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The Washington Monument is visible as armed members of the National Guard patrol the National Mall on August 27, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Getty Images, Andrew Harnik
Fulcrum Roundtable: Militarizing U.S. Cities
Nov 15, 2025
Welcome to the Fulcrum Roundtable.
The program offers insights and discussions about some of the most talked-about topics from the previous month, featuring Fulcrum’s collaborators.
Consistent with the Fulcrum's mission, the Fulcrum Roundtable strives to share many perspectives to widen our audience’s viewpoints.
The Trump Administration’s use of National Guard deployments and intensified ICE raids has redrawn the contours of immigration enforcement in the United States. Touted by supporters as essential for national security and condemned by critics as a breach of civil liberties, these tactics have ignited lawsuits, stirred fear, and galvanized communities into action.
To explore the implications of these federal strategies, I spoke with:
Debilyn Molineaux, a storyteller, collaborator, and connector. For 20 years, she led cross-partisan organizations. Her accolades include being a co-founder of the Bridge Alliance and a former co-publisher of The Fulcrum.
Rachel Hoopsick, an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project and the University of Illinois.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum and writes The Stability Brief.
- YouTube youtu.be
In the column, We Are Chicago, Debilyn asked: Is it law and order when ICE are patrolling American neighborhoods hunting undocumented people—or part of a larger authoritarian play to use SWAT-style takedowns and raids to scare people into surrendering their civil rights?
In Guarding What? The Moral Cost of Militarizing Our Cities, Rachel wrote about deploying National Guard troops to engage with civilian populations, carries deep consequences—for both the communities involved and the soldiers tasked with the mission.
Edward wrote: Democracy depends on courage: the willingness of people with something to lose to speak when it matters most. Some institutions still hold. But others are buckling.
He continued the conversation he started with his column, Courage Is Contagious.
The writers offered essential perspectives on the moral costs of militarizing our cities, the challenge to civil rights, and the critical role of courage in sustaining democracy when institutions are tested.
I invite you to read their columns and those of all of The Fulcrum's contributors. It's time well spent.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
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A deep look at the fight over rescinding Medals of Honor from U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee, the political clash surrounding the Remove the Stain Act, and what’s at stake for historical justice.
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Congress Bill Spotlight: Remove the Stain Act
Nov 14, 2025
Should the U.S. soldiers at 1890’s Wounded Knee keep the Medal of Honor?
Context: history
Throughout the 19th century, the U.S. military engaged in violent conflicts with Native Americans, many of them armed uprisings, as white people settled native land. On December 29, 1890, a large party from the Lakota tribe made camp by a South Dakota creek called Wounded Knee. Hundreds of Army soldiers surrounded the group, attempting to disarm them.
A shot rang out. Though the exact circumstances are murky, it’s believed a deaf Lakota man named Black Coyote refused to surrender his weapon, which went off accidentally. A violent melee ensued – but since most of the Lakota had surrendered their weapons by that point, they were left largely defenseless. While at least 25 U.S. soldiers died during the battle, hundreds of Lakota people died, including women and children.
In the aftermath, 20 U.S. soldiers were bestowed the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top military prize.
Context: today
In July 2024, President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced a commission to review those medals, with their recommendations and report due to him by that October. However, this report was never publicly released.
Austin ultimately took no action on the medals during his time in office – neither rescinding them as many predicted he would, nor affirmatively maintaining them. As a result, the medals remain intact.
In September 2025, President Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed the panel had voted nearly a year prior to recommend upholding the medals.
While the actual report has still not been publicly released, one of the commission’s five members told South Dakota Searchlight that the recommendation vote was 3-2. Reportedly, Defense Department members provided the three votes to maintain the medals, while members of the Interior Department (which helps manage tribal lands) provided the two votes to rescind.
Hegseth then announced he accepted the panel’s recommendations and affirmatively kept the medals intact. He declared his decision “final,” meaning the medals would never be rescinded by him… but Congress still could.
