When the state acts unseen, liberty has no witness

The first business of a free government is accountability to the governed. Not accountability promised in a press release, not accountability deferred to a future budget cycle — accountability in practice, in the moment when an officer of the state exercises the most irreversible power a government can exercise over a human being: the taking of life. NPR reports that two immigrant fathers have been fatally shot by federal immigration agents in recent days, and that none of the officers involved were wearing body cameras. The Department of Homeland Security had, by its own pledge, committed to equipping all immigration agents with such devices. Months later, that commitment remains unfulfilled.

I have always held that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance — and that vigilance requires evidence. A citizenry cannot hold its government to account on the basis of competing assertions alone. The body camera is, in the language of my own era, nothing more exotic than a credible witness: a means by which the public may see, after the fact, what was done in its name and with its authority. To promise such a witness and then fail to provide one is not a minor administrative lapse. It is a structural choice, whether conscious or not, to leave the state's most consequential acts unexamined.

I will speak plainly on a matter the modern Shard cannot evade: these men who were killed were immigrants. The government of this republic has, in recent years, treated the category of "immigrant" — including, by the New York Times's account in a separate story on this menu, legal residents of long standing — as a population to be managed by executive decree rather than protected by law. That disposition troubles me deeply. The Declaration I drafted did not enumerate the rights of citizens alone; it named the rights of all people, derived not from any sovereign's grant but from nature itself. Every person on whom a federal officer draws a weapon stands in that moment before the full moral weight of the state. They are owed, at minimum, a faithful record of what happened.

The concentration of enforcement power in a federal agency, acting across the territory of fifty states, with armed agents and no uniform system of oversight, is precisely the shape of power I spent my public life warning against. It is not the king's dragoons in red coats; the form has changed. But the principle is identical: armed men acting under executive authority, answerable in the moment to no one but their chain of command, and accountable afterward only if someone thought to record them. When the recording was promised and then withheld — by inertia, by budget, by indifference, I cannot say, and I mark that as inference — the public is left with nothing but official assertion. Official assertion, history teaches, is the least reliable currency in disputes between the state and the individual.

The remedy is not complicated in design, though it is evidently complicated in political will. Equip the agents. Enforce the policy. Release the footage under a clear public-records framework. Let a free press, which NPR in this instance is doing its honest duty to sustain, examine what is released. And let the Congress — whose constitutional role is precisely this oversight — hold the executive to its own word. A republic that cannot compel its enforcement arm to wear a camera after pledging to do so has already conceded something important about who, in the end, holds power. I urge every citizen to notice that concession, and to insist it be corrected.