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Experts have long warned that immigration dragnets and the erosion of civil rights for immigrants will inevitably result in the erosion of rights for citizens.

Since the start of this Trump administration, we’ve watched those warnings come true.

The Trump administration says none of this is happening.

“DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.” “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.

We know because we have once again done what the government hasn’t:

We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent holding a citizen during the current administration.

More than 500 cases. That includes:

• More than a hundred Americans held after agents questioned their citizenship. Nearly all were people of color.
• At least 70 American children and teens detained, some of whom were handcuffed.
• Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed.
• At least 63 Americans detained while recording.
• 36 Americans held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family.
• Roughly a dozen citizens deported, mostly children.

Collectively, these cases show that as the administration has relentlessly pursued immigrants, federal agents have run roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens too.

We’re showing you every case — the reality that the administration denies — along with the receipts.

Explore our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

In January 2025, agents held a 21-year-old citizen at gunpoint and put him in handcuffs during a raid at the Philadelphia car wash where he worked.

In April, a 20-year-old was held in a Florida jail for more than 24 hours, despite having proof of his citizenship.

In June, a dual citizen of Mexico and the U.S. was detained while working in California. He was held for four days without access to a lawyer or his family.

During the enforcement surge in Chicago last fall, known as Operation Midway Blitz, there were “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. “ICE has significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed.” But we found that federal agents detained more than 120 citizens in Illinois during the height of the surge.

In November, agents took an 18-year-old citizen off the street, eventually dumping him in the woods.

In December, an American in Baltimore was picked up and held for 25 days, unable to see her 5-year-old son over Christmas.

In January, hours after Renee Good’s killing, agents tackled and handcuffed a school staffer in Minneapolis. He was terrified, he recalled: “I feel lucky to be alive.”

In April, when agents stopped a man in Texas, he told them, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.” He was deported four days later.

In May, a New York teen was thrown to the ground, bloodied and then dumped in an unfamiliar neighborhood. “He just grabbed me and threw me on the floor,” the teen recalled.

In September, agents detained and injured an Illinois man they thought was someone else.

We shared details and footage of many of the incidents with former immigration officials. They reacted with anger and disbelief.

“This is just terrible,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, both agencies under DHS, including in President Donald Trump’s first administration.

“I’ve never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years,” said Darius Reeves, who oversaw the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Baltimore office before retiring last year. “It’s an embarrassment.”

In tallying these detentions, we included anyone who authorities held against their will for any period of time — whether they were handcuffed, held at gunpoint or otherwise prevented from leaving by immigration agents. The courts consider someone detained if they aren’t free to leave.

Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances: if they can reasonably suspect they are in the country illegally, or if they allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers.

ProPublica shared its findings and information on each case with DHS. 

The department defended agents’ conduct. “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted. We do our due diligence,” the agency said in a statement. It added that anyone who obstructs agents “will of course face consequences which include arrest.”

We compiled our list by scouring social media, court records and local media to confirm and compile incidents.

Our work doesn’t include all of agents’ problematic interactions with citizens. We didn’t count incidents where, say, an agent shot but didn’t detain a citizen. And as with the tally we did last year, the new list is an undercount. For instance, witnesses estimate that more than 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, but we only included the 30 citizens who we were able to identify.

Willy Wender Aceituno, a naturalized citizen who voted for Trump twice, said he never imagined that the immigration crackdown he supported would entangle him.

Then, last November, Border Patrol agents broke his truck window, yanked Aceituno out and threw him onto the pavement of a parking lot, where one agent knelt on his back. (DHS says he “refused to comply” with agents’ commands.)

“ICE isn’t looking for criminals,” Aceituno said. “They’re looking for Latinos. Having papers in this country does not protect you.”

“Upon Probable Cause”

Under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement generally must have probable cause to arrest someone. But there’s a lower bar, reasonable suspicion, for stopping someone to question them.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said its agents are just questioning citizens, not detaining them — even when they’re in handcuffs or held for hours. DHS also cites a concurring opinion issued last year by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh stating that agents can consider factors like “apparent ethnicity” when making stops. Citizens around the country have been detained because, they’ve said, of their skin color, accents or jobs.

Ever since his arrest in November, Aceituno said his U.S.-born daughter carries her passport at college. “She has a Latino face,” he said, adding, “My daughter’s white friends aren’t carrying their passports.”

