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Heather Bryant, a teacher in Park City, Utah, only learned that a Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) worker had interviewed her three kids after the fact.

“I got a call from the DCFS investigator,” Bryant said in a phone call. “I was sitting at work and was absolutely knocked sideways by it. My hand was shaking—I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation.”

The investigator informed Bryant that someone had called DCFS to report overhearing a conversation between their son and Bryant’s middle son. The 8-year-old boys were talking about how Bryant’s 12-year-old son had been rough with them during a neighborhood soccer game.

This was labeled “child-on-child physical aggression during play” by the DCFS.  

“We want to reassure you that your children are all clearly well-adjusted,” the caseworker told Bryant after going to their schools and asking her three children about their home life. Bryant was informed that “no further action will be taken.” In other words, an investigation was opened without announcement, and was now being closed. “She was clearly apologetic,” recalls Bryant. 

Months afterwards, Bryant was still shaken. “It was fear mixed with shock,” Bryant says. Feeling betrayed by an anonymous mom made Bryant wary about letting her kids play with their friends. She only recently felt ready to write about it in an op-ed in The Park Record, although the incident occurred over a year ago.

The fact that an overheard discussion of 8-year-olds prompted government investigation made Bryant start to see how fear and over-reaction “is increasingly routed through public systems.” She couldn’t understand why a mom would call the authorities, rather than just speaking to her. “This wasn’t about genuine risk to children. It was about outsourcing discomfort,” Bryant wrote. 

Getting the state involved in parenting decisions is something Utah has been at the forefront of fighting. In 2018, Utah became the first state to pass a Free-Range Parenting law. Since then, 10 more states have followed suit with “Reasonable Childhood Independence” bills. These bills say that “neglect” is when you put your child in obvious, serious danger—not anytime you take your eyes off them, including letting them play outside unsupervised.

If a casual soccer match could be described as “dysregulated,” then almost all true play environments could be considered overly rough. “Normal physicality was reframed as aggression,” wrote Bryant. “Healthy competition became cause for alarm.” If we take all the spontaneity and risk out of play, it’s no longer play. It’s yet another orchestrated, scrutinized, adult-run activity. 

Maybe one reason kids are so anxious and depressed these days is that they don’t get a lot of chances to work things out on their own. If you never figure out how to deal with an older kid playing rough, you never learn how much you can handle. Instead, an adult is always there to solve the problems—or call the authorities—and kids are growing up as bystanders. 

Parents, meanwhile, are stuck in anxiety mode, seeing and hearing so many of the once-hidden ups and downs of their kids’ day. Between constant surveillance and near-constant supervision, childhood spats that would have been forgotten are now witnessed, worried about, and turned into bigger issues.

This kind of excessive intervention knows no boundaries. When kids are over at her home, Bryant says, she gets a stream of texts from parents asking her to remind their kids to hydrate, or eat a protein snack, or not to eat sugar. 

As a high school teacher, Bryant sees the impact on students growing up this way. “You ask them to do something, and I need to provide step by step instructions, because that’s what they’re used to,” says Bryant. “They need directives for simple tasks.”

The post How a Kids' Soccer Game Became a Child Welfare Case appeared first on Reason.com.

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When news broke last weekend that federal immigration agents had shot and killed a second U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was quick to go on the offensive. Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse who was killed, a DHS post on X initially claimed, “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said that Pretti had “brandished” a gun at officers. Pretti was indeed carrying a gun, for which he was legally permitted. But multiple videos of the incident clearly show that he had been disarmed before he was shot, and a DHS review released days later notably did not include the claim that he brandished his weapon. 

As with the killing of Renee Good by federal immigration officers days earlier, senior Trump administration officials rushed to prejudge the incident before the facts could possibly be known by painting the dead citizen as an agitator and aggressor. Rather than acting cautiously, Noem and her agency simply lied. And in doing so, they had smeared a man killed by his own government. 

Those lies came directly from senior White House adviser Stephen Miller, according to Axios. It’s not hard to believe that report. Miller is, by most accounts, the mind behind President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, including its most visible and aggressive aspects—the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles last year, the attempts to create a chaotic scene in Portland, Oregon, and the surge of masked federal agents into Minneapolis that resulted in the killing of Pretti and Good.