What the legislation does
The Remove the Stain Act would posthumously rescind the Medal of Honor for any Wounded Knee participant who previously received the award.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced the Senate version on May 22, then Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI2) introduced the House version a day later on May 23. That was several months before Hegseth’s announcement, but in anticipation of its possibility.
Is this even allowed?
Indeed, hundreds of Medals of Honor have been rescinded before.
The most famous case might be Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor. President Andrew Johnson bestowed the prize upon her in 1865 for saving dozens of soldiers’ lives while working at a Civil War hospital. But in 1917, Congress retroactively changed the criteria, saying medals could only go to those who’d served in combat.
Walker, still alive in her 80s, saw her prize officially revoked but refused to return her actual physical medal. President Jimmy Carter posthumously reinstated her award in 1977.
What supporters say
Supporters argue that the 1890 event was an unjustified butchery.
“The massacre of hundreds of unarmed Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee was a crime against humanity. Honoring the perpetrators with the Medal of Honor adds insult to that deep wound,” Rep. Tokuda said in a press release. “[The bill would] revoke medals that should never have been given, because healing begins with honesty — and the Lakota people deserve nothing less.”
"We cannot be a country that celebrates and rewards horrifying acts of violence against native people," Sen. Warren said in a separate press release. "Congress must recognize how shameful this massacre was and take an important step toward justice for the Lakota people."
What opponents say
Opponents counter that the soldiers in 1890 were under attack and defended themselves valiantly, with 25 of them losing their lives.
Sec. Austin “was more interested in being politically correct than historically correct,” Sec. Hegseth said in a social media video announcing his decision, which earned 29+ million views on X/Twitter. “[Austin] chose not to make a final decision. Such careless inaction has allowed for their distinguished recognition to remain in limbo, until now.”
“Under my direction, we’re making it clear without hesitation that the soldiers… will keep their medals. And we’re making it clear that they deserve those medals,” Hegseth continued. “Their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate. We salute their memory, we honor their service, and we will never forget what they did.”
Odds of passage
The Senate version has attracted seven cosponsors, all Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. The House version has attracted eight Democratic cosponsors. Either version awaits a potential vote in their respective chamber’s Armed Services Committee, both controlled by Republicans.
Several prior versions introduced starting in 2019 never received a committee vote, not even when Democrats controlled one or both chambers of Congress.
Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with The Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on The Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
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Migrant families from Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela and Haiti live in a migrant camp set up by a charity organization in a former hospital, in the border town of Matamoros, Mexico.
(Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
The Recipe for a Humanitarian Crisis: 600,000 Venezuelans Set to Be Returned to the “Mouth of the Shark”
Nov 14, 2025
On October 3, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, effective November 7, 2025. Although the exact mechanisms and details are unclear at this time, the message from DHS is: “Venezuelans, leave.”
Proponents of the Administration’s position (there is no official Opinion from SCOTUS, as the ruling was part of its shadow docket) argue that (1) the Secretary of DHS has discretion to determine designate whether a country is safe enough for individuals to return from the US, (2) “Temporary Protected Status” was always meant to be temporary, and (3) the situation in Venezuela has improved enough that Venezuelans in the U.S. may now safely return to Venezuela. As a lawyer who volunteers with immigrants, I admit that the two legal bases—Secretary’s broad discretion and the temporary nature of TPS—carry some weight, and I will not address them here.
Instead, I write today to highlight what I believe is an imminent human rights crisis that should influence Secretary Noem’s determination whether Venezuela is a safe place to send 600,000 human beings. On one hand, it is well known around the globe that Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro is a brutal dictator bent on absolute power at all costs. On the other hand, based on allegations that Maduro is facilitating narcotics trafficking, President Trump is aggressively increasing pressure on the Maduro regime, possibly seeking regime change (Maduro’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, a recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been openly lobbying for President Trump’s intervention). Caught between these two opposing perilous forces, 600,000 Venezuelans fled to the U.S. to escape Maduro and the disastrous conditions he has created for all Venezuelans.
How Did We Get Here?
