When Constitutional Guardrails Fail

A Framework for Understanding the Erosion of Democratic Immigration Enforcement

Introduction

I’ve heard the comparisons. You probably have too. “This is just like Hitler.” “ICE is the modern Gestapo.” “They’re all Nazis.” And if you’re anything like me, your first instinct was to roll your eyes a bit—or a lot. These terms get thrown around so casually that they’ve started to lose their weight. The boy who cried wolf, but with historical atrocities.

Here’s the thing though: I couldn’t shake the question of why so many people were saying it. Not the terminally online folks who call everything fascism, but historians, genocide scholars, constitutional lawyers. People who study this stuff for a living were raising alarms. Were they all just being hysterical?

So I did what any self-respecting person who’s genuinely concerned should do: I tried to understand it. Not to confirm what I already believed, and not to dismiss what made me uncomfortable. I read history. I tried to understand current events without the filter of cable news or social media hot takes. I learned the frameworks that scholars who spend their lives studying authoritarianism have developed to identify warning signs—early, while something can still be done about it.

What I’m presenting here isn’t an argument that we’re living in Nazi Germany. We’re clearly not. What I found instead was something more unsettling in its own way: a systematic erosion of the very safeguards that distinguish us from those historical horrors. The question isn’t “are we there yet?”—it’s “are we moving in that direction, and how fast?”

This analysis proceeds in three stages: First, establishing the baseline constitutional and statutory framework that theoretically constrains ICE. Second, applying scholarly warning signs frameworks—developed by people who’ve studied genocide and democratic collapse—to identify what escalation would look like. Third, documenting what’s actually happening right now, not as theoretical risks but as recorded events.

I’m not asking you to agree with me at the outset. I’m asking you to look at the evidence with me and draw your own conclusions.

Part I: The Question That Started This Inquiry

Look, I’m going to be honest about where I started on this. When I first heard people comparing ICE to the Gestapo, my gut reaction was basically: “Oh come on.” It felt like the kind of thing people say when they’re angry but not thinking clearly—politically useful maybe, but analytically lazy. The structural differences seemed so obvious that the comparison felt almost insulting to historical reality.

Here’s what I thought I knew: ICE operates under constitutional constraints. Federal courts can review their actions. Detainees have rights—habeas corpus, due process, all the stuff that’s supposed to distinguish us from the authoritarian nightmares of the 20th century. Immigration violations are civil matters, not inherent criminality. The whole system is designed with checks and balances.

The Gestapo? That was something else entirely. The 1936 Prussian Gestapo Law was explicit: “Orders in matters of the Secret State Police are not subject to the review of the administrative courts.” Read that again. This wasn’t weak oversight or underfunded enforcement of existing protections. It was the deliberate legal abolition of oversight. When the Prussian High Court ruled that Gestapo actions were beyond judicial review, the court wasn’t admitting failure—it was affirming that no reviewable rights existed in the first place.

So I felt pretty confident. Yeah, over 400 Holocaust scholars had signed an open letter in 2019 arguing that comparisons to early-stage Nazi practices could serve educational purposes. But the consensus seemed clear: comparing ICE to the fully operational Gestapo was historically inappropriate. The structural safeguards were just fundamentally different.

Case closed, right?

Except I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Not the comparison itself, but a different question—one that made me a lot less comfortable:

What would have to happen for those structural distinctions to stop mattering?

Not “are we the same as Nazi Germany?”—obviously we’re not. But what if the question isn’t about sameness? What if it’s about trajectory? What if the safeguards I was pointing to as proof of our difference were actively being dismantled while I was busy feeling smug about their existence?

That question wouldn’t leave me alone. So I started digging.

Part II: The Warning Signs Framework

Here’s the problem with waiting until things are “bad enough” to warrant concern: by that point, the window for prevention has usually closed. The whole point of studying historical atrocities isn’t to have a checklist for when to start panicking—it’s to identify the early warning signs that precede the point of no return.

Two scholarly frameworks proved essential for this analysis. These aren’t talking points from political pundits. They’re diagnostic tools developed by people who have spent decades studying how societies slide into authoritarianism and genocide. Full documentation is available in Appendix B.