On social media, Miller himself asserted that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin.” And in the days afterward, Miller continued with the militant rhetoric. He often paints immigration as an invasion with civilizational stakes. And this week, he declared that, after losing an election, Democrats “launched an armed resistance to stop the federal government from reversing the invasion.” 

Miller isn’t just seeking dutiful immigration enforcement. And he’s not just spouting ugly rhetoric on social media. He just doesn’t want the public to believe that immigration policy is equivalent to a war on America’s streets, he needs them to, because that’s the only way to justify the sort of wartime tactics he favors on American streets. 

Trump’s second-term raids are not merely designed to sweep up immigrants for deportation; they are designed to act as shows of force, a dangerous and occasionally deadly form of political theater. And while Trump bears ultimate responsibility for the immigration sweeps and their consequences, it is Miller who has most clearly shaped their operational character. The masks, the menace, the militarism—these are all direct manifestations of a cruel and apocalyptic worldview, in which force is the only real governing power, illegal immigration represents a form of “invasion,” legal immigration mechanisms like birthright citizenship are “destructive and ruinous policies aimed at the heart of the Republic,” and public protest of deportation raids that turn violent is tantamount to “insurrection.” 

There’s an ugly underlying race-essentialism to Miller’s outlook: According to a recent Atlantic profile, Trump broke up an immigration dispute between Miller and a moderate Trump aide by saying, “Stephen, if you had it your way, everyone would look exactly like you.” Miller, a source told The Atlantic, responded, “That’s correct.” 

Some of this can be understood as an outgrowth of Trump’s own worldview. The president notoriously launched his first campaign by declaring that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re bringing crime. They’re bringing drugs. They’re rapists.” But Trump’s personal ability to implement policy and execute on his impulses is limited without competent staff to follow through. Miller is the White House aide who turns Trump’s immigration ideas into reality. As the Atlantic profile put it, he’s “the man who turns President Trump’s most incendiary impulses into policy.” 

Policy making is a craft and a process, and like most crafts, it tends to reveal the character of its practitioners. Under Miller’s watch, immigration agents on the street aren’t just duly enforcing immigration law, they are doing so in a way that engenders maximum conflict and maximum hostility, emphasizing shows of force over dispassionate legal procedure. In court, meanwhile, immigration officials have repeatedly lied to judges and ignored their orders, in flagrant violation of the law. And Miller, from his perch in the Trump administration, is urging them on, pushing obvious falsehoods about Pretti (among other incidents), instructing Department of Homeland Security agents that they have “federal immunity,” and repeatedly describing court rulings against the administration as “judicial tyranny.” If you want to understand why ICE is acting the way that it is, look at Stephen Miller. 

Yet while there are certainly divides over ICE and its tactics—witness the fractious social media reaction to videos depicting Renee Good’s killing—the agency’s aggression and lack of accountability are clearly political losers, even amongst nominal supporters. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 57 percent of voters disapprove of ICE’s aggressive enforcement; no less than Joe Rogan has compared ICE tactics to “the Gestapo.” When Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson conducts focus groups of Trump supporters, she recently told The New York Times, it is “notable how [immigration enforcement] does come up as an area where it feels like it’s gone too far for some.” That sense that enforcement has gone too far is a direct byproduct of the incendiary tactics Stephen Miller favors. 

Even as the public has turned on his project, Miller has worked to maintain the impression that he has a majority on his side, making him a sort of populist militant fighting for real Americans against traitorous enemies. Days after Renee Good’s killing, he posted that Americans had voted “overwhelmingly for mass deportation” but that “the response of the Democrat Party and its activists has been to support and orchestrate violent resistance against federal law enforcement.” 

Miller’s menacing, militarized tactics are helping drive shifts in public sentiment. Prior to Trump’s second term, public opinion generally favored Trump on immigration, and even recent polls have shown the public still trusts Republicans over Democrats on the issue. 

But it’s hard to make a persuasive case that masked, militarized law enforcement tactics are necessary to protect Americans when confronted with videos showing Americans losing their lives and their liberty to those very same tactics. It’s simply not credible to say that what’s happening on the streets of Minneapolis is necessary to uphold the law when the rule of law is so obviously being flouted.