In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security determined that Venezuela was experiencing “extraordinary and temporary conditions” that prevented Venezuelans in the U.S. from returning safely. This determination triggered DHS to offer Temporary Protected Status to eligible Venezuelans in the U.S. This 2021 determination found that the circumstances in Venezuela were dire, in large part, due to former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s campaign to upset Venezuela’s democratic processes and consolidate the power of the government in himself and his trusted inner circle. The determination cited Maduro’s political machinations, crimes against humanity, and his regime’s disastrous initiatives that collapsed the economy, the health care system, the food distribution system, and public utilities. That the country with the largest oil reserves in the world should find itself in these dire straits is a testament to Maduro’s myopia, placing himself first with zero concern for the 32 million people that live in Venezuela.
Even before Maduro’s 2018 power-grab, his regime was repeatedly and credibly accused of crimes against humanity (see, e.g., the 2014 Report by the U.N. Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission into alleged abuses). The brutality of the Maduro regime has only intensified as Maduro continues his assumption of absolute political power. A 2024 investigation by the U.N. Human Rights Council found credible evidence to support allegations of Maduro’s continued crimes against humanity, such as torture (including beatings, suffocations, electrical shocks, and sexual violence against women and children), violent and deadly repression of pro-democracy demonstrations, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and disappearances. While the list goes on, the summary is brief: Maduro will do anything to stay in power.
U.S. Pressure Campaign
President Trump’s Administration would like to see Maduro deposed. Since the beginning of this year, the U.S. has built up its military presence in the region. In January, the U.S. military had relatively few people, planes, or ships near Venezuela. Today, the U.S. has stationed 10% of the Navy’s actively deployed fleet in nearby waters, including the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford—the Navy’s largest aircraft carrier —and has deployed thousands of Marines as well.
In August of this year, Attorney General Bondi authorized a reward of $50,000,000 for facilitating the arrest of Maduro. Recently, it has been widely reported that U.S. officials attempted to leverage that reward to encourage Maduro’s pilot to divert a routine flight into a jurisdiction where the U.S. could extradite him. On October 16, President Trump publicly acknowledged that he authorized the C.I.A. to engage in operations within Venezuela. Ten days later, Maduro announced that he had captured individuals he believes are connected with the CIA in a plot to incite and justify armed hostilities between Venezuela and the U.S.
Each day brings more reports of the U.S. Armed Forces destroying vessels with alleged ties to Venezuelan drug trafficking. 64 individuals have been killed as of this writing. Detailed information on the attacks is not available. While it’s clear not all deceased are Venezuelans, they have been the explicit targets of attacks for which the Department of War has made country of origin information publicly available.
A Recipe for Human Rights Abuses
In light of President Trump’s intensifying pressure on Maduro and Maduro believing that he has already discovered two U.S.-backed attempts to oust him from power, how will Maduro now treat the 600,000 Venezuelans arriving from years in the U.S.?
It’s said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Unfortunately, dictators throughout history and around the globe follow the same cursed limerick - when their power is challenged, they brutally reassert it. If history is any guide, a mass torturer viewing himself in a struggle for survival with forces both within his country (the pro-democracy movement led by María Corina Machado) and from outside (President Trump’s increasingly aggressive display of power) will view any new arrivals as potential provocateurs, particularly when those arrivals return from a country that is openly challenging the mass torturer’s power. Given Maduro’s track record of human rights violations and torture, the probability is extremely high that many former TPS recipients will be detained in overcrowded prisons. At the same time, the Maduro regime interrogates them, likely using its violent prior practices.
Do we really have the stomach to send 600,000 humans into the “mouth of the shark,” as Warsan Shire powerfully described escaping brutality in her poem “Home?” How much torture is OK? A practical solution is extremely simple: delay DHS enforcement of non-violent Venezuelans with current TPS status as of November 6. With the stroke of a pen, Secretary Noem can prevent an imminent human rights crisis while still allowing the removal of violent criminal immigrants, whom most Americans agree should be the target of ICE action. Delayed enforcement of the end of TPS for Venezuelans has little cost or risk to the U.S. Prematurely sending those Venezuelans risks an eternal miasma of blood on our hands.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld Secretary Noem’s power to end TPS; the question is whether she has the judgment to stay her hand.
