There are no more sidelines

On Friday, ICE was in my neighborhood.

In the morning, I got a text from a neighbor on a group thread alerting us, along with a video of a confrontation between people in the community and masked agents in unmarked cars, apparently just after they took someone away right outside an elementary school. Shortly afterwards, I heard whistles outside and saw another neighbor running down the street to notify people. I didn’t have a whistle, so I got a whistle app for my phone, played it through the car speakers at full volume, and drove around the neighborhood. We could hear helicopters overhead for the next few hours.

The school district let parents know that recess and after school care would be held inside, to make sure all the children were safe. Ordinarily, when I pick up the kids, the schoolyard is a wonderful chaos—dozens of kids running and shouting all over the soccer field, the playground, everywhere. On Friday, it was deserted, because it was unsafe. Because federal agents made it unsafe. The school didn’t tell the kids why they had to stay inside, but one girl in my son’s class understood. She advised him and some other dark-skinned classmates to stay away from the windows in case ICE might be looking inside.

Of course, I’ve known about ICE’s activities in Chicago and have been outraged by them, attending protests and following the confrontations happening around the city. Even then, knowing they were in my neighborhood was a new level of intimacy with this terror. Knowing that people might get snatched off the streets where we’d be trick-or-treating just a few hours later, taken and swallowed up by a system that hides them away and possibly removes them from the country, with no regard for their families or communities. Wondering if I should have grabbed my own passport on the way out the door.

Throughout this campaign, I’ve encountered reticence, apathy, and disengagement. Friends who say they “aren’t that political,” past donors who say they’re “taking a break” from politics. People who simply don’t vote.

I might have understood it a decade ago. If you have a good job and live in a comfortable neighborhood, you can insulate yourself from national politics to the point that it seems abstract. A few elections ago, many Americans looked at Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and felt that their lives would be about the same either way, and that they could sit it out. I didn’t agree with that view for one moment, but I understood where it came from.

Many Americans felt they could watch from the sidelines. There are no more sidelines.

You will be directly affected by what’s happening in Washington if you take advantage of healthcare subsidies, or SNAP benefits, or any of the many other ways the government supports families and communities. Or, your business might be hit by tariffs, or become a target for intimidation and coercion by the administration. You may need a lifesaving medical treatment that won’t come because the research funding was canceled, or your child might need education accommodations that are no longer available.

However insulated you think you are, you or someone you love is going to get hurt. If that doesn’t feel real yet, it will when armed agents in masks turn up in your neighborhood.

There is a path out of this. It will take the discipline to focus on winning where it counts—in competitive elections, and specifically taking back the White House in 2028. I am running to build the party that can do that. But we can’t even get started on that until we get engaged—until we realize that there is a real and stark choice, and that we can’t leave it to others to make it for us.

Thankfully, this town came together to protest ICE’s presence.

On Friday, the school playground was empty.

On Saturday, the community center parking lot was full.

These people are off the sidelines. Are you?

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