Fire and ICE – January 7, 2026

Daily Poem

I’d be lying if I didn’t say this was inevitable, or jarring, or downright exhausting. More accurately, infuriating.

In Minneapolis snow, a red stain spreads where none should. Voices rise like breath in cold air – fury and sorrow entwined. A memory flickers of another fire long ago, a parliament ablaze to justify tyranny. Now power prowls for its own spark to crown fear with flame. Around our humble table, we feel the chill and the heat, hoping the only fires that warm us are those of truth and justice.

At the Kitchen Table

Not all violence announces itself. One ordinary winter day in Minnesota, unmarked ICE vehicles lined a quiet street under gray skies . By nightfall, police tape fluttered in the icy wind and a 37-year-old woman lay dead, shot through her car window by a federal agent . The bullet that pierced the cold air shattered the calm of a community. Neighbors rushed out into the snow, outrage burning hotter than their breath. “What were you taught by your parents?” one woman screamed at the stone-faced agents . A man with a bullhorn led the crowd in defiant chorus: “Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants are welcome here,” they chanted, voices echoing off brick and winter sky . In that moment, the street became a makeshift vigil—equal parts protest and prayer—for a life taken without reason.

City officials soon converged at the scene. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s voice trembled with righteous anger as he faced the cameras. “To ICE, get the f out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here… you are doing exactly the opposite [of creating safety]. People are being hurt,” he declared bluntly . The pain in his words laid bare a simple truth: the agency that claimed to protect was terrorizing instead. “Families are being ripped apart… residents… are being terrorized, and now, somebody is dead,” the Mayor added somberly . From City Hall to kitchen tables, Minneapolis was united in grief and fury.

Across town, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also rose to condemn what had happened. “ICE’s actions today were unconscionable and reprehensible. I am beyond outraged,” she stated, mourning the “reckless, callous” killing of a legal observer in her community . Omar did not mince words: “This is not law enforcement. It is state violence… simply indefensible,” she said, calling for accountability . She noted that instead of keeping people safe, federal agents had “unleashed violence – terrorizing neighborhoods and now killing a civilian” . For weeks, Minnesotans had been living under ICE’s so-called Operation Metro Surge – a massive 30-day immigration crackdown – and it had already brought “fear, chaos, and violence across our state,” Omar said . Day 2 of this campaign, and a woman lay dead in the snow. What exactly is being protected, and at what cost?

At kitchen tables nationwide, families absorbing the news of this ICE murder in Minnesota must wrestle with that question. The images are jarring: armored agents in winter streets, neighbors pelting their vehicles with snowballs as they flee , volunteer medics flushing pepper spray from protesters’ eyes . It feels like a scene from some dystopia – but it’s here, and it’s now. Parents struggle to explain to their children why those sworn to uphold the law can shoot an innocent civilian and face chants of “get out of our city” from the very people they claim to serve. Around our own tables we sit with unease, realizing that law and order has been warped into a slogan to mask brutality. The moral lines are as sharp as the winter cold: killing a civilian is not protecting a community, and no righteous society can accept an atrocity like this in silence. The disgust is palpable – disgust at the act itself, and at any who would excuse it. This kitchen-table conversation is not just about one tragedy in Minneapolis; it’s about what we are willing to tolerate as a nation. And that conversation now leads us from our homes to the wider world beyond our front doors.

On the World Stage

Zoom out from that Minneapolis street, and the pattern comes into focus. We have seen this playbook before. Nearly a century ago, in 1933, an inferno consumed the German Reichstag (parliament) and became the pretext for a dictatorship. Hitler’s regime seized on that crisis – the Reichstag fire – to suspend civil liberties and purge its opponents. “Anyone who stands in our way will be cut down,” Hitler infamously vowed as the building smoldered, and soon democracy was dead in a hail of emergency decrees . That was the blueprint: create or exploit chaos, then crack down in the name of order. Today, in 2026, many are asking: What will be America’s Reichstag fire?

It’s no secret that Donald Trump’s campaign and allies are hungry for a spark to ignite their own agenda. In the absence of a single grand crisis, they have been busy manufacturing smaller ones. Where real emergencies don’t exist, they invent them. “Fake chaos fuels his power grab,” one observer noted of Trump; handed chaos on a silver platter, no wonder he couldn’t care less if the nation comes together . We saw this last fall: when far-right activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead while speaking in Utah, Trump wasted no time in pointing fingers. With no evidence about the shooter’s motive, the President immediately blamed “those on the radical left,” accusing unnamed enemies of fomenting “terrorism… in our country today” . Asked how a bitterly divided America might heal after the assassination, Trump’s reply was chilling in its cynicism – he said he “couldn’t care less” about national healing . Instead, he doubled down, painting his critics as irredeemable: “The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible” . In Trump’s narrative, the problem is always “them” – some demonized Other – never the extremists on his own side . Never mind that over 75% of extremist killings in the past decade have been committed by right-wing actors ; inconvenient facts mean nothing when a useful lie is at hand.

What followed Kirk’s death was even more telling. The MAGA movement, far from tempering its fury, treated the shooting as political opportunity. The white-supremacist agitator Matt Forney went so far as to call it the movement’s “Reichstag fire moment”, clamoring for mass arrests of Trump’s opponents in response . Think about that: a man was murdered, and certain voices on the right literally celebrated it as a fortuitous spark – an excuse to unleash the powers of the state against their foes . If your instinct is revulsion, you’re not alone. There is a deep moral nausea in hearing anyone cheer violence as a means to political ends. It lays bare the rot at the core of authoritarian thinking: the belief that power justifies any atrocity. We are right to feel disgust and moral clarity in rejecting that. No cause that requires killing or terrorizing the innocent can ever be righteous. Period.