“Secure in Their Persons, Houses, Papers and Effects”

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution also prohibits officers from entering homes without a judge’s warrant.

An ICE memo revealed by a whistleblower this year showed that agents had been doing it anyway. The agency asserted that administrative warrants that didn’t involve a judge gave agents the ostensible authority to force their way into homes looking for someone with a final deportation order. Some of those incidents have also resulted in Americans being detained.

In January, Jeyli Salguero, her parents and her sister were asleep at home when armed federal agents broke through the front door and rushed inside.

“The first thing I yelled when I stepped out of my room was that I was a U.S. citizen and I had the right to record,” Salguero recalled. “That’s when they snatched my phone.”

The agents told Salguero’s family they were looking for her brother, who does not live there. After half an hour, the agents released Salguero and her mother, but detained her father, who had temporary protected status, and her sister, who was undocumented. The sister was eventually deported to El Salvador, and her father was later released from detention.

Salguero told us that agents left her and her mom alone in their wrecked house with the Minneapolis winter air coming in through a broken door.

Salguero is one of several plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against the government for going into homes without a judicial warrant. DHS has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it has “paused” the policy.

“Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures”

The Fourth Amendment is also intended to protect people from “unreasonable” use of force during arrests. Previously, we’ve documented how agents have used chokeholds that DHS banned other than when deadly force is authorized. We’ve also documented how immigration agents have broken car windows while pursuing people they believe are in the country illegally. But they’ve been doing it to citizens, too. Many of those citizens have filed lawsuits.

Darren Eichler was working at a Christian cemetery in a Chicago suburb last October when he and his coworkers moved to help a man who was wading in the nearby river. They soon realized — too late — that the man was running from immigration agents, who emerged from the brush near the river and demanded access to a gated area of the cemetery. When the men refused and started filming, agents used bolt cutters to cut open the gate, then fired pepper balls and tackled the men.

Explore incidents where citizens were subjected to crowd control weapons.

Eichler said his face felt like it was on fire and he had trouble breathing. “I pleaded with them for an hour to please call an ambulance.” Eichler told ProPublica. He was eventually brought to a hospital, still handcuffed, while the agents stood over his bed. Eichler’s co-workers were held for several hours at a nearby federal office. No one was charged.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment about the incident.

“The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble”

The First Amendment protects protesters and those documenting agents’ conduct. The amendment guarantees the freedom to assemble — in other words, to protest peacefully — and the freedom of speech, which courts have interpreted to include recording in public.

The Trump administration has, however, aggressively pursued the arrest and prosecution of citizens who were protesting, often claiming the protesters were assaulting officers or interfering with enforcement activities. We counted more than 300 people accused of assaulting or obstructing officers, about 130 of them at protests.

Top DHS officials, including former Secretary Kristi Noem, went further, claiming that filming ICE agents was interfering with arrests. Last summer, three siblings driving in Texas were detained after they stopped to film an immigration arrest. One of the siblings was a young teen. “They tackled me down and an agent put one knee behind my knee, where I felt a sharp pain,” he told ProPublica. He was separated from his mother, who has a green card. “They were saying my mom wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and I was scared they were gonna take her away.”

The siblings have filed claims for damages with the government. Asked about the incident, DHS said it respects “the First Amendment rights of individuals to observe and express themselves. However, if such actions interfere with or obstruct our operations, ICE will take necessary steps to address the situation.”

Our review did uncover instances that appear to show some protesters or other civilians assaulting officers. One person pleaded guilty to throwing pieces of cinder block at an agent. A woman in California pleaded guilty to pulling off an officer’s mask.

Many protesters were accused of crimes but never actually charged. We found 137 instances of citizens who were charged with federal crimes, most of whom were charged with assaulting or obstructing federal agents. In nearly half of those instances, the charges were dropped or dismissed. Three dozen citizens have been sentenced to prison or probation, and another three dozen cases are pending, as of September 15.

Explore incidents where citizens were detained while recording.

Some of those arrested, like clarinet player Oriana Korol, were initially charged with felony assault before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor — in Korol’s case, for trying to kick an officer. She said she did so after officers shoved her and pepper-sprayed her twice in the face. Just moments before, the band had been playing the “Ghostbusters” theme song as part of a peaceful protest.