Gregory Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide

Dr. Gregory Stanton isn’t some guy with opinions on Twitter. He’s the founding president of Genocide Watch, drafted UN Security Council resolutions on genocide prevention, and was asked by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to review U.S. policy failures in Rwanda. He first presented this framework as a State Department briefing paper in 1996, drawing on his study of the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, and Cambodian Genocide.

His key insight—and this is critical—is that genocide is a process, not an event. It doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It develops through predictable stages, and at each stage, intervention is still possible. The stages aren’t strictly linear; they can occur simultaneously and reinforce each other. But they follow a recognizable pattern.

The ten stages are:

1. Classification – Division of people into “us” and “them” based on ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality
2. Symbolization – Names or symbols assigned to classifications (yellow stars, identity cards)
3. Discrimination – The dominant group uses law and political power to deny rights to the target group
4. Dehumanization – Target group equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases—language that makes violence psychologically possible
5. Organization – Genocide is always organized, often by the state through militias or special units
6. Polarization – Extremists drive groups apart; moderates are silenced or eliminated first because they’re most capable of stopping escalation
7. Preparation – Plans made, euphemisms deployed (“ethnic cleansing,” “national security”), fear weaponized
8. Persecution – Victims identified, isolated, harassed; deportation, forced displacement, extrajudicial killings
9. Extermination – Mass killing begins (called “extermination” because perpetrators don’t consider victims fully human)
10. Denial – Perpetrators destroy evidence, intimidate witnesses, blame victims

A few things stand out to me here. First, Stanton specifically notes that Stage 3—Discrimination—often begins with stripping citizenship rights: “The first step toward the genocide of Jews and Roma in Nazi Germany were the laws to strip them of their German citizenship.” Second, Stage 6 emphasizes that moderates from the perpetrator’s own group are targeted early, because they’re the ones most capable of stopping the process from within.

And then there’s his warning about timing:

The main lesson is that preventive action must be done as soon as you know genocide is coming. Many people talk about early warning. But it has to be really early because it is too late once genocide is already underway. So genocide prevention must start when the processes that lead to genocide begin.

This isn’t a call to wait and see. It’s the opposite.

Levitsky & Ziblatt’s Four Warning Signs

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are Harvard political scientists—Levitsky specializes in Latin American politics, Ziblatt in European democracy. Their 2018 book “How Democracies Die” won the Goldsmith Book Prize and became a New York Times bestseller. It’s not a partisan screed; it’s a comparative analysis of democratic breakdown across dozens of countries.

Their core thesis challenges the Hollywood version of how democracies fail: “Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves.” Think Chávez in Venezuela, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey. The pattern is consistent—leaders who come to power through democratic means and then systematically dismantle the institutions that could constrain them.

They identified four behavioral warning signs that appear consistently across cases:

1. Rejection of democratic rules of the game – Not just violating norms, but actively undermining electoral legitimacy, endorsing extralegal means to power, or attempting to change constitutional rules to entrench control

2. Denial of legitimacy to political opponents – Treating rivals not as competitors but as existential threats, criminals, or traitors. This isn’t normal political hardball; it’s delegitimizing the very concept of opposition

3. Toleration or encouragement of violence – Ties to armed groups, encouraging supporters to engage in violence, refusing to condemn political violence, or rehabilitating violent actors

4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties – Threatening legal action against critics, restricting protest rights, praising repressive measures elsewhere, attacking the press as “enemies of the people”

What makes this framework useful is its behavioral focus. You don’t have to read minds or predict intentions. You just observe what leaders do and compare it against documented patterns.

In December 2025, Levitsky and Ziblatt published an updated analysis in Foreign Affairs. Their assessment was blunt:

Reversing the United States' slide into authoritarianism will require democracy's defenders to recognize the twin dangers of complacency and fatalism. On the one hand, underestimating the threat... enables authoritarianism by encouraging inaction. On the other hand, overestimating the impact... discourages the citizen actions required to defeat it.

