The eye of the citizen is the first check on the officer of the state

According to Reason, a videographer in Springfield, Ohio — a private citizen exercising no authority but that of an awake and watching neighbor — recorded Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the conduct of their public duties. For that act alone, he alleges, those agents subjected him to harassment. A federal judge found sufficient cause to issue a temporary injunction ordering the agency to stop. The government's answer, the story reports, was to move the offending officers out of the district entirely.

Let us be plain about what that maneuver signifies. A court of law spoke; the executive branch complied with the letter of the order while defeating its purpose entirely. This is not obedience to the rule of law — it is the rule of law treated as an obstacle course. Any republic that tolerates this habit of evasion in its officers will, in time, find that no injunction is worth the paper it is printed on.

I have written that the freedom of the press is the great bulwark of every other freedom, and I meant the word press in its widest sense: any citizen who sets down, by whatever means, what the powerful do in public spaces. A man with a camera standing on a public street is performing one of the most republican acts available to him. He is, in essence, the jury that never leaves the courtroom. When agents of the federal government harass that man, they are not enforcing a law — they are suppressing a witness.

I am not unsympathetic to the argument that law enforcement requires operational latitude. I understand the executive must act with some speed and discretion. But discretion exercised in secret, and defended by silencing those who observe it, is not discretion — it is impunity. The distinction matters enormously. One serves the public; the other serves only the officer.

There is also the matter of the states. Springfield is in Ohio. The citizens of that city, and the government of that state, have their own legitimate interests in knowing what federal agents do on their streets. When the federal arm reaches into a locality and then shields itself from the eyes of that locality's people, it has presumed more sovereignty than the Constitution grants it. The federal government was given enumerated powers, not the power to conduct itself invisibly.

I will not pretend to know every technical and legal particular of immigration law — that is a domain of modern complexity I could not have foreseen. But I know the shape of this civic question with great precision, because it is as old as republican government itself: does a citizen have the right to watch an officer of the state perform his duties in a public place, and to suffer no punishment for doing so? The answer, under any honest reading of the First Amendment, is yes. A court said so. The executive branch found a way around the court's word. That is the story, and it is a serious one.

The remedy, as always, is an engaged citizenry and a press willing to report what power would prefer to do in darkness. Reason has done its part. The courts must do theirs — and must close the loophole that lets an agency dissolve an injunction simply by reassigning the agents named within it. Power transferred is still power; evasion renamed is still evasion.