Video footage shows agents leading Korol away, handcuffed, while one pulls her tear-gas-soaked mask over her mouth. “Please pull it down,” Korol tells the agents in the video. “I’m going to have an asthma attack. I have asthma. Why are you doing this to me? Please.”

The Rights of Children

Unlike earlier administrations, Trump has detained significant numbers of immigrant children living far from the border. Citizen kids have been swept up too — at least 70 of them. We’ve found about 20 kids who were handcuffed or zip-tied.

DHS said that ICE doesn’t zip-tie or restrain children, or separate families. But agents handcuffed a 15-year-old with disabilities outside a school in Los Angeles in 2025. The agents said they mistook the teen for an alleged gang member. A few months later, officers detained more than a dozen American children during a raid on an Idaho horse track. Anabel Romero said her children are still deeply shaken by their detention.

Romero told us how her 7-year-old son warned his older sister about going to another race this month: “He said, ‘Watch out for ICE, make sure you have your phone to film — I’ll come save you.’”

“Without Due Process of Law”

As the government has rushed to deport people as quickly as possible, Americans have also been swept up and removed from the country too. About a dozen American kids have been deported with their parents, allegedly over their parents’ objections.

DHS said: “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”

One American adult in Texas was also deported this spring.

The car Brian Morales Garcia was in was pulled over earlier this year in central Texas. Officers didn’t believe him when he said he was a citizen. And they wouldn’t let him get his birth certificate. Morales Garcia was held for four days without being able to call his lawyer or anyone else. Then he was deported to Mexico.

After suing, Morales Garcia was allowed back into the country just last month using his birth certificate.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Morales Garcia’s deportation. In earlier court filings, officials disputed Morales Garcia’s citizenship and claimed he had admitted to being born in Mexico.

“I couldn’t process what they were doing to me.” Morales Garcia told ProPublica. When he was first stopped in Texas, he had told officers, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.”

Explore more video evidence compiled by ProPublica and our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

How We Reported This Story

How We Counted Incidents

We found and vetted cases from a number of sources, including English- and Spanish-language social media, DHS statements, court records and local news reports, in addition to our own reporting. We included an incident in our dataset only if we could find at least two sources for it. For additional details about the incident, like whether crowd control weapons were used, we accepted one source in some cases.

When DHS provided a response specific to an incident — including about whether it happened or the circumstances under which it happened — we noted that response in cases in our full list for which we offered detail beyond a simple count of detained citizens. DHS responses that generically denied ever detaining citizens or that are proven inaccurate by our reporting were not included.

As with our count a year ago, most of the detained Americans on our list fell into two broad categories. The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. This time, we found more than a hundred such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied roughly 300 Americans. 

In many of these cases, the government accused but never charged these individuals with assault. Sometimes agents detained people because of questions about their citizenship but later accused them of crimes. While public attention often focuses on ICE, the immigration dragnet often relied on officers from agencies across the government.

Since the government itself does not track these cases, our list is almost certainly an undercount. Except in a few cases in which DHS itself confirmed detentions, we only counted citizens we were able to individually identify. So, for example, while witnesses estimate as many as 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, we were only able to identify 30 individuals by time of publication. We encountered the same issues for many smaller raids and protests, such as a raid of a food plant in Cato, New York; protesters detained by ICE at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey; and a raid of a Hyundai-LG plant in Ellabell, Georgia.

ICE itself occasionally has stated higher numbers than we were able to confirm: It told Congress that 131 citizens were arrested for assaulting, obstructing or interfering this year in Minnesota’s Metro Surge. It didn’t name them. We cataloged fewer than a hundred.

We tagged each case with details like whether a minor was detained or a citizen was held after filming. Another trend we tracked was citizens held for more than a day without access to a lawyer or their family. When multiple citizens were detained in one incident or sometimes on the same day and city, we grouped them together.

Because we focused on the expanded presence of immigration agents in American communities, we restricted our count to warrantless arrests that took place outside of airports and away from the borders, where immigration agents have long had more authority. We also excluded cases of Americans who were arrested after a judicial warrant.

We did not include incidents where an agent shot, tackled or pepper-sprayed a citizen but didn’t detain them.

We also did not include immigration protesters arrested by police who were only enforcing local laws. We did, however, include some cases involving police working with immigration agents. We still have little visibility into how many citizens have been detained by police deputized to act as immigration agents.

We also found reports of more than 30 Americans who felt racially profiled by immigration agents, but we did not include them in our database because it was not clear they were held against their will.

