As I write this, it’s Republic Day in India – the day we have fun the Constitution as not only a founding textual content however a promise {that a} various nation can maintain collectively with out turning distinction into suspicion. And but this yr I spent Republic Day desirous about one other structure, one other democracy, and the way shortly the bottom beneath it may possibly change into unstable.
I reside within the United States now. Over the final month, the administration of US President Donald Trump has made brutal immigration enforcement probably the most seen perform of presidency, changing the quiet work of regulation enforcement with public spectacle – raids, intimidation and the regular manufacturing of worry.
In December, Trump described Somali immigrants as “garbage”. He stated he didn’t “want them in our country”, phrases that landed like a canine whistle and a directive in Minnesota, dwelling to the most important Somali neighborhood within the US.
When a frontrunner begins to talk about some individuals as disposable, the equipment of disposal follows.
Many around the globe know Minneapolis by brutal photos: the killing by the police in 2020 of an African-American man named George Floyd and the protests that adopted. In January 2026, it grew to become the main target of consideration once more – this time as a result of federal immigration forces surged into the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St Paul below what the administration calls “Operation Metro Surge”.
The deployment has been so expansive, it has triggered courtroom challenges over whether or not the operation quantities to unconstitutional coercion.
And then there was the killing.
On January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official shot and killed a lady named Renée Good who was performing as a voluntary “legal observer” to observe the police and safety forces at protests and through their operations.
The video travelled quick as a result of the main points had been insufferable and acquainted: a federal agent, a civilian, the flash of power offered afterwards as process. In the weeks since, the town has seen one other deadly encounter with federal brokers – the dying of ICU nurse Alex Pretti who was additionally observing ICE operations, deepening the sense that regulation enforcement has slipped into one thing nearer to abject criminality.
The NYT did a wonderful job debunking the allegations that Renee Nicole Good was making an attempt to make use of her automobile as a weapon. Justice for Renee Nicole Good. pic.twitter.com/lQrsV72VAA
— Christopher Bouzy (spoutible.com/cbouzy) (@cbouzy) January 8, 2026
I’m a part of an organisation referred to as Hindus for Human Rights. Since November, our members in Minnesota had been warning that ICE presence was intensifying and that neighbourhoods had been bracing for what was coming. But it’s one factor to know a crackdown is going on. It’s one other to face in it and really feel the way it adjustments the air.
After Renée Good was killed, a multifaith group in Minneapolis – Multifaith Antiracism, Change & Healing or MARCH – put out a nationwide name to clergy and religion leaders, explicitly echoing civil rights chief Martin Luther King Jr’s name to Selma in 1965: come bear witness; come put your physique the place your mouth is; come make it tougher for the state to do what it desires to do in the dead of night. I heard that decision and knew I couldn’t maintain my ethics summary. I went.
What I discovered was not a “protest weekend”. I discovered a metropolis making an attempt to defend itself.
The organisers started by stripping away the consolation of symbolism. We had been skilled in nonviolent resistance and, extra importantly, in understanding the distinction between a march that makes individuals really feel righteous and a follow that truly interferes with energy.
We heard from native religion leaders, union organisers, and households who had been residing the crackdown as a each day actuality: detentions, disappearances into custody, the fixed calculation of threat.
Then we went out.
The clergy motion at Minneapolis Airport, January 23. The authorities arrested 106 native clergy.
Some actions had been public and direct, like demonstrations on the Minneapolis-St Paul airport and on the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building (an ICE base of operations) that resulted in arrests. But what with me most was the quieter, extra granular, and extra terrifying work of neighbourhood patrols.
Since the surge started, native volunteers have been doing what Minnesota refuses to do – watching the watchers. They monitor autos, doc encounters, warn neighbours and attempt to interrupt ICE abductions as they’re taking place with noise, numbers and visibility. In just some hours driving with them, I noticed how briskly a daily road nook can change into a website of state violence – how shortly “papers, please” turns into bodily domination.
At one level, an agent deployed tear gasoline. For minutes I couldn’t see correctly; I couldn’t breathe properly. The level was not solely dispersal. The level was the lesson: we will do that to you at any time when we would like.
By the time we joined a large march by the centre of the town, the temperature was bitter – the form of chilly that makes the physique negotiate with itself. And nonetheless the streets stuffed. That defiance wasn’t performative. It felt like a civic intuition: when the state begins looking your neighbours, neutrality turns into complicity.
A multifaith group joins the 50,000-strong march by the centre of Minneapolis on January 23.
Here is the argument I wish to make, to Indian readers watching all of this from a distance:
Democracy hardly ever collapses in a single dramatic second. More usually it’s thinned out by exceptions – a everlasting emergency the place regulation turns into a dressing up for power. The goal adjustments by geography: in India, it’s usually Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, dissenters; within the US, it’s migrants, Black communities, and anybody who stands too shut in solidarity. But the construction rhymes: outline a inhabitants as suspect; make investments state brokers with full impunity; deal with rights as privileges that may be revoked; name it safety; demand gratitude.
