mentioned, this operation was completely chaotic and disorganized. The ICE agents appear poorly trained and out of control. They’re armed to the teeth with weapons of war and invade a family’s home, in which there were children, without a warrant, in violation of their fourth amendment rights to unlawful search and seizure, they didn’t have a warrant. As Gibbons-Neff reported, the Ms. Gibson Brown’s husband, Garrison Gibson was arrested and detained for four days before he was released.

This is the kind of situation with which people in Minneapolis are confronted daily. The federal government is acting as if Minneapolis is an occupied territory and the people in that city have no rights. They don’t have the First Amendment right to protest peacefully or exercise free speech; they don’t have the Second Amendment right to carry licensed firearms; they don’t have the Fourth Amendment right to protect them from unlawful search and seizure; they don’t have the Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.

They don’t have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as outlined Declaration of Independence. This is not a regime to be negotiated with. We must demand not negotiate; demand not compromise. As was the case in October 2025, when the U.S. entered the longest shutdown in its history, the Republicans have the majority in the Senate, and they needed Democrats to vote with them to prevent a shutdown. Once again, the Republicans would have needed to make concessions to Democrats to keep the government they control open. A shutdown would have been due to their intransigence and refusal to cede any ground in the name of bipartisanship.

Just as in November 2025, the Democrats did not need to negotiate. Since the murder of Alex Pretti, we’d been hearing several Senate Democrats say they would refuse to fund the Department of Homeland Security and ICE even if it meant risking a shutdown. Instead, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made a deal with Donald in which five of the six spending bills passed to keep most of the government open for the rest of the fiscal year. Funding for the Department of Homeland Security would be extended for two weeks in order to “negotiate changes such as ending “roving patrols,” tightening requirements for warrants to make arrests, imposing a code of conduct for immigration agents and forcing them to wear identification and body cameras,” according to The New York Times.

On the floor of the Senate, Schumer said,

If Republicans are serious about the very reasonable demands Democrats have put forward on ICE, then there is no good reason we can’t come together very quickly to produce legislation. It should take less than two weeks. These are not radical demands. They’re basic standards the American people already expect from law enforcement.

What is radical is negotiating with Donald, the man most responsible for the horrors being unleashed upon the citizens of this country and the immigrants who have come here simply to find a better life. I’ve been saying for a long time that you should never make common cause with fascists. And we all know that you should never negotiate with terrorists. Yet Democrats have agreed to continue to fund an agency that is responsible for terrorizing children; illegally detaining immigrants and undocumented workers and disappearing them to gulags in other countries; and, most recently, murdering two American citizens. What more evidence do Democrats need to know that these are people with whom we should not negotiate? What more evidence do they need that the other side never operates in good faith? We need them to stand up for us, to fight for us. We need them to demonstrate that they understand, once and for all, what’s at stake.