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- By Levi Rickert
Opinion. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often reduced to a single quote, his one dream and safely fixed in history. But King was not a ceremonial figure. He was a disruptor. He challenged systems of power, condemned police violence, and warned that a nation could not survive while sacrificing human dignity for “law and order.”
Which raises an unavoidable question as mass deportations, militarized raids and terror in communities across America: What would King say about the tactics used on American streets by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement?
On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we cannot speak for him, but we can listen to him.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963. He was responding to white clergy who urged patience, moderation, and obedience to the law. King rejected that moral evasion.
In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written April 16, 1963 while he was jailed for participating in nonviolent protests, King directly condemned the use of police dogs against peaceful Black demonstrators in Birmingham.
King wrote that the white clergymen who had urged restraint and praised local police for “keeping order” would not commend the force so warmly if they had seen what really happened — namely dogs being unleashed on unarmed, nonviolent Black men and women.
In the letter, he wrote about “hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity.”
These words are hauntingly familiar now. One could easily write about ICE agents who are hate-filled and deputized by the Trump administration —men who curse, kick, brutalize and even kill American citizens with impunity.
In his essay, King makes a crucial distinction that still haunts America: There is a difference between what is legal and what is just.
ICE operates legally. That does not settle the moral question.
When armed agents raid neighborhoods, detain people without warrants, separate children from parents, and spread fear through entire communities, we are not witnessing simple law enforcement. We are witnessing state power used in ways that dehumanize, and that is precisely the kind of system King spent his life opposing.
King understood something that remains uncomfortable today: The law can be an instrument of cruelty. Slavery was legal. Segregation was legal. The removal of Native nations from their homelands was legal. The incarceration of Japanese Americans was legal. Legality has never been a reliable measure of justice in the United States.
From an Indigenous perspective, this is not abstract. Native people know what it means to be policed, removed, confined, and managed by bureaucracies that claim to be “just doing their job.” We know what it means when the state decides certain populations are problems to be controlled rather than human beings to be protected.
King also warned about the moral corrosion caused by normalized violence. In his opposition to the Vietnam War, he spoke of a nation that had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” He saw how militarism abroad was inseparable from repression at home.
Today, immigration enforcement increasingly looks and feels like a military operation. Tactical gear. Armored vehicles. Crowd-control weapons. Masked agents. Raids that resemble counterinsurgency missions more than civil administration. If this is what “law and order” requires, King would have recognized it for what it is: a sign of a society losing its moral compass.
None of this requires pretending that borders do not exist or that nations do not have the right to enforce laws. King was not naïve about governance. But he was uncompromising about human dignity. Any system that relies on terror, humiliation, and collective punishment to function is, in his moral framework, already unjust.
He would also have insisted we look at why people migrate. Violence. Poverty. Climate disasters. Political instability. Many of these conditions are shaped by the very global economic and military systems the United States dominates. To then criminalize the displaced is not justice; it is double victimization.
Late in his life, King turned his attention to what he called the “giant triplets” of racism, militarism and materialism. Immigration enforcement today sits squarely at their intersection. It is racialized. It is militarized. And it is deeply entangled with an economic system that exploits labor while criminalizing the laborer.
What would King call us to do? He would not counsel silence. He would not counsel patience. He would almost certainly support nonviolent resistance, moral confrontation, and civil disobedience against unjust policies. He would urge faith communities, civil society, and ordinary people to stand between the machinery of the state and those being crushed by it.
Above all, he would remind us that the true measure of a nation is not how efficiently it enforces its laws, but how faithfully it protects human dignity.
A country can survive breaking families apart. It can survive ruling by fear. But King would tell us it cannot do so without losing its soul.
And history suggests he would be right.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen - We are all related.
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