A Note on Using These Frameworks

Before I apply these frameworks to current events, a word on methodology. Over 400 Holocaust scholars—including historians like Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, and Timothy Snyder—signed an open letter in 2019 urging the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to retract its statement rejecting all analogies between the Holocaust and other events. Their argument: such a position is “far removed from mainstream scholarship” and would make “learning from the past almost impossible.”

The distinction that matters is between comparison and equation. Comparison means analyzing similarities and differences to understand patterns. Equation means claiming events are identical. Holocaust historian Waitman Wade Beorn put it this way: “Genocides—and dictatorships—do not spring into existence” but begin with “authoritarianism, racism, ethnic myths and dehumanizing language. This is where Holocaust comparisons can and should be made.”

I’m not here to tell you we’re living in 1940s Germany. I’m here to apply frameworks developed by people who study this for a living and see what they reveal about where we are—and where we might be heading.

Part III: What I Found When I Looked

So I took these frameworks and started looking at what’s actually happening. Not what pundits say is happening. Not what politicians claim. The documented record: court filings, government memos, investigative journalism, official statistics.

What I found was not theoretical risk. It was documented reality. The structural safeguards I had identified as distinguishing democratic from authoritarian enforcement were actively failing—not in some hypothetical future, but right now.

Full evidence documentation is available in Appendix C. What follows are the findings that stopped me cold.

Habeas Corpus: The Core Distinction

Remember Part I, where I identified habeas corpus as the single most important structural difference between ICE and the Gestapo? The right to challenge detention before an independent court is the fundamental protection against arbitrary imprisonment. It’s the thing that makes everything else possible.

Here’s what I found: In May 2025, Stephen Miller confirmed on CNN that the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, citing Article I’s invasion exception. The President was reportedly “personally involved in discussions.” But the part that really got me was how Miller framed judicial independence—as contingent on favorable rulings:

A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.

Read that again. The White House is explicitly saying that whether they respect judicial independence depends on whether courts rule the way they want.

But here’s the thing: they haven’t needed to formally suspend habeas corpus. They’ve made it functionally inaccessible instead. Immigration detention reached 66,000 by December 2025—the highest ever recorded, a 75% increase. Discretionary releases dropped 87%. For every 1 person released pending a hearing, 14.3 were deported directly from custody. Detainees are transferred out of state so quickly that attorneys cannot file petitions in the arrest jurisdiction.

And here’s the kicker: when detainees do manage to file habeas petitions, they win over 96% of the time. Federal judges ruled for detainees in more than 700 cases; only 8 were denied. Texas alone saw 675+ petitions in the first eleven months of 2025—more than the entire first Trump term. The legal merit is overwhelming. The problem isn’t that the courts aren’t ruling correctly. The problem is what happens after they rule.

Court Order Defiance: The Pattern

This is where things get genuinely alarming. Individual violations happen. Bureaucracies screw up. But what I found wasn’t isolated incidents—it was a systematic pattern of defying court orders, then facing no consequences for doing so.

• Chanthila Souvannarath: Chief Judge Shelly D. Dick issued a temporary restraining order explicitly prohibiting deportation because of substantial citizenship claims. ICE deported him to Laos anyway. The ACLU called it “a catastrophic failure.”

• Any López Belloza: A federal judge in Boston blocked her deportation. Within 24 hours, she was flown to Texas and deported to Honduras. ICE attorneys later admitted in court filings that they “violated the court order.”

• Congressional Access: In December 2025, a federal court affirmed that members of Congress have the right to access detention facilities. One day later, DHS Secretary Noem secretly signed a memo reinstating 7-day notice requirements. The day after that, Representatives Omar, Morrison, and Craig were blocked from a Minneapolis ICE facility. Democracy Forward’s Skye Perryman: “This administration is willing to defy both Congress and the courts.”

• Chicago Consent Decree: On November 12, 2025, Judge Cummings ruled ICE violated the Fourth Amendment by using fake “warrants” to arrest 615 people. ICE arrested 47 more the next day using identical methods.

• Kilmar Abrego Garcia: After the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the government to facilitate his return from wrongful deportation to CECOT, the DOJ’s response was to charge him with human smuggling. Unsealed documents show DOJ called the prosecution “a top priority” after losing.

