By David Stout
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often remembered in ways that are safe, sanitized and convenient. His words are reduced to slogans, his radicalism softened, his urgency stripped away. But Dr. King was never meant to comfort those in power. He was a moral disruptor who challenged systems of domination, named injustice plainly, and demanded that this nation live up to its promises not gradually, not selectively, but fully.
Dr. King believed that silence in the face of injustice was itself a form of violence. He understood that progress required courage, sacrifice and collective action. That lesson is painfully relevant today as we witness the federal government turn its power inward, unleashing cruelty against immigrant communities across the country.
From El Paso to Minnesota, from border towns to major cities, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become an instrument of fear under the Trump administration. Families are torn apart. Parents disappear. Children are left traumatized. Door-to-door operations have spread fear beyond immigrants, subjecting even U.S. citizens to constant surveillance and threat. These are not isolated incidents. They are the result of deliberate policy choices and unconstitutional actions that treat immigrants as enemies rather than human beings.
In Minnesota, we are seeing a flashpoint that reflects something far larger. Aggressive ICE actions, mass protests, and a deep rupture between the state and the people it claims to serve. It feels less like public governance and more like an occupation where enforcement agencies are weaponized against communities and dissent is met with repression rather than accountability.
Turning law enforcement against community members erodes public safety and destroys the very foundation of community policing. Agencies meant to protect and serve instead become sources of fear. When people are afraid to report crimes, seek medical care, go to work, send their children to school or attend church, everyone becomes less safe. Dr. King warned us about unjust laws and the moral decay they cause not only to those targeted but to the institutions that enforce them.
What we are living through now mirrors the Civil Rights Movement in unsettling ways. Then, as now, the state used law enforcement to intimidate, criminalize and suppress entire populations. Then, as now, leaders invoked law and order to justify brutality. And then, as now, the nation stood at a crossroads forced to choose between justice and convenience, between moral clarity and complicity.
Dr. King rejected a false peace that demanded silence from the oppressed. He called instead for a unity rooted in truth, accountability, and an unwavering commitment to human dignity. That dignity does not end at the border, nor does it depend on immigration status.
Dr. King also understood that democracy is not self-sustaining. It must be defended, expanded, and renewed by ordinary people willing to act. Civic engagement is not passive. Participation is not optional. Voting, organizing, protesting and practicing civil disobedience are acts of conscience. They are refusals to accept apathy, fear and injustice as inevitable.
Across the country, people are responding the way Dr. King taught us to respond through protest, organizing, and civil disobedience. These actions are not chaos. They are conscious in motion. They are a declaration that democracy still belongs to the people, not to an administration that rules through federal immunity and intimidation.
Honoring Dr. King’s legacy today requires more than speeches or symbolic observances. It requires rejecting complacency while civil liberties are eroded, while immigrants are scapegoated, and while federal power is used to punish rather than protect. It requires naming these atrocities for what they are and refusing to normalize them.
The work is unfinished. The arc of history does not bend on its own. It bends because we decide that injustice is unacceptable and act together to change it. That is Dr. King’s legacy, and it is calling on us now.
The post Opinion: Dr. King’s legacy was never comfortable and it was never silent appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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