President Donald Trump's administration has chosen to enforce federal immigration laws in a manner that prioritizes "maximum letahlity" over "tepid legality."

That's what Dakota Rudesill, a professor of law at Ohio State University and a former legislative assistant on national security to Sen. Kent Conrad, said on this episode of Plain Talk. He said that President Trump is usince ICE in Minnesota and elsewhere in the country as a "new federal domestic army."

Rudesill called the U.S. Constitution a "national security document," and argues that the separation of military and civil authority is a core American value found throughout our founding legal documents. With ICE dressing like soldiers, and using military equipment and tactics, and with ICE's leaders, up to and including President Trump and his cabinet, using the rhetoric of war to describe their activities, does that separation still exist?

"The Constitution was forged from national security crisis, and the highest level of government right encroaching on the liberty of the people in the name of national security," he said. "And so the framers wrote in that context, and they gave us the system we have, which is one where we have limited government not unlimited government."

With ICE patrolling American streets as if they were in enemy territory, with their assertion of the right to search homes without warrants, and deport detainees without due process, can we say that we have limited government or unlimited government?

Dakota S. Rudesill, Peter Granlund: A Profile in Courage and Fidelity to Law, The Gavel (Summer 2025), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5198782

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