ICE Demonstrates Why We Need the Second Amendment

The right to keep and bear arms is about resisting tyranny.

This week, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes warned that her state's Stand Your Ground law makes confrontations between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the public potentially dangerous. Mayes, a Democrat, thinks she's scoring points against the self-defense law while raising a caution to ICE agents, but she's really underlining a feature of America's political culture. It's not Stand Your Ground that puts masked government agents in peril, but this country's noble history of resistance to overbearing government and the Second Amendment in which that tradition is embodied.

'This Is a Second Amendment State'

"It's kind of a recipe for disaster, because you have these masked federal officers with very little identification, sometimes no identification, wearing plain clothes and masks," Mayes told 12 News's Brahm Resnik. "And we have a Stand Your Ground law that says if you reasonably believe that your life in in danger, and you're in your house, or your car, or on your property, that you can defend yourself with lethal force."

"Now, you're not allowed to shoot peace officers," she clarified when pressed in the interview by Resnik. But "if you're being attacked by somebody who is not identified as a peace officer, how do you know? If somebody comes at me wearing a mask—by the way, I'm a gun owner—and I can't tell whether they're a police officer, what am I supposed to do?"

"This is a don't-tread-on-me state," she added. "This is a Second Amendment state. This is a state with a lot of guns in it."

Mayes seems to have confused Arizona's Stand Your Ground law, which specifies there's no duty to retreat when attacked in public, with Castle Doctrine, which recognizes people's right to defend themselves on their property. Both are common in the U.S., though Castle Doctrine is more prevalent. Both could also come into play in confrontations with ICE or other state agents. But it's Castle Doctrine that matters when "you're in your house, or your car, or on your property" and goons kick in the door.

The Right To Defend Yourself From Police

Jurors in Burleson County, Texas, recognized the importance of such principles when, in 2014, they declined to indict Henry Goedrich Magee for killing a cop who participated in an early-morning no-knock raid on his home. Police hadn't properly identified themselves.

On the other hand, a Bell County, Texas jury found Marvin Guy guilty of murder for a police officer's death in a similar no-knock raid in 2023. That said, the jurors rejected a capital murder charge.

Exercising self-defense rights against law-enforcement officers is a gamble. But there's precedent for recognizing that right when government agents misbehave in ways that endanger life and liberty.

A similar situation could have easily occurred this month when ICE raided the home of Chongly Scott Thao in St. Paul, Minnesota. As CBS News reported, "ICE agents broke his door down without a warrant before detaining him at gunpoint. Videos show agents bringing him out in the cold with little more than a blanket and his underwear." As it turned out, ICE not only invaded the man's home, but they had the wrong guy. They were ultimately forced to release Thao after terrifying him and his family. Who could have blamed him if he'd opened fire as they stormed through the door?

As that case demonstrates, bad government behavior comes not just from failing to provide proper identification, but from a range of overbearing behavior. Second Amendment advocates have long recognized this point – at least the consistent ones have.

'That They Are a Law Enforcement Officer…Does Not Mean You Are Obliged To Allow Yourself To be Killed'

In 1995, the National Association of Radio Talk Show Hosts awarded radio personality and former Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy a Freedom of Speech Award for urging resistance to violent raids by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) at a time when anger was rising (as it has again) against that agency's abusive enforcement of gun regulations. "Shoot twice to the body, center of mass, and if that does not work, then shoot to the groin area," he advised. He later specified that "if somebody is shooting at you, using deadly force, the mere fact that they are a law enforcement officer, if they are in the wrong, does not mean you are obliged to allow yourself to be killed."

That sounds a lot like scenarios we've seen with ICE, which not only neglects ID but often uses brutal tactics. The founders and other luminaries of the republic might have gone even further.

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government," Alexander Hamilton advised in The Federalist Papers, No. 28.

Thomas Jefferson's personal seal bore the saying, "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers," noted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in his commentaries on the Constitution.

As self-defense advocates often emphasize, the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms not just for hunting and target shooting, but so people can resist government when it inevitably steps out of line. One of the more dramatic such incidents occurred in 1946, when returning war veterans found corrupt officials in charge of Athens, Tennessee, and tossed them out with gunfire and dynamite.

Many Americans Oppose ICE Tactics

That many Americans find ICE as reprehensible as self-defense advocates view the ATF is clear from the protests in Minneapolis that have resulted in several shootings, including the killing of Renee Good. Recent polling by CBS/YouGov finds that a majority of Americans (61 percent) believes ICE is "too tough" in the way "it stops or detains people" and 52 percent say ICE operations make communities "less safe."

In separate polling, 56 percent call Good's shooting unjustified. A slight plurality (47 percent) approves of anti-ICE protests. "Equal shares of Americans support and oppose abolishing ICE (45% vs. 45%)."

An agency that almost half of Americans believe should be abolished, and that a majority believes is shooting people without justification—that is, committing murder—is a prime target for self-defense.

Fans of the right to keep and bear arms have rightly pointed to the Second Amendment as protecting the ability to resist abusive government officials. ICE is in the process of demonstrating why that constitutional amendment, and the freedom it protects, are so important.