How We Counted and Reviewed Court Cases

We searched every named adult in our list to see if they were charged with a federal crime in relation to their detention. We conducted searches, using several name combinations for people with double names or compound names, in federal district courts through the online platform PACER. We looked for a criminal case filed within two months of the noted date of a person’s detention in the judicial district in which the detention happened. We then noted whether we found charges, what the charges were, and whether the person involved was sentenced or had their case dismissed or discharged.

How We Chose the Videos in This Report

We reviewed hundreds of videos of federal agents detaining American citizens across the country. While that included body camera footage, news clippings and helicopter footage, the vast majority of videos were made by bystanders and shared over social media. Many of the videos went viral and were recirculated across the internet by a range of third-party accounts. They touch on everyday American life in a range of settings, including workplaces, homes, protests, car washes, suburban sidewalks and the interiors of vehicles.

We tagged each video with how clearly it shows the incident and whether the citizen detained was clearly visible. We then categorized the videos by the kind of conduct they show, such as citizens being detained after recording. We provided DHS an opportunity to respond to each of the videos we included.

We did not alter videos, nor did we add watermarks, blur faces or overlay captions on videos unless otherwise noted. Videos that include captions or watermarks are shown as they were obtained.

The post More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown appeared first on ProPublica.

A whole decade ago I blogged about a taxonomy of cliches in space opera, with a considerable checklists of things to watch out for in the space opera I was just then starting to work on.

This was almost entirely a background task for most of that time. During the period I was poking at the new space opera project I wrote: the Empire Games trilogy, the New Management trilogy, A Conventional Boy, The Labyrinth Index and The Regicide Report. So, nine other novels. Meanwhile the space opera went through two and a half rewrites, spawned a spin-off novel, and the spin-off novel is now getting its second rewrite, because Reasons (it has to be perfect: also, I'm going to go back to the original space opera next and finish that, too, probably next year, not to mention already having the first 50,000 words of a sequel.).

But anyway: the space opera project has resulted in maybe a third of a million words of fiction so far, and absolutely humongous quantities of world-building work. Which is why I'm now revisiting my earlier thoughts on space opera, to try to better understand what I'm doing here.

First, some clarification. What even is space opera, when it's at home?

While there's no short, concise definition of space opera, there's an extensive monograph on Space Opera in the SF Encyclopedia, tracing its roots back to the US pulp magazine sector around 1900 and following it to 1941, when Wilson Tucker defined it as the appropriate term for the "hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn": alternatively, space-adventure stories which have a calculatedly romantic element.

Let's stick a magnifying glass on top of that last phrase. Romaniticism in this context does not have anything to do with the romance genre of fiction (which focusses on love and relationships). Rather it's a shout-out to the romantic movement of the 18th to 19th centuries and its modern descendants, which prioritize passion, intuition, and individualism over social convention—the pursuit of beauty entails an interest in the exotic and mysterious, a celebration of the heroic and the divine, respect for the supernatural, and arguably the will to power and worship of force that took a darker turn in the fascist and totalitarian movements of the 20th century. Stick starships and light sabres and vast vistas of time and space on top of this and you can get an impression of where it's going.

As a romantic genre, space opera requires its protagonists to have enough agency (personal autonomy) to break out of their quotidian setting and have adventures—travel is a big part of this, for it cuts them free of the ties that bind, leaves family behind, and promises escape. To which end, the spaceship is central in space opera just as the sailing ship was key to the age of (ahem) sail. Trying to imagine Moby Dick or Master and Commander without sailing ships is like trying to imagine Star Trek or Star Wars without starships.

You can write romantic adventure-focussed SF without starships (use stargates/wormholes or just set it on a planet where adventure-shaped activities dominate the plot) but what you get then isn't space opera, it's a planetary romance.

(Planetary romance (the sub-genre Jack Vance was famous for) inherently places more constraints on what you can do with your fiction. You can't easily have a planetary setting which combines long travel times, high energy technologies and high population density, for example: long travel times imply no fast vehicles (no high speed rail or air travel, never mind spaceships), which are a side-effect of high energy technologies (internal combustion, gas turbines, big-ass electrical generators and HV grid of any kind) and you can't easily get to any of those things without a sufficiently high population density to support the industries that make them feasible (not just engineering and factories but universities and schools with mass literacy and mining) which in turn implies advanced agriculture—you've got to feed those cities somehow. (Memo to self: hunt down James Burke's Connections on video (they're somewhere on YouTube) and re-watch the series.) It also makes it difficult to justify sub-settings with wildly divergent levels of technology because that stuff leaks—to keep it out you need a North Korean level hermit kingdom, or totally impenetrable jungles that haven't been penetrated by colonialists, or something of that level. (NB: I have found a workaround for this, but I'm not going to spoiler the coming novels!)

