Parenting Through Authoritarianism's Rise
Protesting ICE and Imperialism with My Teenage Son
The day after the Trump Administration illegally launched a war against Venezuela, my 13-year-old son sliced up a cardboard box and made his sign. I threw mine together after the murder of Renee Good by an ICE agent. We took both to a protest near our home in northern Virginia this past weekend.
A voracious reader and keen student of history and politics since long before he entered middle school, my son (“E”) knows an imperialistic war of choice1 when he sees one. And as you can glean from his sign, he has even less tolerance for tyranny, imperialism, and plunder than he has for basic writing rules like putting spaces between words. (That’s my boy.)
It’s been less than two weeks since the Trump Administration launched a major military operation to decapitate Venezuela’s leader in order to take the country’s oil — Trump himself has made this crystal clear — and it already feels like a previous lifetime. A few days after the military operation against Venezuela, many of us were shaken to our cores when a good Samaritan aptly named Renee Good was shot to death by an ICE agent after dropping her 6-year-old son at school.
Renee was neither the first victim of ICE nor the last. The killings and abductions of black and brown people have garnered less attention, which is both unsurprising and extremely problematic. Given what we know about Renee Good, I suspect she would have been among the first to point that out. That said, thank goodness Renee’s murder has served a clarifying moment for many. That was certainly apparent at the protest my son and I attended.
The protest was local and hastily organized and, nonetheless, hundreds showed up with homemade signs in hand. There were signs that especially caught E’s eye — like this one from George Orwell’s novel 1984.
E and I had seen signs with this same quote at our first No Kings protest in June 2025. After Renee Good’s murder and the instantaneous responses by our government’s most senior officials — Trump, Vance, and Noem — it takes on a palpable urgency. Thanks to video evidence, we’ve all seen for ourselves what happened to Renee Good. We saw her attempt to deescalate. We saw the ICE agent shoot her and keep shooting after she couldn’t conceivably have been posing a danger to him. And then we heard him finish her off with a misogynistic epithet.
Yet, the most senior officials in our government demanded that we reject the evidence of our eyes and ears. Practically before Renee’s blood had even dried and absent any investigation, they called the mother of three kids a “domestic terrorist” and a “deranged leftist” and blamed her for her own murder. Orwell warned that this would be the party’s “final, most essential command.” We’re less than a year into this regime.
Our government has mounted an assault on truth and Good-ness, blocking local Minnesota authorities from investigating Renee’s murder and instead pressing for a criminal investigation of her widow, Becca — leading six federal prosecutors in Minnesota to resign.
The gaslighting is (intentionally) destabilizing and makes us feel the world is upside-down and we’re going insane. It’s vital to be out in community with others who affirm they are seeing the same things we are. Consider it a basic sanity check.
At our local protest, E took note of multiple signs that characterized ICE as Trump’s Gestapo, including the one below.
It may seem hyperbolic, offensive, or even dangerous to liken ICE to the organization Yad Vashem identifies as “the Third Reich’s secret political police force, serving as Hitler’s main instrument of torture and terror.” As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I am sensitive to potential misappropriations of Holocaust imagery and terminology. Yet, it is hard to overstate the gravity of the situation we face when our president has in effect created a private militia, which Congress has endowed with vast resources and Republicans are attempting to shield from any oversight or accountability.
Credible firsthand accounts of ICE activity from the ground in Minneapolis — like this one, from Carin Mrotz and this from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — are harrowing. Minneapolitans are likening the presence of ICE agents with assault rifles and combat gear to “military occupation.” From residential neighborhoods to schools to places of employment to big box stores’ parking lots, it seems nowhere is off limits. US citizenship and whiteness may help, but even they don’t guarantee safety.
As for whether the Gestapo analogy is the most apt one, Joshua Shanes (professor of Jewish History at University of California, Davis) sees ICE as a blend of the Gestapo and Sturm Abeilung, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary organization known as the “brownshirts” when it was constituted in 1921. So that’s not exactly comforting. Peter Birkenhead writes this of the ICE-Gestapo juxtaposition:
Please don’t tell me the comparison isn’t fair. The gas chambers at Auschwitz didn’t start their terrible work until 1942. The Gestapo in 1938 was engaged in exactly the same activity that ICE is today: the rounding up of people on the basis of race and sending them off to concentration camps.
It is excruciating to live through these times and it’s even harder to figure out how to parent through authoritarianism’s rise.
On election night in 2024, we watched the election results come in together, as a family. When it became clear that the tide was turning for Trump, E panicked. He asked me what we were going to do. He told me we had to leave the country. Now. His reaction took me totally by surprise and I made up the best answer I could on the spot. I told him we would be safe and, if it came to it, we would know when it was time to leave.
Over a year later, I don’t feel any better equipped. Letting the boy sit at home “perseverating” (the word E’s school counselor used to characterize his behavior at school on the day after the election) would not seem to be the answer.
