“A national coalition of locally-elected, top prosecutors today announced the formation of the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach – an effort to hold federal officials accountable when they exceed their lawful authority, especially in states around the country where federal agents are being surged. The coalition launches amid growing concerns about warrantless entries, unlawful detentions, and coercive enforcement tactics by federal agents, and it’s intended to ensure that constitutional limits on federal power are actively enforced through lawful institutions.”

So reads the first paragraph of a press release issued by FAFO (Fight Against Federal Overreach) that kicked off its national effort this week with Falls Church and Arlington’s Commonwealth Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and her Fairfax County counterpart Steve Descano as among nine founding members. The report of this development in the New York Times this week put Falls Church, by association with Dehghani-Tafti, in a global spotlight.

With four of the first nine prosecutors founding this group from Virginia, in fact (the other two besides Dehghani-Tafti and Descano being Ramin Fatehi from Norfolk and Stephanie Morales from Portsmouth), it is not lost on us that, with the sweep of Democratic statewide leaders taking office here this month, Virginia may soon become a target of the Trump administration’s national storm trooper offensive. In fact, at a national online press conference hosted by the FAFO group yesterday, in response to a question from the News-Press, Dehghani-Tafti confirmed just that concern.

So, it is critical that this effort expand, and that poignant comments like those of Falls Church Mayor Letty Hardi and City Council members David Snyder and Arthur Agin resound throughout the commonwealth without delay. Mayor Hardi’s remarks (published elsewhere in this edition) were not only a call for a moment of silence at the start of Tuesday’s City Council meeting to honor the memory of the two individuals slain by Trump storm troopers in Minnesota, but also, as she said, “a warning” of what may be to come.

Her remarks and the organizing action of the Fight Against Federal Overreach make it clear to us that a backing off by the Trump domestic terror offensive is not to be expected.

Alert citizens right here in Falls Church and its surrounding areas must be ready to stand up for democracy and the rule of law in their communities the way brave citizens in Minneapolis have been doing. Keep your cell phones charged, learn to tote a whistle and make sure you have plenty of warm clothes to wear outside in this Minneapolis-like weather.

We are called to become a critical front-line part of a national resistance to the fascist coup that the Trump administration is attempting to perpetrate on us all. We can be grateful that we have the example of the brave citizens of Minneapolis for showing us the law abiding and non-violent way to do it. Now, we ourselves need to be prepared for what may be coming.