Within the span of a few days, two separate, armed ambushes were launched against federal law enforcement facilities in Texas.

In Alvarado, a group clad in body armor allegedly shot a police officer and opened fire on a detention center.

In McAllen, a gunman fired dozens of rounds at a U.S. Border Patrol facility before being killed.

These are not acts of protest. They are not expressions of dissent. They are calculated, violent assaults on the authority of the United States government. This string of attacks forces every American to confront a fundamental and non-negotiable line: the line between constitutionally protected protest and armed insurrection.

When citizens take up arms against the state, it is a direct attack on the rule of law and the very foundation of our republic.

Anatomy of an Ambush

The attack on the Prairieland Detention Center on the Fourth of July provides a chilling case study.

According to the Justice Department, a group of ten individuals arrived in military-style clothing, armed with AR-style rifles. After spray-painting “ICE Pig” on government vehicles, they allegedly shot a responding local police officer in the neck before another assailant fired on unarmed federal correctional officers.

This was not a spontaneous protest that spiraled out of control. This was a premeditated operation.

The FBI recovered body armor, radios, and propaganda materials from the scene.

The flyers, calling to “FIGHT ICE TERROR WITH CLASS WAR!” and for “Organising for Attack! Insurrectionary Anarchy,” leave no doubt as to the group’s intent.

This was not about changing a policy; it was about waging a war.

The Unmistakable Line Between Dissent and Sedition

Our Constitution, through the First Amendment, provides near-sacred protection for speech and assembly.

It protects the right to condemn government policy in the most vehement terms, to organize peacefully, and to demand change.

But that protection ends where violence begins.

The moment individuals conspire to use firearms to murder federal officers, they forfeit all First Amendment protection. This is no longer dissent; it is sedition.

The Constitution itself anticipates this gravest of threats in Article III, which defines Treason as, among other things, “levying War against” the United States.

The framers understood that a republic must possess both the freedom for its citizens to dissent and the power to defend itself from those who would destroy it through violence.

The individuals who take up arms against the government are not exercising a right; they are committing a foundational crime against the constitutional order.

The Duty to Resist Tyranny

It must be acknowledged that the idea of resisting a tyrannical government is not a foreign concept; it is a principle embedded in the American political tradition, articulated most famously in the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that when a government displays a “long train of abuses and usurpations” designed to reduce the people under “absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

This is the philosophical bedrock of our nation’s own revolution.

However, the very purpose of the Constitution that followed was to create a system that made violent revolution unnecessary.

The framers established a republic governed by the rule of law, with mechanisms for profound change: elections, free speech, a free press, the right to assemble and petition, and a process for amending the Constitution itself.

Within this framework, the “duty” to resist tyranny is channeled through these lawful, political processes.

To resort to armed ambush and insurrection when these constitutional avenues for change exist is not a fulfillment of the founders’ revolutionary duty; it is a rejection of the stable, democratic republic they fought to create.