Journalists are regularly targeted around the world as they carry out their jobs of reporting truth amid war and mayhem.
All too many have paid with their lives.
Thus far, there have been no such tragedies in the streets of American cities in the context of immigration enforcement.
But this opening par from a Washington Post report should make us all consider where we are, and where we appear to be heading: "A federal judge Thursday temporarily blocked federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security from using riot control weapons against journalists covering protests and immigration enforcement operations in the Chicago area."
Added the report: "As federal agents have clashed with protesters in the Chicago area in recent weeks, journalists have been shot with tear gas and less-lethal munitions including pepper balls.
Many of the incidents occurred outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago."
This is Chicago.
But journalists and elected political representatives have been the victims of ICE heavy handedness in other cities too, including New York.
Also being subjected to often violent tactics are citizens and legal residents, as well as undocumented immigrants.
Even local police officers have been the victims of ICE street tactics that would not have been out of place in the pre-civil rights South.
Now there is applying immigration law and there is enforcing immigration law.
Units of ICE agents, and officers from other federal agencies, have been on the streets of a number of cities and towns in search of an array of people that could be included in various legal classifications.
Reports indicate an enormous shift of FBI resources towards immigration enforcement.
Presumably, some who should be in the eye of the FBI in other contexts are enjoying their lucky break.
Most Americans would lose little sleep at the sight of gang members being arrested by ICE, the FBI or any other federal law enforcement agency.
But what we have seen all too often are images of linebacker-sized ICE agents in body armor, masks and armed with guns, tear gas and pepper spray forcefully detaining people to the point that they, the agents, appear to be themselves committing assault.
All too often those being forcefully detained are women, sometimes mothers, sometimes daughters.
If you are going after illegal/undocumented immigrant families it is the women and children who are easiest to find - in their homes or at schools.
Then again, there have been numerous raids on workplaces.
The long term damage being caused to the U.S. economy is a story for another day.
There appears to be an element of Nativist rage in what we are currently witnessing, and it comes from the very top.
And from that we have the scenes on our streets where some enforcers of law look to be far removed from the disciplined federal agents we have long been used to.
At one point in recent months ICE officers were being offered a $200 bonus per immigrant deported within seven days.
Someone in authority, and with a modicum of sense, must have thought this looked like bounty hunting.
That plan was withdrawn.
In response to all the overly forceful tactics of agents - many of them newly recruited and likely some of them wholly unsuited to the job - people in a number of cities are beginning to do what people do when they face strong arm tactics on the part of authorities: they are taking to the streets.
Think Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. And so we have had people charged with assaulting federal officers.
This is no small matter of course and it is something that should always be condemned. But there is the letter of the law, and there is the sense of it.
One woman charged with assault, according to reports, stands at four feet eleven inches tall.
Yes, there is the sense of the law here, the sense of things going awry.
And a growing number of Americans have a sense that there is something wrong with what they are lately witnessing.
As for the law? Well, this page has been advocating for years that U.S. immigration law needs to be changed and updated.
And, yes, this would include measures for workable border order and control. But as it currently stands the national frontier is actually under relative control.
A lack of control, order and discipline is more evident within its lines.