Ultimately economics are your enemy if you want to write convincing romanticist fiction without turning into a fantasy-without-the-magic secondary world setting: all it takes is one country inventing capitalism and/or imperialism to muck it up for everybody else). And economics fucks with space opera too: ask yourself what markets plausibly exist for goods and services transported across interstellar distances, and after digesting Paul Krugman's Theory of Interstellar Trade (PDF) you may be left scratching your head.

My go-to answer for economics in space opera is that interstellar expansion/colonization is most plausibly driven by (a) religion ("manifest destiny" is a religious belief, built atop Genesis 9:7), or (b) escapist colonialism (but only if travel is cheap and compatible biospheres are abundant). In third place we probably get pyramid schemes (eg. Neptune's Brood by some guy called Stross: prior art for that one existed in the shape of colonial pyramid schemes, eg. the Darien Scheme which bankrupted Scotland, or the South Sea Bubble, which nearly bankrupted the British government a generation later). Then a long way down the list we get to trade in Veblen Goods, and maybe—if interstellar transport is very cheap—recreation. What the latter two items have in common is that they're status signifiers—the wealthy have been having yachting adventures while the peasants labor on their estates to pay for them for a very long time, and as for Veblen Goods, Faberge eggs are pretty obvious. So we have status as a driver for space opera: a side-effect of hierarchical social structures where the elite seek to maintain their status by signaling their affluence in various ways.

Did I mention hierarchical social structures and capitalism? The thing about capitalism is that it's a totalizing ideology, like the divine right of kings, or religious fundamentalism. It seeks converts, it refuses to be gainsaid, and it confers a competitive advantage on cultures that adopt it (as opposed to those that reject it). Yet, as Ursula le Guin said, "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings..."

Space opera embraces the romanticist outlook. This is inherently problematic, for it is capable of spawning totalitarian nightmares. To understand this point, I dare you to read Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto from 1909 and not recognize it both as a masterpiece of romantic rhetoric and as one of the founding texts of Fascism—very specifically the Italian Fascist movement (Nazism and Spanish clerico-fascism were later tumors on the rancid politics of violence and misogyny that Marinetti unleashed).

It's not possible to examine space opera, or planetary romance, and not acknowledge the pernicious fascistic imagery in both subgenres. Michael Moorcock wrote a magisterial essay about this nexus in the wake of Star Wars (the first movie): I strongly recommend reading his Starship Stormtroopers before pressing on if you're not already familiar with it.

Pace Le Guin, it is possible to write space opera that doesn't pander to fascism directly, as the late Iain M. Banks demonstrated. But even in his magisterial Culture series the pustules of fascism can easily be seen on the faces of the Culture's adversaries: from the Idiran imperialists to the Empire of Azad, perhaps most clearly in the character of the Affront, it takes a bad dose of fascism to introduce the romanticist element necessary for space opera to be perpetrated. Otherwise you're left with something like Inversions, which is a Culture novel with merely homeopathic traces of space opera remaining. Incidentally I make no apologies for assuming a familiar with the Culture novels on the part of the reader: if you haven't read it already, you're missing out, because it's the nearest thing I've seen to a refutation of the core conceit of might-makes-right inherent in the fascist strain of space opera. Iain wrote A Few Notes on the Culture in 1993 to explain what he was about: in particular, I was struck by this summary: The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there. ... Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

Totalizing ideologies like capitalism or Christian Nationalism aren't immutable, and opposition is possible. They rely on a perception of inescapability on the part of their subjects, and space opera should be the ideal fictional vehicle for escapism from such certainties: if our protagonists can board a starship and flee, there is in principle no reason why they can't shed the chains of a pernicious ideological system.

Now I want to cut to a different question. What about the human-scale story?

