When the Ground Shifts: Acknowledging the Signs

This message isn’t meant to alarm. I write because I wholeheartedly believe in informed self-determination, and part of that means being willing to look directly at uncomfortable information without either exaggerating it or explaining it away. There is a strange pressure in uncertain times to choose between panic and denial, as though acknowledging that something concerns us means assuming the worst, while remaining calm requires us to insist that everything is probably fine. I don’t think either response serves us particularly well. There is another possibility: we can pay attention, gather information, acknowledge what we do not know, and make thoughtful decisions about our own lives before circumstances make those decisions for us.

For many of us, America has felt uneasy for some time. There is a tension beneath the surface politically, socially, and economically that can be difficult to articulate because no single development explains it. Project 2025 laid out an extraordinarily detailed vision for restructuring the federal government, while the new administration has moved quickly on immigration enforcement, the federal workforce, and executive authority. Questions about civil rights, institutional independence, the limits of presidential power, and the durability of democratic safeguards have become part of ordinary political conversation. People disagree profoundly about what these developments mean, whether they represent necessary changes or dangerous ones, and where they will ultimately lead. I don’t pretend to know how this chapter ends. But I also don’t believe we need to know the ending before we are allowed to pay attention to the direction of the story.

And now another piece of information has entered that picture.

Another Piece of Information

Recent federal procurement data shows that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement dramatically increased spending in a contracting category covering small arms, ordnance, and related equipment. Between January and October 2025, ICE committed more than $71 million in that category, compared with less than $10 million during the comparable period the year before. The purchases included firearms, ammunition, armor, chemical agents, and other tactical or law-enforcement equipment.

Some of the initial reporting around those contracts was more alarming than the underlying records justified. One federal procurement entry, for example, was classified under a category referring to guided missile warheads and explosive components, which understandably attracted attention. The actual purchase appears to have involved distraction devices used in law-enforcement operations rather than missile warheads. That correction matters because discernment requires more of us than collecting information that confirms what we already fear. If something proves inaccurate, we should correct it even when the inaccurate version supported our concerns.

Even with that correction, however, the scale of the increase deserves attention, particularly because it is happening during an expansion of immigration enforcement rather than in isolation. There may be straightforward operational explanations for some of these purchases. ICE is a law-enforcement agency whose officers already carry weapons and conduct operations that can involve risk, and an expanding enforcement apparatus requires equipment. Procurement records cannot tell us precisely how every item will be used, much less prove what the government intends to do in the future. But they do tell us something about capacity. When an institution receives more personnel, more money, more equipment, or broader authority, its ability to act increases. What matters is not merely that the capacity exists, but what surrounds it: who directs it, what restraints govern it, who is subject to it, and whether institutions capable of challenging its use remain effective.

That is why the ICE purchases caught my attention. They are not the whole story, and I don’t think they should be treated as one. They are another piece of information arriving within a much larger pattern I was already watching.

The Context Matters

Project 2025 is part of that context. Published before the election, it offered a sweeping conservative governing blueprint touching executive authority, the federal bureaucracy, immigration, education, reproductive policy, LGBTQ+ policy, and the relationship between the presidency and parts of the administrative state. There has been considerable argument about how closely the Trump administration should be identified with the project, and it would be inaccurate to assume that every administration policy originates there or that every proposal it contains will become law. But I also don’t think the only meaningful question is whether the administration officially claims the Project 2025 label. Political plans are useful because they show us what influential people and organizations believe government should do. When subsequent policies move in similar directions, those plans become relevant context for understanding the ideas already circulating around power, even when they cannot tell us precisely which policies will ultimately survive political, legal, or institutional resistance.

More broadly, this is why I am interested in patterns rather than waiting for a single unmistakable event to tell me how concerned I am permitted to be. Political change usually arrives through accumulation. Laws change, executive authority is tested, agencies are reorganized, money and personnel move, enforcement priorities shift, legal protections are challenged, and language about threats and enemies gradually changes what actions feel acceptable. At the same time, other institutions push back. Courts intervene. Journalists investigate. Citizens organize. Elections continue. Officials refuse orders or challenge interpretations of the law. A country can contain pressure and resistance simultaneously, which is precisely why interpreting a period of political change is difficult while we are living through it. We do not get the clean narrative that history books provide afterward. We get fragments, competing explanations, incomplete information, and the responsibility to decide what deserves our attention.

That uncertainty is not a reason for panic, but neither do I think it is a reason for dismissal. Seeing one alarming number and deciding catastrophe is imminent is not discernment. Waiting until every uncertainty has disappeared before allowing ourselves to respond is not discernment either, because by then the choices available to us may be very different. The discipline is learning to live somewhere between those extremes: to take troubling information seriously without making it say more than it does, to revise our understanding when new facts emerge, and to recognize that preparation does not require prediction.

What Does This Mean for Your Life?

This is where the question becomes deeply personal, because the same political conditions do not create the same calculation for everyone. Someone whose children, parents, career, property, community, and entire support system are rooted in the United States may look at the current moment and decide that staying is unquestionably worth whatever uncertainty lies ahead. Someone else may already have family abroad, portable work, another citizenship, or a long-standing desire to live elsewhere and decide that the threshold for leaving is much lower. Other people may feel particularly exposed by changes in immigration policy, reproductive law, LGBTQ+ protections, healthcare, education, or other issues that touch their lives directly. There is no single political development that can tell all of those people what to do because they are not protecting the same things or carrying the same risks.

