A Moral Reckoning: The Silence of Congress Amid a Modern Pogrom
By Alfred Brock
To the elected officials of the United States Congress—Senators and Representatives alike:
Your silence has become thunderous.
While immigrant families—many of them Hispanic and Catholic, and many having lived here for years—are being torn from their homes in the dead of night, you issue no statement. While children return from school to find parents missing, you hold no emergency hearings. While federal agencies round up workers, seize breadwinners, and abandon wives, husbands, and sons to despair, you retreat into procedural neutrality, moral ambiguity, and political calculation.
This is not neutrality. This is complicity.
From the standpoint of classical morality, as grounded in the teachings of Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and the Judeo-Christian tradition, you have failed in the cardinal virtues:
You have failed in courage, by remaining silent when truth demands speech.
You have failed in justice, by standing idly by as your fellow human beings are denied due process and dignity.
You have failed in prudence, by ignoring the long-term social, political, and spiritual consequences of state-sponsored terror.
And you have failed in temperance, as you allow ambition, party loyalty, and self-preservation to outweigh your duty to conscience and country.
You preside over a modern Kristallnacht—not one of shattered glass, but of shattered families. Not one executed by jackboots in the streets, but by suits in federal agencies with unchecked authority. You oversee, in your silence, a pogrom not of fire and blood, but of policies that exile working families without trial, without notice, without humanity. Let us be clear: no moral tradition—ancient or modern—justifies this.
Modern ethics, too, condemns your silence. Rawls’ principles of justice, Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, and even Kant’s categorical imperative demand that human beings be treated as ends in themselves, not means to political ends. The dignity of the person, the sanctity of family, the inviolability of conscience—these are not partisan values. They are human ones.
Yet some of you—second and third-generation immigrants yourselves—now wield power with the zeal of the newly arrived, as if to slam the doors behind you. What madness, what moral inversion, has taken hold? To climb the ladder of opportunity and then torch it beneath you is not patriotism. It is perversion.
And to those who claim to be Christians, or defenders of faith, we ask: Which Christ do you follow? The one who said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”? Or the one you have invented, who guards borders but not hearts?
This is not a call for open borders—it is a call for open eyes, open hearts, and open law books. Due process. Proportional enforcement. Humane treatment. These are not radical demands. They are the minimum required by any society that dares call itself civilized.
In failing to act, in refusing even to speak, you are not preserving order. You are sanctioning injustice.
History has a long memory. And one day, your children and grandchildren will ask what you did when the state turned on the people who fed our fields, built our homes, cared for our elderly, and prayed in our churches. What will you say?
Your silence is a stain on the republic. We do not ask you to be heroes. We ask you to be human.
The Silent Plunder: How Federal Agencies Seize—and Keep—Americans’ Property
It is a little-known scandal hiding in plain sight: federal agencies like the FBI and ICE regularly seize private property—from cash to cars, homes, boats, and even personal electronics—during criminal investigations. But what’s more disturbing is what happens afterward.
In most cases, the property is never returned. Not because the individual was convicted. Not even because they were charged. But because the burden to reclaim seized property falls squarely on the original owner—who must sue the federal government to get it back.
This is not a conspiracy. It is official policy. It's called civil asset forfeiture.
Unlike criminal forfeiture, which follows a conviction, civil forfeiture allows the government to take property without charging the owner with a crime. The legal fiction? The property itself is "guilty." In court, the cases bear surreal names like United States v. $43,000 in U.S. Currency or United States v. One 2017 Chevrolet Silverado.
Most victims—especially immigrants, poor individuals, small business owners, and those with limited legal resources—do not or cannot contest the seizures. And the system is designed that way. Filing a challenge is expensive, slow, and arcane. In some cases, it costs more to fight for the property than the value of what was taken.
But where does it all go?
That's where transparency ends. What becomes of the seized goods—whether it's cash, jewelry, tools, or vehicles—is not always clear. What is known is that much of it is sold at government auctions, with proceeds often returning not to the general treasury, but directly to the seizing agency’s own budget.
In other words: the more an agency seizes, the more money it gets to keep.
Some forfeited assets are not sold at all, but retained for “official use.” Yes—agents have been known to drive seized vehicles, use confiscated weapons, and furnish offices with property taken from the people they police. It is the modern equivalent of plunder: law-enforcement piracy in the name of justice.
ICE, for example, has seized millions in property under civil forfeiture—often from undocumented immigrants or people suspected (not convicted) of immigration-related violations. The FBI and DEA routinely target property in drug-related raids, often in neighborhoods least able to resist or navigate the legal minefield to get it back.
The result is a disturbing perversion of justice: agencies that enforce the law also profit from its application, creating a clear conflict of interest and incentive for abuse.
The founding fathers warned of precisely this danger. In a free society, law enforcement must be blind, not hungry. Property rights are among the most sacred in the American tradition. Yet here they are treated as optional—rewards to be claimed rather than rights to be respected.
A just system does not seize first and ask questions later. A democratic society cannot tolerate a legal structure where the presumption of innocence applies to people but not to their property.
There must be reform.
At minimum, Congress must:
Require a criminal conviction before assets can be permanently seized.
Mandate public reporting on all seizures, use, and disposition of forfeited property.
Return proceeds to a neutral fund, not back to the seizing agency.
Until then, civil asset forfeiture remains one of the most un-American practices carried out by American law enforcement.
And the silence from Washington is deafening even as these agencies, primarily ICE, prepare to ransack the homes of millions of Americans. They have already been recorded entering homes at will with no prior notice and leaving not indication, normally, that they have even been there.