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By Jeffrey Wernick / Original to ScheerPost
Kristi Noem told the country that videotaping ICE agents is violence.
She did not walk it back. At a press conference in Tampa in July 2025, the Secretary of Homeland Security stated explicitly: “Violence is anything that threatens them and their safety, so it is doxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations.”
This is not a legal gray area. Seven federal circuit courts have held that the First Amendment protects the right to record police performing their duties in public. The circuits do not disagree. The law is settled. A citizen standing on a public sidewalk with a phone, recording federal agents, is exercising a constitutional right — the same right that protects journalists, that disciplines power, that allows a free people to witness what their government does in their name.
Noem either does not know this or does not care. Neither possibility is acceptable. A Secretary of Homeland Security who is ignorant of basic First Amendment law is unqualified. One who knows and lies about it is dangerous. Both failures end in the same place: a quarter-million federal employees receiving the message that constitutional limits are suggestions, that people exercising rights are threats, that aggression is authorized.
Culture Flows Downhill
Leadership sets tone. Tone becomes culture. Culture becomes conduct.
When the secretary defines observation as violence, agents hear permission. Not explicit instruction — they don’t need that. They need the signal that headquarters will defend them, that complaints will be dismissed, that the people are the problem.
Consider what happened in Minnesota. An ICE agent approached a vehicle, opened with “Get the fuck out of the car,” and grabbed the door handle.
No identification. No explanation. No attempt at de-escalation. Immediate aggression, immediate physicality, immediate assertion of dominance.
This is not law enforcement. It is occupation behavior. It treats the person as subject, as obstacle, as enemy. And it is the predictable product of a culture that has been told, from the top, that people who observe them are committing violence, that those who document their actions are aggressors, that constitutional protections are inconveniences to be overcome rather than constraints to be honored.
The agent in Minnesota did not invent that posture. He absorbed it from press conferences, from internal communications, from watching senior officials testify under oath that arresting people for opposing ICE operations is constitutional, from a Secretary who publicly equates recording with attack.
There Is a Better Way
Professional law enforcement knows how to conduct itself. The contrast is not hypothetical: A trained officer approaches calmly, identifies himself, states the purpose of the contact, provides the subject with information about what is happening and why, speaks in a tone calibrated to de-escalate rather than provoke, uses force only when necessary and proportionate, understands that the encounter may be recorded and conducts himself accordingly — not because the camera constrains him, but because his conduct requires no concealment.
This is not weakness. It is professionalism. It is what distinguishes law enforcement from thuggery.
The officer who opens with “Get the fuck out of the car” has made a choice. He has chosen confrontation over communication. He has chosen to establish dominance rather than lawful authority. He has decided, before the encounter develops, that the person is an adversary.
That choice reflects training, supervision, and institutional culture. It reflects what the officer has been taught to expect — and what he has been taught he can get away with. When leadership tells agents that people exercising First Amendment rights are committing violence, the agents learn that those people are threats. When they are threats, aggression is defensive. When aggression is defensive, there is no limit — because you are always justified in defending yourself.
The logic is circular and self-sealing. It produces exactly the behavior we observe: windows broken, captives detained for photography, profanity as first contact, physical escalation before verbal engagement, and a department-wide conviction that accountability is persecution.
The Privileges They Believe They Are Entitled To
Federal agents are not combatants in hostile territory. They are public servants exercising delegated authority under constitutional constraint. They have no entitlement to operate in darkness. They have no right to be unobserved. The privileges of power come with the obligations of transparency.
However, DHS under Noem has inverted this. Agents have come to believe they are entitled to unrecorded operations, to unquestioned authority, to deference as default. They treat observation as insubordination. They treat questions as interference. They treat the presence of cameras as justification for escalation.
This is not the mindset of officers serving a free people. It is the mindset of occupiers who believe the population exists at their sufferance.
Judge Sara Ellis, issuing a preliminary injunction against DHS conduct in Chicago, found that federal officials’ behavior “shocked the conscience.” She found testimony not credible. She noted that describing “rapid response networks and neighborhood moms as professional agitators shows just how out of touch these agents are, and how extreme their views are.”