That is why I keep returning to informed self-determination rather than trying to identify the moment when everyone should become sufficiently alarmed. The more useful question may be: What would I wish I had done earlier if circumstances became more difficult later? That question does not assume catastrophe. It simply recognizes that many forms of preparation become harder once they are urgent. A passport takes time. Residency applications take time. Selling property takes time. Building savings, learning a language, researching healthcare, moving animals, obtaining apostilles, replacing documents, understanding tax obligations, or establishing income somewhere new all take time. Even discovering that the country you imagined moving to offers no realistic legal pathway for you is useful information if you learn it while you still have the freedom to make another plan.

Preparation can also mean preparing to stay. If the life you want is in the United States, then preserving your choices might mean understanding your legal rights, strengthening relationships with neighbors and community, maintaining access to emergency funds, becoming more engaged with local institutions, knowing which organizations provide support in your area, or simply deciding in advance what developments would cause you to reconsider your plans. Staying because you have looked carefully at your circumstances and chosen your home is very different from staying because contemplating alternatives felt too overwhelming. Leaving works the same way. A decision made from agency feels different from one made only when every other option has disappeared.

If You Have Been Thinking About Leaving

If moving abroad, pursuing dual residency, or establishing some kind of backup plan has already been sitting quietly in the back of your mind, I think this is a reasonable time to make that possibility more concrete. Not because I can tell you that the United States is headed toward a particular outcome, and certainly not because one ICE procurement report proves that it is time to flee, but because researching an option is not the same thing as committing to it. There is enormous psychological difference between vaguely imagining that you could “always move somewhere else” and knowing that you qualify for a particular residence permit, what it costs, how long it takes, whether you can legally work, what happens to your taxes, whether your healthcare needs can be met, and what kind of life you could realistically build there.

Begin, then, not with escape but with home. Ask yourself what kind of environment allows you to feel safe enough to build a life. What values are essential to you? What kinds of community, freedom, privacy, opportunity, stability, or belonging do you need? What are you willing to compromise on, and what would eventually make a place incompatible with the life you want? Those questions are more useful than searching for a perfect country because no such country exists. Every place comes with its own politics, bureaucracy, prejudices, costs, vulnerabilities, and frustrations. The goal is not to find somewhere untouched by uncertainty. It is to understand which uncertainties you are willing to live with and which ones you are not.

Once you understand that, the practical work becomes much clearer. Keep passports and essential civil documents current. Digitize records that would be difficult to replace from abroad. Understand where your money is held and whether you have more than one reliable way to access it. Research residency pathways based on the rules that actually exist rather than social-media fantasies about moving abroad. Think through employment, healthcare, taxes, medication, pets, property, family responsibilities, language, and the cost of establishing a new household. You may do all of this and decide never to leave. That does not make the preparation wasted. It means you transformed an anxious possibility into information and then made a choice.

Being a Steward of the Hearth

I think that is the distinction I most want to preserve in conversations like this. Awareness is not fear. Preparation is not panic. And acknowledging that political conditions can change does not require us to believe that we know exactly what those changes will become. I don’t know what the increase in ICE spending will ultimately mean. I don’t know how much of Project 2025 will become policy, which actions will survive the courts, how political opposition will respond, or what the United States will look like several years from now. Those uncertainties are real. So are the changes already happening. I would rather hold both truths at once than force myself into either reassurance or catastrophe.

For me, being a steward of the hearth has never meant clinging to one physical place at any cost. The hearth is what we are trying to keep alive: safety, belonging, dignity, relationships, meaningful work, the freedom to become ourselves, and the ability to build a life that feels like our own. Sometimes stewardship means staying exactly where we are and tending those things fiercely. Sometimes it means recognizing that another place might give them more room to grow. And sometimes it means doing nothing more dramatic than learning what our options are so that, if the landscape changes, we are not beginning from nothing.

The ground feels uncertain right now, and I don’t think we need to pretend otherwise. But uncertainty does not have to leave us powerless. We can pay attention without feeding fear, prepare without predicting disaster, and decide what developments matter according to the lives we are actually responsible for living. We may never need the plans we make now. I hope many of us don’t. But there is peace in knowing that our choices have been considered deliberately rather than left entirely to circumstance. That, more than any prediction about what happens next, is the kind of security I believe is worth creating around the hearth.

Sources and Further Reading

Federal Procurement Data System and USAspending.gov. U.S. General Services Administration and U.S. Department of the Treasury. Federal contract records for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including small arms, ordnance, and related procurement.

Barrón-López, Laura, Shrai Popat, Ali Schmitz, and Laken Kincaid. “GOP Gives ICE Massive Budget Increase to Expand Trump’s Deportation Effort.” PBS NewsHour, July 8, 2025.

Sommerlad, Joe. “Trump Has Spent 700 Percent More on Deadly Weapons for ICE This Year—but Agency Still Claims They Can’t Afford Bodycams.” The Independent, October 23, 2025.