The Cost of Impunity

Imam Tariq: [00:00:00] The cost of impunity by Imam Tariq I El-Amin there's a kind of violence that doesn't announce itself as violence. It arrives in uniforms and paperwork and badges and unmarked vehicles. It insists that it's order, that it's law, that it's necessary. And because it's authorized, it demands that we suspend our moral instincts long enough for it to do its work.

What we're witnessing right now with ICE isn't simply immigration enforcement. It's the normalization of terror, exercised with impunity masked agents, public manhandling, family separated in the open. No accountability, no consequence. No concern for dignity, age, gender, or humanity this moment. Deserves more than outrage.[00:01:00]

It deserves examination because unaccountable power doesn't only traumatize the people on the receiving end. It also corrodes the souls relationships and moral imagination of those who are authorized to wield it,

protection and its denial. Recently after Fajr prayer, that's our morning prayer. A group of us had a serious conversation about safety, not abstract safety, but the very human question of what it means to provide and defend safety for one's family, beginning with one's wife. For black men, that question Kent, be separated from history.

The ability to protect our families has never been guaranteed. In many cases, it has been explicitly denied. When black men have attempted to assert protection in public spaces, many have paid with their lives. [00:02:00] The message has been consistent. You may labor, you may comply, but you may not shield. That kind of historical conditioning doesn't disappear just because time passes.

It leaves marks when the inability to protect goals unnamed. It doesn't evaporate. It turns inward. Shame settles into the body. Pain looks for somewhere to go In relationships, that tension doesn't stay abstract. It shows up as frustration, as strain, as unmet expectations around protection, provision, and presence.

It complicates intimacy and reshapes how people see themselves as one another. Naming that history matters not to excuse harm, but to understand the pressures that unresolved powerlessness places on identity and relationships alike. [00:03:00] When the loss of protection spreads, I recently saw a clip circulating online, a woman being manhandled by ice agents.

It wasn't clear where it took place or even who she was. What was clear was the force being used against her. Suddenly a man entered the frame, presumably her husband. Instinctively, he rushes in trying to pull the agents off of her. Their response to his act of valor was immediate, brutal. The agents turned on him.

What struck me wasn't simply the violence, it was the familiarity of the scene. This wasn't new for black communities. It wasn't new for indigenous communities. This wasn't new for immigrant communities. What was new was who appeared shocked by it when protection is suddenly impossible for [00:04:00] people who assumed it was guaranteed, something shifts psychologically, the question becomes unavoidable.

What happens to identity? Relationships and self understanding when the state demonstrates that it will not honor your right to protect those you love the other side of violence, there is another dimension to this moment that demands attention. On the other side of this terror is a force made up largely of men, predominantly white, though not exclusively, they're armed, emboldened and shielded by political power.

They operate with impunity. They know there will be no meaningful accountability. There's no saying power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but corruption is not only ethical, it's psychological and [00:05:00] spiritual. When violence is normalized and protected by the state, it does something to a person's inner life.

It trains the conscience to quiet itself. It teaches the body to obey power over principle. It creates allegiance not to justice, but to authority. Those outside your ranks become objects. Those within become the only moral reference point. There's also fear embedded in this alignment. The unspoken knowledge that you are spared the indignity of oppression only because you are useful to power and that usefulness has conditions, moral injury, and the cost of families.

We have data on law enforcement, higher rates of suicide, higher rates of substance abuse, [00:06:00] higher rates of domestic violence. We have reports from military context as well, including among Israeli defense forces, veterans of psychological collapse, moral injury, and suicide following service connected to prolonged exposure to oppression.

And violence. Moral injury occurs when individuals participate in or witness acts that violate their deepest moral convictions, especially when they feel powerless to repair the harm they've caused. It's not trauma from fear alone. It's trauma from guilt, remorse, and unresolved responsibility. It is reasonable to ask.

What this work does to ice agents who aren't animated by supremacist ideology, those who still feel those who still have souls. [00:07:00] What happens when you return home after terrorizing a family? When your authority at work is absolute and your conscience has been trained to submit, what happens to those marriages in that environment?

What happens to intimacy? To tenderness to children who learn what power looks like by watching how it's carried at home. Unjust power doesn't remain neatly contained in the workplace. It travels, it settles, it reshapes relationships,

power punishes its servants. We often speak as if power only harms those beneath it. That's a mistake. Unjust power punishes those who wield it as well. It hollows out empathy. It narrows moral vision. It trains people to mistake domination for order from [00:08:00] a spiritual perspective, this is not accidental authority.

Divorce from Mercy becomes corruption. Strength unmoored from accountability becomes cruelty power. Exercise without restraint, ultimately consumes the one who holds it. This isn't a political issue, it's a human one. It's about what? Kind of people we're becoming under the conditions we're normalizing.

It's about whether we recognize that violence once authorized rarely limits itself to its intended targets

paying attention. History teaches us that systems built on terror. Don't remain stable. They spread. They escalate and they leave damage everywhere they pass. The question before us isn't only whether we oppose [00:09:00] what ICE is doing, it's whether we understand what this moment is producing psychologically.

Socially and spiritually, whether we recognize the patterns being set, whether we are willing to name the cost of impunity, not just for the oppressed, but for the enforcers, their families, and the society that authorizes them. Power always has a price. The only question is who pays it and how long we pretend otherwise.