The pattern is consistent: courts rule, administration defies, then retaliates against those who invoked the courts in the first place.

The Attack on Judicial Independence

It’s not just defying court orders. The machinery of judicial independence itself is being dismantled.

Nearly 100 immigration judges were fired in 2025. San Francisco’s immigration court went from 21 judges to 5—a 76% reduction—despite 120,935 pending cases. Aurora, Colorado and Oakdale, Louisiana now have zero immigration judges.

One of those fired judges, Judge Pappas, spoke to journalist Radley Balko about what happened. His words stuck with me: “The courts are dead.” He described being terminated for “insisting on granting hearings for asylum seekers.” DOJ memos became “increasingly overbearing” starting January 20, 2025. “The firewall between DOJ and DHS quickly disappeared.”

Then there’s the physical intimidation. Senator Durbin documented that judges received pizza deliveries to their homes ordered in the name of Daniel Anderl—the son of Judge Esther Salas, who was murdered in 2020. Chief Justice Roberts responded in his year-end report by invoking the Declaration of Independence’s complaint that King George “made Judges dependent on his Will alone.”

When the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is drawing parallels to colonial tyranny, that’s not hyperbole. That’s a sitting jurist telling you something is seriously wrong.

Targeting Expansion: Citizens and Legal Residents

This started as immigration enforcement. It’s not staying there.

ProPublica documented more than 170 U.S. citizens held by immigration agents in the first nine months of 2025—almost all Latino. About 20 were held for more than a day without access to counsel. When confronted with this, DHS Secretary Noem flatly denied it: “There’s no American citizens have been arrested.” NPR’s fact-check: FALSE.

Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three. On January 7, 2026, she was serving as a legal observer at an ICE enforcement action in Minneapolis. ICE Agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed her. Video shows the steering wheel of her car turning away when Ross fired three shots in approximately 700 milliseconds. Secretary Noem’s response was to call Good “a domestic terrorist.” Mayor Frey of Minneapolis: “That is bullshit.” Governor Walz proclaimed January 9 “Renee Good Day.”

DOJ declined to open a civil rights investigation into Good’s killing. Agent Ross faces no charges. Meanwhile, six prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office resigned after being pressured to investigate Good’s widow for “ties to activist groups.”

The denaturalization program has entered quota-driven territory. A December 2025 USCIS memo directed field offices to provide DOJ with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month. For context: the historical average was 11 cases per year. A former official called the targets “virtually impossible” to meet through legitimate means.

Violence Normalization: Record Deaths

32 people died in ICE custody in 2025—the highest number since 2004, more than the previous four years combined. December 2025 was the deadliest month on record. At least 5 more died in the first 15 days of January 2026.

Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55 years old, died at Fort Bliss on January 3, 2026. The preliminary classification: homicide by asphyxiation from neck and chest compression. An eyewitness reported he cried “I can’t breathe” while guards restrained him. DHS’s public response was to call him a “sex predator.”

Fort Bliss—now holding 2,700+ people, the largest ICE facility—sits on the site of a World War II Japanese internment camp. The ACLU’s December 2025 report documented beatings, sexual abuse by officers, medical neglect, and denial of counsel. One doctor for hundreds of detainees.

I’m not going to tell you what to think about that. But I am going to ask you to sit with it.

Documented Torture: CECOT

Human Rights Watch’s November 2025 report is titled “You Have Arrived in Hell.” It documents what happened to 252 Venezuelans sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison between March and April 2025.

The findings:

• 48.8% had pending asylum cases in the United States
• No evidence any were gang members
• Systematic beatings upon arrival and throughout detention
• 24/7 lights, no mattresses, solitary confinement used as torture
• The Independent Forensic Expert Group—medical experts who assess torture claims—confirmed injuries consistent with torture

Noah Bullock of Cristosal, a human rights organization working in El Salvador, put it plainly:

The US government has not been linked to acts of systematic torture on this scale since Abu Ghraib.

El Salvador has admitted to the UN that the United States maintains control over the Venezuelan prisoners. These are people the U.S. government sent there, to conditions the U.S. government knew or should have known constituted torture.

