Mary & Will James say truths out loud in their response: “The truth is, the millions one sees in the streets are not who Ms. Scheidt describes, are not some well-funded cabal. They are ordinary Americans, like us, who are simply outraged by what we see happening to our fellow human beings: …”

In her most recent opinion piece for the Post, Renee Scheidt relates the story of two Hispanic young men she personally knows who were stopped by ICE, and “after a few harrowing moments,” were released after identifying as American citizens and went on their way, saying that’s how it should be. Defending the ICE action based on racial profiling, she asks, “How else are ICE agents supposed to know they’re American citizens since millions of illegals are Hispanic? I don’t look for chicken in the fish section!”

Well, millions of American citizens are of Hispanic heritage. (Santa Fe was founded by Spanish settlers in 1610; Spanish missionaries established settlements in California long before the 1849 Gold Rush.) No American citizen should have to carry around proof of citizenship to satisfy a masked, armed thug in battle fatigues demanding such. A significant pillar of the exceptional American experiment is that everyone is innocent till proven guilty. And equating human beings to chicken and fish is insulting.

These men should not have had to endure even a single “harrowing moment” if ICE were doing what it says it’s doing: targeting only the “worst of the worst.” It’s ICE’s job to know exactly whom it’s seeking, no matter how difficult that might be, without resorting to massive roundups that terrorize a community. That’s like law enforcement stopping and frisking every Oklahoman just because somebody set off a bomb at the Murrah Federal Building.

It also does nothing to further honest debate by resorting to generalizations that all the demonstrators constitute some “well-orchestrated movement funded by rich globalists, such as George Soros and Chinese billionaire Neville Roy Signham”; are “paid, communist rioters,” “agitators,” “trouble makers” who arrive at airports with matching shirts, signs and other paraphernalia; act as “spotters” in various venues; utilize nefarious tactics like alerting others to the presence of ICE and instructing how to impede its work; are actually “defending convicted criminals, some of the worst of the worst, crooks released from jail,” as well as protecting child traffickers and drug dealers, and keeping lawbreakers from being deported. Wow, that’s quite a list of offenses!

The truth is, the millions one sees in the streets are not who Ms. Scheidt describes, are not some well-funded cabal. They are ordinary Americans, like us, who are simply outraged by what we see happening to our fellow human beings: having their car windows smashed; being yanked out of their vehicles and thrown to the ground; being nabbed from their homes, schools, workplaces, restaurants, daycare centers, even scheduled court appearances; being separated from their families; being handcuffed and shipped off to some foul detention facility; and finally two young American citizens being shot dead, one in the head and one in the back, unnecessarily as the videos clearly show.

Yes, a lot of protesters are equipped with whistles to alert others to the presence of ICE. Yes, many exchange ideas about how to resist ICE’s unconstitutional invasion of person and property. And yes, many travel to other cities with similar signs and shirts. (We have!) Nothing wrong with that. This is what righteous resistance looks like. And no, we are not paid.

Ms. Scheidt blames protesters for “all of the chaos ICE has endured.” Protesters are enduring plenty worse and would not be driven to react as they do if ICE acted as it should in the first place. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have been deporting millions of undocumented immigrants for decades but it has never done it like this. The only new ingredient to longstanding U.S. deportation policy is the ICE behavior of today. That should tell you all you need to know about who’s to blame for the chaos.

Finally, we’d like to say we no doubt agree on several things. We support legal immigration. (We have lived in several third-world countries and seen our embassies full of people anxious to come to America but an ocean in between requires they wait to do it the right way.) We support better securing our southern border. And we support deporting the so-called “worst of the worst.” But we unequivocally oppose doing it any way other than humanely, civilly and in accordance with the constitutional right to due process.

Mary and Will James

Opinion from R. Scheidt 2/15/26 – https://www.salisburypost.com/2026/02/15/renee-scheidt-ice-let-them-do-their-job/