The deadly shooting of Renee Good and a never-ending stream of videos and stories documenting the out-of-control behavior of government goons backed by lawless and lying officials show that standing up to these thugs can come at a heavy price for the patriotic Americans and US residents who do so on the streets of Minnesota and elsewhere across the country.

Every day, many of them get roughed up, harassed, arrested, have their property damaged or stolen, and, as we saw last week, literally put their lives on the line.

At this critical moment, congressional Democrats have a chance to do something.

They can either join this fight or allow Donald Trump and his administration to continue to build up an unaccountable federal police force that does the president’s bidding while trampling the civil rights of anybody who lives in America.

And by “join this fight,” we don’t mean “write strongly worded letters” or “harshly condemn the actions of ICE.”

We mean “cut off the spigot of money that has allowed a bunch of fascists to set up the American version of the Gestapo.”

As another government funding deadline draws near, progressives in Congress have made their choice.

On Tuesday, the Congressional Progressive Caucus announced that its nearly 100 members would oppose new funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “unless there are meaningful and significant reforms to immigration enforcement practices.”

That means, for example, that ICE agents must replace their masks with body cameras.

If DHS’s goal was law enforcement and deporting “the worst of the worst,” then that shouldn’t be controversial… and it would even give the department more footage for all of those propaganda videos it produces.

However, since the objective of DHS is to terrorize the people living in states that voted against Trump while rounding up every brown person they can find, there is obviously going to be some resistance to putting in place sensible measures like ensuring that agents who kill American moms at point blank range can be prosecuted.

While progressives have made their position clear, it would be foolish to count on Democratic leaders to follow suit.

However, if they are complicit in waving through a new DHS appropriations bill that doesn’t include real restraints on this gICEstapo (or perhaps ICEIS… we’re not really sure what would be catchier), then they will betray the many Americans standing up to fascism out in the streets.

And reining in these jackbooted thugs isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also popular.

According to a poll conducted after the killing of Good, the same cannot be said for Kristi Noem, DHS’ cosplaying secretary. More importantly, Americans don’t like the way ICE is conducting its job. While 84 percent of Republicans approve of its secret police-style tactics and the trampling of civil rights, nobody else does. Independents, for example, oppose the way the agents are enforcing the nation’s immigration laws by a margin of two-to-one.

Therefore, Democrats may want to stiffen their spines and charge into this fight.

And its message-conscious class of consultants may want to take a page from progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who tied the unpopularity of what ICE is doing to the unpopularity of the administration’s cuts to health care subsidies and other government programs.

“I want everybody to understand — the cuts to your health care are what’s paying for this,” she said this week. “You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.”

You can’t really articulate it much better than that, especially because Americans are watching both of these things happening in real time thanks on the one hand to people risking their freedom and their lives to record ICE’s abuses, and, on the other hand, to their disappearing government benefits that Republicans have cut.

Among progressives, the message is catching on.

For example, here is Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) sounding a similar note on Tuesday.

“People should know that them cutting your healthcare, them cutting nutritional assistance, SNAP benefits, all this stuff — they’re cutting that from working people so they can give ICE money to go terrorize our communities,” he said.

Frost also noted that only congressional Democrats have the leverage to do something about this in the upcoming funding battles.

They absolutely should, especially because this isn’t a fight over premium increases that hadn’t materialized yet and therefore might not have felt real to the affected American families.

This is a betrayal of the founding values of the country that is playing out right in front of our eyes every day… all while the administration tries to claim that people exercising their free speech rights are “domestic terrorists.”

What we have here is another one of those pivotal moments in history where people can choose to be heroes or villains, and we certainly hope that all congressional Democrats do what their voters want them to do and put up a fight.