Part IV: Where We Stand

So now we have the frameworks and we have the evidence. The question is: what do they tell us when we put them together?

I want to be careful here. The point of using scholarly frameworks isn’t to “prove” we’re living in Nazi Germany or that genocide is imminent. The point is to have a structured way of assessing where we are on a trajectory—and whether we should be concerned about where that trajectory leads.

Let me walk through both frameworks against what I found.

Stanton’s Ten Stages: Where Are We?

Remember, Stanton’s stages aren’t strictly linear. They can occur simultaneously and reinforce each other. The question isn’t “which stage are we at” but “which stages are we seeing evidence of?”

Stages 1-4 (Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization): These are clearly present and have been for some time. “Illegals” as a noun rather than an adjective. “Invasion” to describe migration. “Animals.” “Poison the blood of our country.” This isn’t new—but it’s worth noting that dehumanizing language is Stage 4 of 10, and Stanton is explicit that this language makes violence psychologically possible for perpetrators.

Stage 5 (Organization): The infrastructure is expanding rapidly. 287(g) agreements—which deputize local law enforcement to act as immigration agents—expanded from 135 jurisdictions to over 1,300 in 2025. That’s nearly a 10x increase. 12,000 new enforcement officers hired. The largest detention facility in the country built on a former Japanese internment site. This isn’t ad hoc enforcement; it’s systematic capacity building.

Stage 6 (Polarization): This is the stage where moderates are targeted—people from within the system who might otherwise slow or stop escalation. Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan, a state judge, was arrested and convicted of felony obstruction for allegedly helping a defendant exit through a jury door to avoid ICE. She faces up to five years in prison and has resigned. The DOJ memo threatening prosecution of state and local officials who resist. The firing of immigration judges who “insisted on granting hearings.” The resignation of prosecutors who refused to investigate a shooting victim’s widow. Moderates are being removed or intimidated into silence.

Stage 7 (Preparation): Plans are being made and infrastructure put in place. Denaturalization quotas of 100-200 cases per month. Third-country deportation agreements with 58 nations—meaning people can be sent not to their home countries but to wherever will take them. Stephen Miller’s public discussion of suspending habeas corpus, framed as contingent on courts “doing the right thing.” The rescinding of sensitive locations policies. These are preparations for expanded action.

Stage 8 (Persecution): Victims are being identified, isolated, and subjected to escalating harm. Sensitive locations policy rescinded—schools, churches, hospitals are no longer protected. ICE used pepper spray and pepper balls against students at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis; the district cancelled in-person classes until February. Green card applicants arrested during routine USCIS interviews. U.S. citizens detained without counsel. A legal observer shot and killed, then posthumously labeled a terrorist. Documented torture at CECOT.

I want to be clear: I am not claiming we are at Stage 9 (Extermination) or that mass killing is imminent. But Stanton’s entire point is that you don’t wait until Stage 9 to act. By then it’s too late. The stages I’m documenting—5 through 8—are exactly the stages where intervention is still possible but the window is closing.

Levitsky & Ziblatt’s Warning Signs: The Scorecard

The four behavioral warning signs are designed to be observable. You don’t have to read minds or predict the future. You just look at what’s happening.

1. Rejection of Democratic Rules of the Game

This one is unambiguous. The administration has explicitly defied court orders—not quietly, not through bureaucratic delay, but openly. ICE deported people after judges explicitly prohibited it. The DOJ charged someone after the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against them. Stephen Miller has publicly conditioned respect for judicial independence on courts ruling favorably. DHS reinstated congressional access restrictions one day after a court affirmed those rights.

This isn’t playing hardball within the rules. It’s rejecting the rules themselves.

2. Denial of Legitimacy to Political Opponents

Renee Good was a legal observer—someone exercising First Amendment rights to witness government action. She was shot and killed, and the Secretary of Homeland Security called her “a domestic terrorist.” Not an accident. Not a tragedy. A terrorist.

Six prosecutors were pressured to investigate her widow’s “ties to activist groups.” An arrested observer reported an agent saying the shooting happened because “you guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.”

