Wired reported that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility has opened more than 100 cases involving Americans accused by ICE officials of doxing or threatening ICE employees. That office was created to investigate misconduct inside ICE, including corruption, abuse of authority, excessive force, and civil rights violations by the agency’s own officers. Now it is being aimed outward at civilians. FIRE has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of David Streever, a 45-year-old from Rochester, New York, who sent an angry email to then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons after federal agents shot and killed two American citizens in Minneapolis. Five months later, Homeland Security Investigations agents appeared at Streever’s home, handed his wife an official warning notice, and later left a notice at the hotel where he was staying. In Syracuse, agents approached Paigelynne Gonyea over an Instagram post while she was working at a polling place. These are not abstract warnings about what government intimidation could become. These are documented examples of federal power being used to make speech feel dangerous.

The First Amendment was placed first because the founders understood that every other liberty becomes negotiable when citizens are afraid to criticize those who govern them. Authoritarian movements do not always begin with mass arrests or shuttered newsrooms. They often begin by making examples of a few people and waiting to see whether fear spreads faster than outrage. That is why the response cannot be silence. It has to be peaceful, public, collective speech. That is how courage spreads. They can intimidate one person. They can intimidate a hundred. They cannot intimidate an entire country that refuses to surrender its voice.