I met my first civilian bully in the small Iowa town where I grew up. A group of us who lived within blocks of one another were outside most of the year, doing everything from playing school in an old coal shed at our house, to afternoons spent at the swimming pool or at our small public library. We also played softball and tag football regularly, and traded comic books. Several of us also tracked Hit Parade sheet music and learned it, pretending to offer concerts in the park. Pretty innocuous, except for the neighborhood bully who lurked on the sidelines or interrupted our activities or our walks by threatening us and impeding our activities. For about a year, I recall that my reaction after trying to ignore him was to run inside my house and cower until he picked on someone else. At that point, I decided to look up all the words he called me and let him know he needed to stop, or I would report him to both of our parents. Because he had no real power over me, I was able to back him off. I learned my first lesson about standing up to bullies.
In the mid-1960s, I put in my time marching and standing witness on civil rights violations and the byproduct (napalm) of the war in Vietnam. Since the end of the Civil War, a significant percentage of local law enforcement in the South was part of the angry white man mobs, often the Ku Klux Klan. It was President Eisenhower who federalized the Arkansas National Guard in 1957, along with 1,000 Army soldiers, to comply with the Supreme Court ruling titled Brown v. Board of Education, to support the integration of the “Little Rock Nine” into a public school that had always been all white. His actions, for which he never received much credit, made the rise of a civil rights movement possible. By the time, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and removed Governor George Wallace from the door of the Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in June of 1963, organizations had sprung up on college campuses across the United States to provide support for both educational integration and voting rights in the South. I was a founding member of our university’s chapters for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where I learned the principles and practice of nonviolence. The federal government supported our right to protest and to enroll Southern Blacks to vote and access to all public facilities previously denied them.
Today we’re dealing with a different federal government, run by ideologues who want to drive out persons of color and deport all undocumented residents, even in some cases those with green cards. The paramilitary bullies carrying out such actions (which include the deportation component) are personnel from the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), supplemented in some cities by this president’s federalization of the National Guard. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court have as of this writing stopped the targeting of certain cities by contingents of agents. Their presence has led to demonstrations in which local law enforcement is playing an ambiguous role without assisting ICE. This past weekend has seen a sharp increase in the number of persons killed by ICE or CBP, which will surely lead to more demonstrations until Congress or the Supreme Court acts.
How did we get to this place? Trump campaigned both terms on ridding this country of the undocumented, lumping them all into a category of “criminal elements” that include rapists, murderers and drug dealers. While deportations take place in the background, nightly news programs are filled with images of peaceful demonstrators being pepper sprayed or even arrested. The administration’s power in this scenario includes the billions of dollars that the DOGE has cancelled from Congressional appropriations.
There has always been an element of risk in joining with others to protest. Recent use of force on the civilian population makes it even riskier to stand up and bear witness. Yet if we do not exercise our own rights to protest or to write to our Congressional representatives, the situation will progress past what will soon be a point of no return where the rule of law is concerned. This is the time to return to the Quaker principle of bearing witness with as many of your fellow citizens as possible. There’s also a need to write letters to editors to stiffen their spines where bearing witness through their reporting is concerned. And it does not hurt to keep in touch through this time with your Congressional representative.
No one is crying wolf at this point. All the guard rails of our society have been weakened, with an eye to removing them. Make no mistake: these depredations of the rule of law are precisely the forms that bullies have always taken, and they take shape of rejecting any clear idea of justice. It is very clear that the ultimate results are violence, made so clear when ICE agents and other paramilitary representatives of “government” wear masks and carry weapons, with an awful similarity to the KKK. They are ready and willing to use them.
Originally Published in ASA News & Notes January 12, 2026
Annie Searle
Searle is an Associate Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. She is founder and principal of ASA Risk Consultants, a Seattle-based advisory firm. She spent 10 years at Washington Mutual Bank, most of them as a senior executive. Annie is a member of the CISA 10 Regional Infrastructure Security Group. She was an inaugural inductee in 2011 into the Hall of Fame for the International Network of Women in Homeland Security and Emergency Management. She writes a column monthly for ASA News & Notes and is the author of several books or book chapters. She is also a member of the emeritus board of directors for the Seattle Public Library Foundation.