Democrats can never be allowed to run our country again Reason No. 1025.
The Danbury, Connecticut city council voted 18-2 this week to let non-citizens — including DACA recipients — become police officers. Mayor Roberto Alves framed it as knocking down a pointless barrier: these are people who can already serve as EMTs, firefighters, soldiers, doctors, and lawyers, so why not cops? It sounds reasonable for exactly as long as you don’t think about what a police officer actually is.
A police officer is not just another skilled professional. He is the individual the state authorizes to detain you, to search you, to use force against you, and in the last resort to take your life if need be. That power flows from the government’s authority over its own citizens, exercised by an agent sworn to the Constitution above any other allegiance. The question was never whether a DACA recipient can be brave, competent, or decent — plenty are. The question is whether the coercive power of the American state should be handed to someone who is not yet a member of the American community. Those are not the same question, and Alves is banking on voters conflating them.
The comparisons he reaches for actually undercut him. A firefighter runs toward danger to save you; he cannot arrest you. An EMT treats you; he cannot cuff you. A soldier — and here’s the tell — swears an oath of allegiance to the United States, which is precisely the kind of formal, tested loyalty that citizenship represents and that a work permit does not. Lumping the badge in with those roles obscures the one feature that makes policing different: the authority to deprive a citizen of his or her liberty given to an individual who a) isn’t in the country legally, and b) see answer ‘a.’
Then there’s the “trust us” problem. Police Chief Patrick Ridenhour and the mayor both insist the standards aren’t dropping — same background checks, same psych evals, same training and testing. Maybe. But “we’re lowering the eligibility bar while promising the quality bar stays put” is a familiar tune, and it plays over a Connecticut policy that has been ratcheting outward since 2020, when the state first opened municipal policing to green-card holders and DACA recipients. The barrier didn’t fall by accident; it’s being widened deliberately, one expansion at a time, and there is no principled stopping point on offer once citizenship stops being the line.
That’s the real objection, stripped of the culture-war noise. Citizenship is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the marker of full membership in the self-governing community — the thing that says this person is one of us, accountable to us, and empowered to act on our behalf. Enforcing the people’s laws against the people is the most sovereign act a government performs. Reserving it for citizens isn’t xenophobia; it’s the baseline logic of self-government.
Danbury decided that line was an “unnecessary barrier.” It wasn’t unnecessary. It was the whole point. It’s insane to see how left our 13 original colonies have become; they’re more like the British monarchy of old than they are the America that rebelled.
