There’s a classic episode of The Sopranos in which Paulie and Christopher chase a Russian into the woods.
They think they’ve killed him.
His body is never found.
For seasons afterward, the possibility of his return hangs over the story — not as certainty, but as threat. Something has been loosed that cannot be accounted for.
That feeling is hard to avoid when reading what the former president insists on calling the “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Buried within it is a massive expansion of funding for ICE, border enforcement, and detention centers — an apparatus whose budget now rivals, and in some respects exceeds, that of the U.S. Army.
In a moment of real fiscal strain, this alone should give pause.
But the deeper concern is not cost.
It is purpose.
Across cities — and now suburbs — we see armed federal agents operating with little transparency. They are not pursuing violent criminals but detaining undocumented immigrants over paperwork disputes. These agents are often unidentified, not subject to local protocols, and not embedded in the professionalized culture we associate with agencies like the FBI.
They answer directly to the executive.
That executive has now been told by the Court that he is effectively immune from criminal accountability for acts taken in office. Add to that a demonstrated willingness to pardon those who act violently in his name — even outside formal chains of command — and the architecture begins to resemble something darker than enforcement.
I am an African American man. I have lived my life knowing that a routine traffic stop can turn deadly, not because of what I’ve done, but because of how I’m perceived.
Even then, officers are constrained — by departments, by courts, by public scrutiny. However imperfectly, limits still exist.
What has changed is not merely race.
It is power.
When an unarmed woman is killed by an ICE officer under circumstances that strain any claim of imminent danger — and the administration’s response is immediate, full-throated defense before evidence or process — the message is unmistakable.
This is not about tragic error.
It is about permission.
Responsibility does not stop with the officer. It extends to Congress that funds unchecked authority, to courts that construct immunity, to presidents who pardon violence when it serves them, and to citizens who accept all of this as the price of order.
In The Sopranos, the Russian never comes back.
The audience is spared the reckoning it expects.
History is rarely so kind.
What is loosed into the world by law, money, and silence does not usually disappear on its own. And when force is granted without discipline or accountability, it does not merely hang over us —
—it shapes us.
The question is not whether it will return.
It is whether we will recognize it when it does.