Judge Dugan wasn’t just prosecuted—she was arrested by federal agents at the courthouse. Acting Director Lyons announced plans to “track” protest “ringleaders.” The message is clear: opposition isn’t just wrong, it’s illegitimate. Criminal. Dangerous.

3. Toleration or Encouragement of Violence

32 deaths in custody in 2025—a record. At least one classified as homicide. DOJ declined to open a civil rights investigation into Good’s killing. Agent Ross faces no charges. No one has been held accountable for the deaths at Fort Bliss. No one has been held accountable for the documented torture at CECOT.

When violence goes unpunished, it’s tolerated. When it’s tolerated, it’s encouraged.

4. Readiness to Curtail Civil Liberties

Legal observers targeted. Press access restricted. FOIA rejections increased 8x—from 5,427 in September-December 2024 to 41,918 in the same period of 2025. A whistleblower reported being told to “disengage” from providing records and received the lowest performance rating. Congressional oversight circumvented. State officials threatened with prosecution. Protesters placed under surveillance.

All four warning signs are present. Not ambiguously. Not arguably. Documented.

What This Means

I’m not going to tell you exactly what to conclude from this. But I will tell you what I concluded:

Both frameworks—developed independently, by different scholars, studying different phenomena—point in the same direction. We are not at the end of either progression. We are somewhere in the middle. And the trajectory is toward escalation, not de-escalation.

The question that remains is what, if anything, we do about it.

Conclusion: The Question Is Not Comparison But Trajectory

I started this because I was tired of empty rhetoric—people throwing around “Nazi” and “Gestapo” like they’re interchangeable with “thing I don’t like,” and other people dismissing legitimate concerns because the comparisons felt overheated. I wanted to know: is there actually cause for concern here, or is this partisan hysteria from people who spend too much time doomscrolling?

So I did the work. I read the scholars who study this for a living. I applied their frameworks. I looked at the documented record—court filings, government memos, investigative journalism, official statistics.

Here’s what I found: the structural safeguards that distinguish us from historical horrors are eroding. Not hypothetically. Not theoretically. Right now, in documented ways you can verify yourself. What I’ve presented here is only a smattering of the available evidence, and more of it compounds every day.

December 2025 through January 2026. One fucking month:

• Courts ruling against the administration at 96%+ rates—and being ignored
• Habeas corpus nominally intact but functionally inaccessible
• Immigration courts gutted through mass judicial firings
• Prosecutorial independence collapsed (six prosecutors resigned rather than investigate a murder victim’s widow)
• Congressional oversight openly defied
• Legal observers shot, then labeled terrorists
• Documented torture of U.S. deportees, on a scale not seen since Abu Ghraib

I am not saying ICE is the Gestapo. I am not saying this is Nazi Germany. I am saying we are on a trajectory, and that trajectory is accelerating. Gregory Stanton has spent his career studying how societies slide into genocide. His warning is explicit: preventive action must come early. By the time the comparison becomes exact, it’s too late.

If you’ve made it this far and you’re still skeptical, good. Don’t take my word for it. Read the sources. Check the court documents. Look at what’s actually happening—not what anyone, including me, tells you is happening. If you find errors in my analysis, hit me up. I’d genuinely rather be wrong about this than right.

But if you’re not willing to do that work—if you’re going to dismiss this without engaging with the evidence—then shut the fuck up. Your opinion is worthless. This isn’t a debate club exercise. People are dying in custody. People are being tortured. A woman was shot dead for bearing witness, and the government called her a terrorist.

The boy who cried wolf is a cautionary tale about false alarms. But there’s another version of that story: the village that was so conditioned to ignore warnings that they didn’t notice when the wolf actually showed up.

Look at the evidence. Draw your own conclusions. And if those conclusions match mine, then we have work to do—and the time to start is now.

Document Series

• Main Narrative (this document)
• Appendix A: ICE Structural Framework and Constitutional Constraints
• Appendix B: Scholarly Warning Signs Frameworks
• Appendix C: Documented Erosion of Constitutional Safeguards
• Appendix D: Complete Source Bibliography

NOTE: This was written with the aid of AI. I have a process that helps catch issues but it can still be wrong. Feel free to let me know if a source isn’t available or outright wrong. Happy to fix things.