May 2025 didn’t announce itself. It just sharpened. Week by week. Action by action. Until even the air felt thinner.
It started with May Day protests—a nationwide wave of resistance against a renewed deportation machine. People marching in a thousand cities, trying to drag the country's conscience back into the light. It didn't work. Days later, ICE descended on Latino neighborhoods in Nashville like it was a war zone. Traffic stops turned into disappearances. Buses drove off before families could even ask who was taken.
Then Stephen Miller floated suspending habeas corpus. Out loud. On camera. As if courtless detention was just another policy tool to consider. Not four times in U.S. history has that power been used. But here it was, rolled out like a trial balloon to see who flinched.
And the courts? Still hanging on, barely. The Supreme Court took up Trump’s executive order trying to erase birthright citizenship. Oral arguments unfolded under protest chants outside. Judges asked careful questions. But no ruling yet. No assurance the guardrails will hold.
Meanwhile, the DOJ weaponized civil rights law to go after universities for supporting diversity. Labeled it fraud. Invited whistleblowers to sue. Threatened campuses with financial ruin for hosting inclusive policies. And when Harvard pushed back on surveillance requests, DHS cut off their international student visa program entirely. No trial. No precedent. Just a demand for ideological fealty—or else.
May 21st: the DOJ pulled federal oversight from police departments in Louisville and Minneapolis. Reform agreements, years in the making, tossed out with a press release. The people who killed Breonna Taylor and George Floyd—and the systems that enabled them—are now trusted to police themselves. As if oversight was tyranny, and unmonitored violence the patriotic default.
And then came the normalization.
More raids. More deportations. Protesters arrested. Stories that should’ve led the news instead flickered briefly online, then vanished under the weight of newer outrages. Kansas City. Columbia. LA. The pattern stayed the same: someone spoke out, someone disappeared, someone caved.
The scariest part of May wasn’t the scale. It was the silence.
Not from those being targeted. They screamed. They marched. They risked everything to resist. But from the rest—from institutions, from colleagues, from the neighbors who still believed the system could never turn on them. From the people who stayed quiet because they weren’t next in line.
Some judges are now talking about forming their own security force. That’s where we’re at. The very people tasked with interpreting the Constitution can no longer trust the branch that swore to protect them. That’s not theoretical. That’s collapse.
So if this month felt different, that’s because it was. It was the month the executive said out loud what it used to whisper. The month enforcement stopped pretending to follow the law. The month silence became endorsement. The month the mask slipped—and many chose to look away.