Miller’s fundamental argument is that masked ICE agents roaming the streets are waging a valiant and necessary war to protect America. But with two dead U.S. citizens, a flood of official lies designed to shield federal law enforcement from oversight, and a social media stream of videos showing immigration agents harassing, intimidating, and demanding papers just to go on with their lives, what Americans increasingly—and rightly—see is a war being waged against them. 

The post Stephen Miller's Hardline Immigration Tactics Are Backfiring appeared first on Reason.com.

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Yesterday, news outlet The News Moment posted now-verified footage of Alex Pretti, the man killed by immigration enforcement agents this past Saturday in Minneapolis, scuffling with federal agents 11 days before he was fatally shot.

In the video, Pretti is seen behaving aggressively, screaming at the Immigration and Customs (ICE) agents, spitting on their vehicle, and then kicking out their vehicle’s taillight as they attempt to drive away.

Agents then exit their vehicle and tackle Pretti to the ground, before letting him go and driving off. As Pretti gets off the ground, one sees what appears to be a handgun stuffed in the back of his waistband.

Conservatives have immediately seized on the footage as proof that Pretti was a violent and dangerous anti-ICE radical and not some peaceful protester.

MUST WATCH: Footage of an a man who looks like Alex Pretti with a gun in his waistband, spitting on and attacking federal law enforcement officers and kicking the tail light of their vehicle on January 13.

Bombshell report from the BBC.

Important context: Pretti was not a… pic.twitter.com/snzEO8rU8w

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 28, 2026

Some have said this is relevant “context” for his later shooting death.

If confirmed, this would indeed be relevant context. https://t.co/D5TzHK2NFA

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 28, 2026

Others, while saying the video doesn’t directly impact his murder investigation, do say it is evidence that Pretti was looking for a fight and eventually got one.

Alex Pretti was an anti-ICE fanatic who was reckless, violent, and driven by a (literally) spittle-flecked hatred of federal agents

That he would, in short order, get into two of these kind of altercations while armed is absolutely insane

It doesn’t change the analysis of the… https://t.co/zOLG0A0Iy2

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) January 29, 2026

Anyone who’s followed news coverage of police shootings in the past will be familiar with this “no angel” line of commentary. Past instances of someone behaving badly are dredged up to color one’s interpretation of a later, unconnected incident.

Past bad conduct transmutes blame from perpetrator to victim, even if it’s completely irrelevant to their later victimization.

Alert observers should resist falling for this trick. The fact that Pretti kicked out a taillight of a police vehicle does nothing to justify his slaying by federal agents 11 days later in a completely separate incident, when he was not behaving violently.

Whether Pretti’s death is prosecutable murder hinges almost entirely on whether officers had a reasonable fear for their lives when they shot a restrained, disarmed man.

Pretti’s earlier violence has nothing to do with that moment-by-moment analysis.

To the degree it is relevant, Pretti’s past violent behavior is actually evidence of how unjustified his killing was.

In the earlier incident, Pretti is armed and behaves aggressively toward federal officers who, after a brief fight, leave the scene without gunning him down.

If they managed to avoid the use of force in that earlier, more serious incident without consequence, one wonders how agents’ deadly force could possibly be thought necessary in the later incident where Pretti was killed.

The post Alex Pretti's Earlier Scuffle With ICE Doesn't Justify His Death 11 Days Later appeared first on Reason.com.

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Group chats about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents aren’t illegal. But FBI Director Kash Patel doesn’t seem to care.

On Monday, Patel told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that the FBI was investigating a Signal group in which people had been chatting about ICE agents’ whereabouts.

The Trump administration has said that people are doxing federal agents, employing a term once reserved for the act of publishing private information about someone’s identity or address online. “Doxing” generally implies that this sharing is done with ill intent.

But there are all sorts of perfectly benign reasons why Americans—whether in the country legally or not—might want to keep tabs on where immigration authorities are going. Sharing this information allows people to protest, observe, or document ICE activity, or avoid run ins with ICE agents.

Chatting about ICE agent whereabouts is unambiguously speech that’s protected by the First Amendment. So the idea that the FBI would investigate on these grounds is worrying.

“There does not appear to be any lawful basis for this investigation,” said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “The First Amendment generally protects the publication of legally-obtained information, including much of what the Trump administration has labeled ‘doxxing.’ That protection extends to using an app to share information about ICE activity.”