Jordan Martell has nearly 20 years of experience practicing law, primarily as in-house counsel for financial services firms. His passion is pro bono legal representation, where he spends most of his volunteer time working with immigrants.
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Praying outdoors
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For the Sake of Our Humanity: Humane Theology and America’s Crisis of Civility
Nov 13, 2025
The American experiment has been sustained not by flawless execution of its founding ideals but by the moral imagination of people who refused to surrender hope. From abolitionists to suffragists to the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement, generations have insisted that the Republic live up to its creed. Yet today that hope feels imperiled. Coarsened public discourse, the normalization of cruelty in policy, and the corrosion of democratic trust signal more than political dysfunction—they expose a crisis of meaning.
Naming that crisis is not enough. What we need, I argue, is a recovered ethic of humaneness—a civic imagination rooted in empathy, dignity, and shared responsibility. Eric Liu, through Citizens University and his "Civic Saturday" fellows and gatherings, proposes that democracy requires a "civic religion," a shared set of stories and rituals that remind us who we are and what we owe one another. I find deep resonance between that vision and what I call humane theology. That is, a belief and moral framework that insists public life cannot flourish when empathy is starved.
Our national debates and divisions are often described as policy disputes, but the deeper wound is ontological. Contests over the very meaning of the human. We are witnessing the erosion of empathy itself, the corrosion of what makes politics possible. From algorithmic outrage to legislative indifference, the language of our everyday life has grown punitive and performative. Power has become spectacle.
Jim Wallis and others have long warned that when moral truth is privatized, public life devolves into tribal combat. Eddie Glaude Jr. names our current malaise "the value gap," the stubborn belief that some lives matter more than others. The late bell hooks, speaking of love as an ethic of freedom, reminds us that domination cannot produce community. Together they point toward a humanistic core that today’s politics has neglected—the conviction that civility is not etiquette but courage, the refusal to let contempt be our lingua franca.
Conversations with Liu have often centered on the practice of civic faith, focusing on a shared question: What rituals keep democracy alive? Civic Saturday's liturgies—songs, readings, moral reflection—translate faith's communal grammar into public form. Similarly, humane theology balances civic practice with spiritual depth without collapsing the two. It asks how empathy might become not sentiment but structure—how we design policies, schools, and neighborhoods that embody what Howard Thurman called "the growing edge" of human fellowship.
Constructive humane practice contends that sanity and civility are not niceties; they are democratic disciplines. Listening truly to those who differ is not appeasement; it is stewardship of the public square. Protest, likewise, is not disruption but prophetic maintenance, the labor of keeping moral imagination alive. To practice democracy is to practice empathy in motion. Interestingly, If empathy is scarce at home, it is nearly absent abroad. America's global posture has too often traded moral leadership for transactional might. A humane geopolitics would remember that security built on fear breeds neither peace nor respect. Reinhold Niebuhr cautioned that love must find form in justice; a humane theological and political construction extends that maxim to foreign and domestic policy alike, insisting that the sacred is never confined to one nation or creed.
I remain convinced that democracy's renewal will not come from pundits or platforms but from the daily disciplines of citizens, faithful and secular, who refuse despair. We rebuild civility through the mundane miracles of teaching, mentoring, organizing, and voting. We sustain sanity by choosing cooperation over contempt. And we recover humaneness when we risk our comfort for another's dignity.
Humaneness is less a doctrine than a disposition: a willingness to see every policy debate as a moral conversation about how we treat one another. It invites what Liu calls "the practice of powerful citizenship" and what I would name the practice of faithful humanity. Our challenge is not merely to save democracy but to deserve it. And that, finally, is a theological task.
Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson is a spiritual entrepreneur, author, scholar-practioner whose leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues are nationally recognized and applied.
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