Space opera isn't usually a genre of high conceptual merit that tries to tell us something about the world we live in. It can be, in the hands of a determined author who knows what they're doing (I'm thinking specifically of Iain Banks, of Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, of some of Alastair Reynolds' work—notably House of Suns) but it's more often deployed as a giant shiny backdrop for human-scale drama. Fiction is generally the art of confabulating plausible lies that illuminate the human condition, but stars and galaxies exist on a very superhuman scale: if we took them seriously as a setting they'd dwarf the merely human concerns of the protagonists—the emotional cursors that traverses the story universe—into insignificance, as in the more philosophical works of Olaf Stapledon. (For a fine example, see Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear.) Most of us don't have the imaginative flexibility to conceive of time scales significantly longer than a human lifespan and vistas larger than a single planet (and even that is a recent development: I think before mass intercontinental air travel our imaginative horizons were far more constrained). So a common problem in space opera is for the scale of distances to collapse: modern authors tend to fall back on the durations of international air travel, rather than thinking in terms of age-of-sail voyages, let alone more realistic interstellar durations at slower than light speeds. (Honorable exception to that one: Alastair Reynolds, and to a lesser extent, Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Worlds stories and Ken Macleod's Engines of Light tetralogy.)

A side-effect of the romantic outlook is a demand for individual human agency—that is, that despite the vast scale of the backdrop, the protagonists have the ability to effect change, or at least to change their own circumstances. Here in the real world most of us are trapped by situational constraints: our employment system is parodied as wage slavery for a reason. Opportunities for adventure are scarce, and your chances of self-betterment are minimal. (You can found a business and spend 30 years trying to become a millionaire, most likely to end in ignominious failure, or you play the lottery, be it by explicit gambling or by speculation on the cryptocurrency markets, but the game is rigged against you from the start.) Money in large quantities, as capital, exerts a gravitational attraction and we are individually just dust particles. So space opera tends to focus on protagonists who acquire individual agency, have adventures that take them away from the quotidian grind, and let them change themselves or the worlds around them.

A classic plot skeleton for this sort of fiction is the Hero's Journey template, as popularized by Joseph Campbell and demonstrated by George Lucas in Star Wars, and it's less-familiar-to-many sibling, the Heroine's Journey: interestingly the Heroine's Journey can be seen as an explicit rejection of the frenetic diktat of Futurism even though it's compatible with space opera, as demonstrated magisterially by Lois McMaster Bujold, whose Vorkosigan series is bookended by a Heroine's Journey narrative (starting in Shards of Honor, continuing in Barrayar, finally winding up in Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen)—and which holds the singular record for most Hugo awards for a single SF series (so this isn't just my opinion). Character development lives at the heart of both these templates, and I suspect you can't have a working space opera without the scope for such changes.

To briefly hark back to the Futurist/fascist imagery inherent in space opera: the Vorkosigan series is arguably Ruritanian romantic space opera set against a recognizable 19th century central European flavoured empire. (It's no accident that space opera emerged at the end of the age of empires, the turn of the 20th century.) Our main viewpoint character, Cordelia Vorkosigan, is a woman with modern sensibilities who effects change in that society to great effect, working largely behind the scenes as a noblewoman in that setting—indeed, that's the nature of her modified Heroine's Journey arc. (Assuming, of course, that you buy either the Hero's Journey or Heroine's Journey templates, both which are heavily influenced by Jungian psychology and early-to-mid 20th century conceptions of masculine and feminine gender identity, all of which are highly problematic in my opinion.)

Ultimately, though, the romanticist aesthetic is inimical to social convention and formalism—and also to sustainability. The romantic impulse renders space opera antithetical to solarpunk. A fictional setting composed entirely of wild individualists isn't going to end up as some sort of libertarian utopia, it's going to be a cat ranch: meanwhile someone needs to stay behind and tend the home fires, someone has to mind the grain silos on that "small farming planet", someone else needs to manage the shipyard that repairs the interstellar freighter. There's a lot of implied background in space opera, a civilization with enough surplus wealth production to build and operate starships, and this implies some degree of continuity—continuity of biosphere stability (or there'll be nothing to eat), continuity of infrastructure (including education/apprenticeships, to train/socialize the starship crews), continuity of the society our adventurer-protagonists emerged from. Social structures, governance, and politics are a given in every human society, and the romantic movement emerged from a very specific context that coincided with the age of enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Our protagonists are either privileged enough to transcend the daily grind or sufficiently motivated to take a hideous gamble with their own safety. And this tells us something about the constraints within which space operatic storytelling takes place—and my work-in-progress in particular.

