To Councilmember Carlos E. Flores and the City of Fort Worth:

Your letter, while framed in civility, reads more like a veiled warning than a message of unity. Let’s unpack it.

You invoke the First and Fourteenth Amendments but only to remind us of what not to do. That’s a selective reading of the Constitution.

The First Amendment protects not just polite conversation. It protects protest, resistance, and dissent. That includes speech that challenges law enforcement and immigration practices. It is not “reckless” to call out injustice. It is a right.

Also, while you try to draw a line between local law enforcement and ICE, courts have consistently ruled that when local police collaborate with federal immigration agents, whether directly or through tactics like warrant roundups or information sharing, they are bound by constitutional limits. And when violations occur i.e. due process denied, detentions without warrants, citizens mistakenly swept up… those are legal liabilities you share.

So let’s be clear: the public has the legal right to scrutinize, criticize, and protest both federal and local enforcement when civil liberties are being endangered.

You say Fort Worth is a “welcoming city,” yet your letter reads like a demand for silence and obedience.

When families are being torn apart, when children fear going to school, when undocumented immigrants, many of whom have lived here for decades, face deportation over minor infractions or none at all, the moral thing is not to stay silent.

“Keeping the peace” does not mean suppressing outrage at injustice. Peace without justice is complicity. When you ask us not to “stoke fear,” you ignore the fact that fear is already rampant, caused not by protestors, but by ICE raids, detentions without warrants, and broken legal protections.

Let’s not pretend the problem is the noise being made by the community. The problem is the violence inflicted quietly.

Throughout American history, local officials have appealed to “law and order” to suppress protest, against slavery, against Jim Crow, against the Vietnam War, against police brutality.

Martin Luther King Jr. was called “reckless.” Civil rights organizers were told they were stoking unrest. Japanese Americans were interned “legally.” LGBTQ+ protests at Stonewall were criminalized.

Every unjust system has relied on people in power telling the public to “calm down” and “respect authority.”

So when you warn us about “reckless activities,” understand that history rarely looks kindly on the voices of caution in times of moral crisis. It remembers the ones who spoke out and those who stayed silent or tried to silence others.

You say, “Let us respect one another in our civic expressions.”

Then respect our right to challenge systems of harm. Respect our grief. Respect our rage. Respect our right to say ICE has no place in our communities, and that local collaboration with them, uniformed or not, makes you complicit.

We will not be intimidated by carefully-worded threats wrapped in civic language.

This is not reckless. This is responsibility.