By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
September 4, 2026
The immigration crackdown has come to Indiana.
Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE—showed up in the Indianapolis metropolitan area and elsewhere in the state and began taking an undetermined number of people into custody.
As usual, ICE refused to provide any detailed information about the people taken into custody and what crimes they had committed.
Most, it seems, could be accused of misdemeanors at worst—and many may not have broken any law at all.
And that’s the problem with all of this.
President Donald Trump and his amen corner—which, sadly, includes U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Indiana—bray that they’re being tough on immigrant lawbreakers.
And the gullible swallow that.
In reality, Trump and company are waging war with the founders of this country and the very principles upon which they sought to build this nation of free people.
The founders of this country did not want government to be able to exercise power arbitrarily. They had a great deal of experience with a British government that had wielded authority outside of any just constraint.
That’s why the first U.S. citizens demanded a Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution as a condition of acceptance. They wanted to make sure that the burden of proof when it came to questions of personal liberty always would be on the government.
We can see that from the language that serves as the stirring beginning for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That bulwark of our rights begins “Congress shall make no law respecting” and then proceeds to lay out no less than six areas of human life government isn’t allowed to touch, much less curtail. These include the rights to worship freely, think, speak and write freely, join in protest of government actions and demand that government be held accountable for any injustices it commits.
Note that the amendment doesn’t say that people must prove they have the right to these things.
No, government must show that it has an overwhelming need to limit any of these things.
That spirit is reaffirmed in the Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment—amendments that apply specifically to this situation—which deny government the power to search or seize people without just cause or force them to compromise their own rights in any way.
Those amendments, by the way, do not confine these rights to citizens. They speak instead of people.
There’s a reason for that.
The founders knew that one of the ways unscrupulous elected officials would seek to circumvent these constitutional constraints on their exercise of government power would be to challenge or deny the citizenship of human beings they wanted to target.
Using the word “people” rather than “citizens” made clear that the founders wanted government’s authority kept on a leash.
Not human beings’ liberty.
The president and his camp followers try to argue that they’re merely chasing down and sending away hardened lawbreakers, even though the available evidence suggests that is not the case at all.
And, besides, in this country, the way we determine if someone has broken the law is not by having a political official, no matter how high-ranking, make an accusation, but instead through a public trial in which standards of evidence apply and the accused has the right to a presumption of innocence.
These very rights were ones a certain former real estate developer from New York turned national political leader relied on skillfully to delay and ultimately deny prosecution on grounds that he had illegally violated, among other things, national security laws.
At that point, Donald Trump didn’t think the Fifth Amendment, among other constitutional protections, was such a bad idea.
Trump and his yapping apologists—and, yes, that includes you, Jim Banks—like to wrap themselves in the flag when they commit these wholesale assaults on our national founding charter.
They like to present themselves as patriots.
They aren’t.
The actions by ICE, this president and all who back Donald Trump demonstrate one thing clearly.
Trump and company think the wrong side won in the American Revolution.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
