Minnesota. 3,000 federal agents sent to a state with 2.2% undocumented population—less than half the national rate.

Why?

They’ve killed multiple people. Detained U.S. citizens. Deployed tear gas on protestors. Not because it’s a crisis. Because the cruelty sends a message.

The harm to communities is unconscionable. People killed. Families torn apart. U.S. citizens detained. Communities terrorized. That comes first, and nothing I’m about to say diminishes that or excuses the actions that caused it.

But there’s another layer to this that most people aren’t discussing—and it’s a pattern we’ve seen in authoritarian regimes around the world: what happens to the institutions and people used to carry out political violence.

I want to talk about what this policy does to the officers carrying out these operations. Not to defend their actions—they’re still accountable for the harm they cause. But to examine how this policy weaponizes people as part of its design.

Because cruelty requires instruments. Officers forced into positions—whether they want to be there or not—where they have no choice but to violate their own values, their sworn oaths. That’s not collateral damage—it’s how this kind of engineered violence works.

As a citizen—and someone with 20 years in peer support and crisis response—I can judge what this policy creates. I carry two badges: one as a sworn firefighter, one as a fire chaplain. But I haven’t made the specific decisions these officers face. Still, empathy doesn’t require identical experience. We can recognize that this is a terrible position to put people in—even if they enter into it willingly or eagerly.

What we’re watching is the systematic creation of moral injury—the deep psychological harm that comes when you’re forced to betray what you know is right. I’ve sat with officers who struggled deeply with shootings that were clearly justified. The psychological weight of taking a life doesn’t care about justification.

Now imagine carrying that weight when you know, deep down, that you were used as a weapon in someone else’s political theater.

Maybe some officers believe they’re doing righteous work. But moral certainty is a dangerous myth. What feels righteous today can give you nightmares later. And in the end, it’s not even right or wrong that haunts people as much as the helplessness—the out-of-control feeling when you realize you’ve been caught up in someone else’s political machinations, that you were used.

Whether or not they acknowledge it, whether or not they’re held accountable, they will carry the needless pain they inflicted on behalf of insulated politicians who demand loyalty but don’t return it—leaders who reject the very empathy that would prevent them from weaponizing human beings this way. Leaders who won’t be there when the nightmares start.

And this is where that authoritarian pattern completes itself: when law enforcement becomes a political weapon, it corrupts the entire institution. Career professionals who joined to serve their communities leave. They’re replaced by those attracted to power rather than service. The culture shifts from protection to occupation. Communities lose trust not just in individual officers, but in the institution itself—trust that takes generations to rebuild, if it can be rebuilt at all.lucid.substack+3

We don’t need tactical expertise to recognize engineered cruelty. We just need to call it what it is.