So I stood behind him at our local protest as he held up his homemade sign, chanted along with the crowd, and joined in protest songs. As he sang the words to “This Land Is Your Land” in his beautiful baritone voice (already!), a gray-haired lady standing in front of him turned around to tell him how lovely it was that he knew the words. In fact, he knows them better than I do! E was inspiring others as he experienced solidarity and common purpose.
As the protest came to a close, we learned more about the work of We of Action Virginia and Indivisible, great organizations that organized the protest. E is eager to get involved and stay connected — no small thing for an introverted, bookish, neurodivergent kid. Perhaps he is starting to understand what social capital is and why it’s vitally important.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, published in 2000, is a key text on social capital that proved invaluable when I taught undergraduate courses on comparative politics. In the book, Putnam presented data showing that Americans were becoming increasingly disconnected from each other. He argued that this resulted in a decline in “social capital” and the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation that flow from social networks. Since Putnam wrote, the pervasiveness of social media, constant attachment to smartphones, and isolation during Covid seem to have exacerbated the decline in social capital.
A society in which people are disconnected is one in which authoritarians find it easier to consolidate power and pathological ideologies like fascism can grow. What historian Timothy Snyder has termed corporeal politics — physically getting our bodies outside, meeting new people, and protesting with them — has become even more vital.
E and I debriefed after the protest, taking shelter from a biting wind that kicked up as we waited for our ride. He told me he was glad we came to the protest and that it felt important to be there. He found it reassuring that local officials spoke to the crowd. They were defiant, resolute, and unequivocal. The Commonwealth’s Attorney stated: “Law enforcement officers are public servants, and they are not an occupying army. As chief law enforcement official of our community, I’m here to tell you: we are a free people.”
Then he asked, with a note of concern, “But will it make a difference?” When we got in the car, he thought of a way to spur more people to action. He asked, “Mom, can you put this on your Substack? You don't have the biggest audience, but get it out there.” I promised him that I would.
As we close, I have three asks:
Tell me what actions that you are taking or plan to take. I’d love to be able to share them with E. Will you join a local activist group, such as Indivisible? Go to a protest… and make it a regular habit? Boycott entities that are complicit in rising authoritarianism? Put an ICE Emergency Hotline into your phone contacts so you can report ICE activity? What other things will you do?
Share any ideas or resources on parenting through rising authoritarianism. Many of us need them, myself very much included! If you just want to share something about your experience, that’s very welcome, too.
SUPPORT THE DEBRIEF. As some of you know, our family just received some difficult news. Your support today would be especially meaningful. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you have the capacity. If you’re not currently in a position to to do so, you can still help this little Substack that “doesn’t have the biggest audience” by becoming a free subscriber and sharing my work. Your support would mean the world to E and me and our whole family. Thank you.
At a recent protest in NYC following the killing of Renee Good, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum (friend and alum of The Debrief) preached:
We will not give up on future generations. We will be the shoulders on which they will stand and look back at these terrible times and say that we stood in the light and we demanded of each of us to hope and to believe in a future…
May the memory of Renee Good and all the victims of injustice move us to choose light over fear, practice nonviolence as sacred resistance, and become the goodness that this moment demands of each of us.
Her stirring sermon is worth watching in full:
Until next time, friends. I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Check out The Debrief’s podcast with Brian Finucane, who served as a legal advisor at the State Department across three administrations before joining the International Crisis Group. It’s a deep dive into issues regarding the illegality of the Trump Administration’s decapitation and plunder operation in Venezuela.
Thanks for your post. It is so full of heart, I have to respond. I’m so glad to hear about your son’s awakening in community.
In March, I became obsessed with Lady Liberty and began making art with her image. In April, I made a Lady Liberty costume and began wearing it to every protest I attend. Twice a week, The Lady shows up at an ICE Detention Center to Bear Witness to the atrocities committed there against our immigrant neighbors. She is much beloved and an instant connector to people everywhere. This enables me to uplift the despairing, teach and inform about local actions to take, pass out Ezines about how to report ICE and more. People share their stories. For a person who has social anxiety, The Lady opens me up so I spontaneously make eye contact and talk unbidden to folks new to me.
She heals and is a beacon of hope. She builds community. I leave feeling grateful for this opportunity to serve.
To fundraise for immigrant organizations I make prodemocracy handcrafts (many with Her image) with all proceeds going to those organizations. Art and Love are my path in these times.
I have been doing a little bit of a lot of things. Every once in a while I've writing postcards to voters (organized by Tony the Democrat). I have been sometimes confirming call shifts and making volunteer recruitment calls for the Wisconsin Democrats (best organized staff in the country to volunteer for!). I am trying to write some testimony for the Maryland state legislature through Jews United for Justice and I am a core leader with the MD chapter of Bend the Arc, Jewish Action. I also just (last Friday) observed my first immigration court to report to the ABA Commission on Immigration.