In his interview with Johnson, Patel paid lip service to the First Amendment. Yet he also framed Signal chats pertaining to ICE whereabouts as inherently suspect and/or likely to lead to criminal actions. “You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts law enforcement in harm’s way,” he said, drawing a direct link between constitutionally protected activity and criminality.

Of course, trapping ICE agents and harming them would indeed be illegal. But the illegal part of that is the trapping, the plotting harm, and the harming, not merely the knowing where the agents are or chatting about where they are. And even if some individual ultimately uses the location information to inflict harm, it still would not make the mere sharing of that information illegal.

“The First Amendment has narrow exceptions for true threats and speech intended and likely to provoke imminent unlawful action, but the government cannot trigger those exceptions simply by claiming that speech puts officials in harm’s way,” notes Terr. “The First Amendment also does not protect criminal conspiracy, but that requires evidence of an agreement to commit a specific crime and a substantial step toward carrying it out. No such evidence appears in the Signal messages that have been made public.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to frame speech about ICE whereabouts as something sinister align with its broader approach to people protesting ICE deportation antics and violence, including the killing of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Officials have been trying to portray peaceful protests as “left wing agitation”—as if the only goal is to foment unrest and smear Republicans—or even as “domestic terrorism.”

Their goal seems to be discrediting the very idea that protesting government actions is at the core of protected First Amendment speech.

Likewise, Patel and others in the Trump administration seem intent on discrediting people exercising their Second Amendment rights. In his interview with Johnson, Patel paid lip service to the fact that it’s OK to bring a gun to a protest (as Pretti did) “as long as you don’t incite violence or commit another crime in doing so.”

But Patel followed up that comment by asking, “Why would you bring a firearm in a situation that is so volatile right now?…That is just not smart. It is just not going to lead to a good scenario.”

Carrying a firearm to protect oneself and others against armed agents of the state is at the core of protected Second Amendment activity. But Patel is trying to cast it as somehow suspicious—as if it’s only proper for federal agents, and not the people who might need protection against them, to be armed.

In talking about people exercising their First or Second Amendment rights in service of protesting and protecting themselves from ICE, Patel seems intent on conflating legal actions with illicit ones.

“Patel did not say which laws he thought Minnesota residents [in a Signal group chat about ICE] may have violated,” notes NBC News. “An FBI spokesperson said the bureau had no further information to provide.”

A quiet investigation into potential illegal activity fostered through Signal group chats would be one thing—still not great, but at least theoretically justifiable, if the FBI had reason to suspect criminal activity. The fact that Patel is openly talking about this investigation (while bungling information about its legal basis) indicates that this is more about striking fear and chilling legal speech.

The post Group Chats About ICE Whereabouts Are Protected Speech. The FBI Is Investigating Anyway. appeared first on Reason.com.

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From an Institute for Free Speech symposium on the 50th anniversary of Buckley, which I’ve been cross-posting; this is by Allen J. Dickerson is a partner at BakerHostetler and a former commissioner and chairman of the Federal Election Commission:

Buckley v. Valeo ranks among the most consequential articulations of American liberty, and yet almost no one reads it in full. It is a famously long decision, written on an emergency timeline, addressing technical material. It lacks the gripping rhetoric of, say, Justice Robert Jackson’s great First Amendment opinions—you will find no paeans to the “fixed stars in our constitutional constellation” here.

But, for all its complexity and compromise, Buckley stood fast on a key point: the Constitution protects effective political organization. The First Amendment exists “to assure unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people.”

Free speech is central to individual dignity. But it is also the foundation of democratic self-government. We have Buckley to thank for the enduring influence of that idea.

*        *        *

For speech to be considered effective, it must be able to change government policy and affect election outcomes. Effective speech is inconvenient to those in power because it can make them adjust their plans or risk being fired. Even in the aftermath of Watergate, the Court recognized that campaign finance laws could easily be used to limit speech, handicap civil society, and entrench government power.

The Buckley litigation showed, first and foremost, that Congress’s proposed remedies were shockingly beneficial to incumbent members of Congress and their entrenched allies. A central claim in the litigation was, in essence, that Congress had used the Watergate crisis as an opportunity to pass amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) that insulated elected officials from criticism and opposition.