Any questions?

The last 12 months were the hottest on record and sixth driest in Colorado. Will the state have an epic winter?

I remember two bronze plaques in an Emporia park, each cast with the anguished writing of a father recounting the death of his 16-year-old daughter. I was only 8 years old, but the words of William Allen White in Emporia’s Peter Pan Park left a permanent impression.

I didn’t understand what a newspaper editor or columnist did back then, but I surely knew White was important. A bronze bust of the Emporia Gazette editor and publisher watches over the park from between those bronze plaques, after all.

My family only lived in Emporia a year, nearly four decades ago now, but I never forgot how one man captured a profound event of his life with indelible words. Those plaques, I’ve come to believe, represent the beginning of my lifelong fascination with commentary writing and opinion journalists. I became a writer and editor myself, and now my book on the topic has arrived in bookstores.

That fascination didn’t stop with William Allen White. When my family moved to El Dorado in the early 1990s, I frequently heard stories about longtime El Dorado Times editor Rolla Clymer. His name adorns a room at the library, a local pond and a property development. His collection of editorials about the sweeping Flint Hills landscape could be purchased across town.

In the early 2000s, I attended the University of Kansas (and the William Allen White journalism school) in Lawrence. It didn’t seem peculiar to watch Lawrence Journal-World editor and publisher Dolph Simons Jr. write weekly columns that enraged or amused locals. This was what Kansas newspaper editors were supposed to do, I reasoned.

By that time I had decided to make journalism my career, and that fact seemed self-explanatory that no one needed to voice it. The history of Kansas and its towns was defined by opinion writers and commentators, those men and women who wrote about daily life in the pages of community newspapers.

Since then, journalism has gone through tumultuous shifts. Newspapers have shrunken or closed, and local opinion writing has all but vanished from the number that remain.

Figures like White and Clymer and Simons were not just flashes in the pan. They worked for decades. They strengthened their cities and built bonds with residents. While they were not perfect — none would have claimed to be — they provided an essential civic good.

They helped Kansas know itself.

I’ve written a book that’s coming out Tuesday called “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now.” It’s published by the good folks of the University Press of Kansas.

My book isn’t just about old white men. It’s about old women, too — including the indomitable Mamie Boyd, who worked and wrote through her 97th birthday in 1973. It’s about legendary Black journalists like Lucile Bluford of Kansas City and Hollie T. Simms of Wichita.

It’s about Soviet-curious socialists like Emanuel Haldeman-Julius of Girard, whose Little Blue Books spread the classics to teenagers of America. And it’s about homemakers like Lindsborg’s Donna Burough Opat, who raised nine children while writing a column for the Salina Journal.

These people told the stories of Kansas. These people were Kansas. There was little distinction between their words and the lives they lived. For those of us devoted to local journalism, that has always been the case.

Recently, opinion writing has come to mean something else. It’s come to mean something more partisan and performative, more focused on horse races than hometowns.

As local journalism struggled, local opinion pages withered or disappeared. At the same time, a national political entertainment complex developed, treating deeply held personal beliefs as fodder for ratings. That approach trickled back down to the local level, where commentary began to be seen as destructively divisive.

For anyone who has followed the travails of local news media, this should sound familiar.

What I couldn’t forget or overlook is how popular opinion writing remains among readers. Americans may have a dim view of national talking heads, but they gobble up opinion pieces like a hungry teenager devouring chicken nuggets.

National newspapers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post maintain expensive editorial page staffs. Magazines including the Atlantic and Harper’s commission lengthy think pieces about current affairs. Meanwhile, digital platforms such as Substack attract millions of readers for opinionated posts.

In my five years at Kansas Reflector, I’ve seen it happen repeatedly. During our legislative session, from January through March, news stories predictably attract the most readers. But for the rest of the year, columns and opinion pieces from a diverse assortment of Kansans frequently take the top-read spot at our website.

People enjoy reading local opinion — yes, even if they disagree with it.

My favorite comment from readers? “I like your column, but I don’t agree with everything you write.”

That’s the whole point of writing opinion and running an opinion section, in White’s day or the present. Serious opinion journalists devote their careers to making people examine their preconceptions and engage in a dialogue about the future of their communities.

In the words of Iola Register editor and publisher Angelo Scott, whose 1958 speech on this subject help inspire my book:

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. His first book, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now,” comes out Sept. 29 from the University Press of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.