Out of touch. Extreme. Conscience-shocking. That is a federal judge describing the conduct of agents operating under Noem’s leadership, absorbing Noem’s signals, implementing Noem’s doctrine that observation is violence.
The Accountability Inversion
In a functioning system, the response to a judge finding conduct conscience-shocking would be introspection, discipline, reform. The administration called her an “activist judge.”
In a functioning system, the response to agents lying under oath about use of force would be termination and prosecution. The agents remain in their positions.
In a functioning system, the response to a Secretary publicly misstating constitutional law would be correction or resignation. Noem continues to set policy.
The accountability has been inverted. People exercising rights are detained. Agents violating rights are defended. The observer is criminal; the observed is victim. This is not dysfunction. It is design.
When leadership refuses to hold agents accountable for misconduct, agents learn that misconduct is permitted. When leadership publicly misrepresents constitutional law, agents learn that the Constitution does not apply to them. When leadership responds to judicial rebuke with defiance, agents learn that courts are obstacles, not authorities.
The agent who grabbed the door handle in Minnesota did not act alone. He acted with the implicit authorization of a Secretary who had already told him that people who document federal agents are committing violence. He acted within a culture that had already decided the Constitution is negotiable. He acted as he was trained — not formally, but culturally — to act.
What Noem Has Built:
- A department where agents believe recording them is illegal.
- A department where profanity and physical aggression are opening moves.
- A department where senior officials testify under oath that arresting people for opposing operations is constitutional.
- A department where lying about use of force produces no consequence.
- A department that responds to judicial injunction by attacking the judge.
- A department that pressures private companies to suppress apps that track its activity.
- A department where a citizen photographing unmarked vehicles gets her window broken and is detained for seven hours.
This is what constitutional illiteracy produces when it pervades a quarter-million-person organization with surveillance capabilities, enforcement powers, and minimal accountability.
Noem did not create every problem at DHS. But she has made it worse — explicitly, publicly and deliberately. Her words gave permission. Her posture gave license. Her contempt for constitutional limits became her department’s operating assumption.
The agents in the field are not abstractions. They are armed individuals with the power to detain, to search, to use force. They interact with citizens daily. They carry into those interactions whatever their leadership has taught them to believe.
Noem taught them that observation is violence. They are acting accordingly.
The Alternative
It did not have to be this way.
A Secretary who understood the Constitution would have said: “Citizens have the right to record federal agents in public. We expect our officers to conduct themselves professionally at all times, including when they are being observed. Transparency is not a threat to legitimate law enforcement — it is its foundation.”
A Secretary who valued professionalism would have said: “De-escalation is the first tool, not the last. Force is authorized when necessary, not when convenient. Our agents will identify themselves, explain their purpose, and treat every person with dignity — because that is what the law requires and what honor demands.”
A Secretary who understood institutional culture would have said: “The conduct of our agents reflects on this department and this administration. Those who violate rights will be held accountable. Those who lie under oath will be terminated and prosecuted. We do not defend misconduct — we correct it.”
None of this was said. The opposite was said. And the opposite is now policy — not written, but lived. It is the policy that an agent carries when he walks up to a car in Minnesota and opens with profanity and aggression.
That agent did not invent himself. He was made — by training, by supervision, by institutional culture, by a Secretary who told him that the people he serves are the enemy.
Kristi Noem should be removed from office. Not for political reasons. For constitutional ones. She is unfit to lead an agency whose power depends on limits she does not understand and does not respect.
Until she is removed, every act of aggression, every unconstitutional detention, every lie under oath, flows from the permission she has granted.
She told them observation is violence.
They believed her.
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Jeffrey Wernick
Jeffrey Wernick hosts the podcast The Wernick Files and moderates The Fein Print. An independent private investor with over 40 years of experience, he began trading options and futures before graduating from the University of Chicago. In 1984, he sold his venture capital and risk management firm, AVI Portfolio Services, to one of the largest diversified financial firms, and has since been an opportunistic investor across a broad array of assets. He has been a Bitcoin acquirer and advocate since 2009 and a keynote speaker at Bitcoin conferences worldwide. His investment philosophy and political outlook share a common thread: skepticism of centralized power and a commitment to individual sovereignty.