At oral argument, Ralph K. Winter, Jr.—Yale professor and future federal appellate judge—highlighted the challenged law’s many distorting effects, almost none of which are routinely discussed today. For instance, incumbent members of Congress could accept unlimited funds from any source, without disclosure, which could “be used to prepare materials” that were then mailed, at taxpayer expense, using the member’s franking privileges.

But if a challenger did the same, printing “matters debating the pros and cons of governmental action,” his or her materials would have to be paid for using limited, fully-disclosed contributions. And, because the Act barred any candidate for Congress from spending more than $70,000—no matter how much he or she could raise—the cost of that material (and the cost of mailing, which would not be borne by the taxpayer) would count against the cap.

FECA didn’t just entrench incumbents. It also gave special benefits to dominant, longstanding interest groups. Congress had determined that political committees (PACs) that had been registered for six months could spend $5,000 per candidate—five times as much as newly-formed organizations. Meanwhile, unions, membership groups, and corporations could spend unlimited amounts subsidizing the fundraising and administrative expenses of their established PACs, again without disclosure. This rewarded permanent interest groups and badly handicapped ideological organizations responding, in real time, to political developments.

As Professor Winter noted at argument: “If there were five restaurants in the town and someone was about to open a new one, an ordinance severely limiting the amount of newspaper advertising restaurants might buy would be recognized for what it is. An attempt by the existing restaurants to freeze out newcomers.”

There were other examples, with small political parties facing special practical difficulties. But this was the general background against which the Court was acting. As the Court itself explained, the Act worked “to exclude all citizens and groups except candidates, political parties, and the institutional press from any significant use of the most effective modes of communication.”

After all, “virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.” The central insight that funding is necessary to effective advocacy remains the most controversial and important of Buckley‘s holdings. Yet it is obviously correct.

The caselaw leaves no doubt concerning an individual’s right to burn a flag or decline the Pledge of Allegiance. But unlike those acts of individual defiance, restricting “the amount of money a person or group can spend” has the (intended) effect of “reduc[ing] the quantity of expression.” Restricting funding limits “the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.” Throw in the centrality of “television, radio, and other mass media”—and now, the internet—to our national conversation, and the only way to communicate at scale is by pooling and spending funds.

Cutting off that lifeblood of political change was the mortal danger to which Buckley responded. It did so in three ways.

First, it held that Congress has no authority to curtail the private resources amassed and spent criticizing the government and its officers. Limits on the amount spent discussing campaigns and candidates are presumptively unconstitutional. In the Court’s classic formulation, “restric[ting] the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”

Second, and as important, it reaffirmed the centrality of group association in our system of government. And it did so for a familiar reason: associating with others “enhances effective advocacy.” This is true, in substantial part, because people of modest means can best participate fully in a public debate where they have the “right to pool money through contributions.” The juggernaut of small-dollar contributions that now power political campaigns is the best proof of this insight.

Indeed, while the Court permitted disclosure of small contributions, it was clearly uncomfortable. When Joel Gora argued the point for the ACLU, he was met with incredulity. Justice Lewis Powell seemed shocked that Congress had imposed a one-year prison term “for a citizen who fails to report a hundred dollar” independent expenditure. And the Court’s opinion agonized over what it wrought, explaining at length that “compelled disclosure, in itself, can seriously infringe on privacy of association and belief.”

Finally, even where the Court upheld some portion of the Act, it left the door ajar. Limits on direct political contributions were permissible, but only if they did not prevent a candidate from “amassing the resources necessary for effective advocacy.” Disclosure requirements were upheld, but not if a donor faced a “reasonable probability” of “threats, harassment, or reprisals” for giving. These and other questions were intentionally left open, and the courts have spent the following fifty years revisiting them. And always, in the background, is the question of whether a particular restriction makes “effective advocacy” untenable.

*        *        *

Buckley is an unwieldy exercise in practical judging. It has never been a popular ruling, and its many compromises ensured it would satisfy few. Yet it has created a stable foundation for some of the most difficult—and most politically charged— controversies to face the Republic. In an arena dominated by dreamers and demagogues, the Buckley Court faced a moment of profound crisis and enshrined a right to unfettered, effective political participation independent of any officeholder or political party.

That expression of trust in American society to govern itself, and distrust of governmental attempts to skew the rules in the guise of fairness, is Buckley‘s most important and enduring legacy.

The post "Effective Advocacy," by Allen J. Dickerson appeared first on Reason.com.

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