Trump, for his part, has been systematically laying tinder and kindling all around the American body politic – as if searching for that one great blaze or willing to ignite it himself. Consider his current presidency: an endless barrage of “emergencies” and “crackdowns.” He has openly mused that “maybe we would like a dictator” in the United States – only to hasten to add that he, of course, isn’t one, just “a man with great common sense” . Yet his actions speak differently. Masked federal agents in tactical gear roam city streets, detaining citizens in unmarked vans . 1,700 National Guard troops have been deployed in 19 states as part of immigration enforcement . He signed an order creating special National Guard units to “quell civil disturbances” – an escalation of militarized policing on domestic soil . His administration is in a frenzy of hiring 10,000 new ICE agents, plastering the country with wartime-style recruitment posters that scream about an “invasion” of criminals . Across the board, Trump’s message is plain: be afraid, and let me do whatever I want in the name of protecting you.

Abroad, the pattern extends. Just days ago, American missiles slammed into a Caracas apartment block in a unilateral operation to capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. An 80-year-old woman was killed in the blast, others gravely wounded . Trump launched this strike without congressional approval – a brazen act that legal experts call a violation of the War Powers Act . The official rationale? A dusty indictment from years ago, dubious at best . In truth, it appears to be another pretext, another fire set in the name of a “war on drugs” or “war on communism” that conveniently boosts a strongman image. As one analyst wrote, we’re now in a “Trump-verse” where anything can be justified if the President declares it so – a dangerous trait of the worst kind of despot . Even Congress itself has been sidelined and “is now burning” figuratively, its constitutional authority eroded; it’s “not quite the Reichstag burning, but… frighteningly close,” one commentator warned . The parallels with other authoritarians – Putin, Erdoğan, or the playbook of past fascist regimes – are growing harder to ignore.

All of this – the crackdowns at home, the adventurism abroad – serves a single aim: to concentrate power by stoking fear. An environment of constant crisis, whether real or concocted, allows would-be autocrats to present themselves as the saviors and to trample norms in the name of security. Trump’s strategy, if we can dignify it with that word, is essentially a search for a Reichstag fire – or as some have observed, a series of mini-fires he can use to justify the unjustifiable. In Nazi Germany, Hitler waited for a single grand blaze to seize total control. In today’s America, “it is Trump himself who plays the arsonist – igniting not one blaze but many, each fueled by crises of his own making,” as one journalist aptly noted . The question now is not whether this is happening – the evidence is before us daily – but whether we, the people, will let him finish what he’s started . Will we stand by, silent and numb, as our democracy is consumed by these flames and frozen by this fear?

Back to the Kitchen Table

And so we find ourselves back at the kitchen table, where all grand themes eventually settle into personal moments. It’s here, in the simple ritual of daily life – sharing a meal, sharing our day’s stories – that we must digest what all this means. The news from Minneapolis, the headlines from Washington and Caracas, the echoes of history, all converge in our hearts as we pass the bread or tuck in the kids. We realize that the state of the world is no longer an abstraction on page A5; it’s spilling right into our homes, demanding we choose where we stand. Do we yield to fear, letting it poison our conversations and eat away at our values? Do we harden our hearts and turn a blind eye to “state violence” in hopes it won’t visit us next? Or do we hold fast to our principles – justice, compassion, truth – even as storms rage around us?

These are not easy questions, but the times leave us no luxury of escape. Each of us has a stake in this. Each of us is, in a sense, at that table in Minneapolis, mourning a needless death and insisting that this is not the America we want. Each of us is also, in another sense, a witness in the halls of power, seeing clearly how lies and violence can engulf a nation if left unchecked. The moral clarity that shines through the darkness is our guiding light: it tells us that those who cheer on brutality, who rationalize violence for political gain, have relinquished any claim to moral high ground. We need to say it plainly – at our dinner tables and in our public squares: no ambition, no grievance, no ideology justifies the murder of innocents or the subversion of law and decency. Not by a federal agent on a Minneapolis street, not by a president in the name of “security.” Those who excuse or applaud such acts walk on the ashen path of tyranny, and we must not follow.

Yet, even in this heavy moment, there is hope to be found around the table. Look again at that crowd in Minneapolis: in their grief and anger, they also showed solidarity and love. They chanted “immigrants are welcome here” – asserting community over division. When pepper spray flew, volunteer medics sprang into action to care for strangers – compassion in action, even under attack. These are flickers of light amid the gloom. They remind us that the antidote to hate’s fire and fear’s freeze is our shared humanity. Every kind word, every act of courage, every truth spoken against a lie – these are the quiet, daily deeds that keep the darkness at bay. They are what’s left on the table when all the propaganda and spin are cleared away.

So tonight, as we close this chapter and you push back your chair from the table, take with you this benediction: May we have the moral courage of those Minneapolis neighbors who stood up to power and said “no more.” May we keep alive the memory of justice, like a warm ember in the cold, and refuse to let it die out. May our better angels guard our common table, so that neither the flames of hatred nor the icy chill of apathy can prevail. In a world where leaders hunt for a spark to excuse the worst in themselves, let us become the light that guides one another to the best in ourselves. And until tomorrow, may you find warmth, truth, and solidarity in the company of those you love – these are the things that will nourish us when the room grows quiet. That is what’s left on the table, and it’s ours to hold and to share.

America, we are better than this. Now is our time to show our children what it means to be true patriots and to honor those who stood for what's right.

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