And should you’re ready for a single villain in charge, you’ll miss how the bottom was ready.
America’s present brutality didn’t seem from nowhere in January 2025. The infrastructure of deportation has been bipartisan for years. Under Barack Obama, the US carried out greater than three million formal removals – a part of the explanation immigrant rights organisers referred to as him “deporter in chief”. Under Joe Biden, removals surged once more, reaching 271,484 in fiscal yr 2024 – the best since 2014, in response to ICE’s personal year-end reporting.
Donald Trump didn’t invent cruelty, however he executes it with better present. He takes what was already permissible and makes it loud – after which makes use of the noise to normalise extra.
India is aware of this rhythm intimately. We have watched the sluggish conversion of regulation right into a weapon: sedition and anti-terror legal guidelines used to criminalise dissent; mobs performing “justice” whereas police look away; establishments hollowed out whereas the language of nationalism performs ethical cowl. Constitutionalism has been deserted whereas the flag remains to be being waved.
A member of the multifaith group on the march.
There is one other uncomfortable hyperlink, and Minneapolis compelled me to take a look at it with out flinching. I travelled to Minneapolis with the delegation organised by Rabbis for Ceasefire. Some of us had traveled collectively to the West Bank in 2024 and noticed what occupation does to each day life: the armed presence that makes itself extraordinary; the paperwork that turns humiliation into routine; the impunity that teaches you the regulation is not going to shield you.
In Minneapolis, these reminiscences returned in waves. We had seen this earlier than.
Palestinian solidarity is the place many progressive “interfaith” areas within the US break down for me. Since October 2023, I’ve watched individuals converse brilliantly about justice within the summary whereas refusing to call Palestinian struggling within the concrete. I’ve worn a keffiyeh in these rooms as a small act of insistence and been informed, greater than as soon as, that the image is “too much”, that the language is “triggering”, that readability ought to be postponed for consolation.
But in Minneapolis, with individuals who had been already refusing silence about Gaza, the dialog may very well be sincere: the identical US state that bankrolls Israeli domination overseas has perfected the strategies of domination at dwelling – and exports the ethical logic that makes it legible. Different histories, completely different stakes, sure. But a recognisable structure of management.
Still, Minneapolis additionally supplied a lesson I didn’t anticipate to really feel so viscerally: the ethics of emergency.
Federal brokers claimed Alex Pretti, 37, compelled their hand on a Minneapolis road Saturday morning, alleging he “violently resisted” disarmament till the officers fired “defensive shots.”
Bystander footage seems to inform a special story. pic.twitter.com/cK0tq4izGt
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 25, 2026
People there are standing collectively now – throughout ideological variations which might be actual and never trivial – as a result of a neighborhood below siege can not wait for excellent alignment. They are constructing mutual assist networks. They are driving youngsters to high school when dad and mom are afraid to step exterior. They are sharing meals, lease, medication, and spare rooms.
They are doing what governments all the time inform residents to do in nationwide mythology, however hardly ever reward: defending each other with out asking for purity.
Which brings me, as a Hindu Indian American, to a query I can’t keep away from.
Why had been there so few of us on the streets?
Part of the reply is worry. Many Hindus within the US are immigrants or in mixed-status households. If the state is making examples of individuals, stepping ahead can really feel like volunteering to change into one.
But a part of the reply can also be political confusion – and, if we’re sincere, ethical failure. A slice of the Hindu diaspora has spent years defending majoritarian politics in India: applauding the focusing on of Muslims, rationalising state violence as regulation and order, treating constitutional secularism as expendable. In that local weather, Trump can look much less like a warning and extra like a well-recognized form of power – till his equipment turns towards you.
This is the place Republic Day ought to cease being sentimental. The Indian Constitution is just not a trophy. It is a self-discipline. If we solely invoke it once we are those below menace, we’ve already betrayed it.
What I carried again from Minneapolis is just not a technique memo. It’s a picture: a metropolis studying, once more, easy methods to refuse.
Selma, Alabama – the place marchers confronted state violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965 – is commonly described as holy floor in American civil rights reminiscence. After marching there, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously stated, “I felt my legs were praying.” That line issues as a result of it refuses the lie that conscience is simply inside.
Minneapolis, for me, now sits in that very same class of locations that change what you suppose ethics is allowed to demand.
On Republic Day, Indians are invited to rehearse pleasure. I would like us to rehearse one thing tougher: constitutional braveness – the type that doesn’t wait for the menace to reach at our personal door; the type that recognises occupation when it’s achieved in our title; the type that treats democracy as dharma.
Sunita Viswanath is the manager director of Hindus for Human Rights and a long-time human rights activist primarily based in New York.
