Assessing what the United States is seeing on its streets has resulted in shock to some after the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent (identified by the Minnesota Star Tribune as Jonathan Ross). Despite the attempts by many on social media and the White House to frame her murder as justified, the evidence in the videos provided by observers from multiple angles tells a story of an extrajudicial killing by a federal agent.
Every comprehensive analysis shows that Good was attempting to steer away from the agents to avoid them, and that the agent fired into her driver’s window. Noted in an analysis conducted by Bellingcat – and later confirmed to be correct with the release of a video – is that the agent was recording the encounter using his cell phone. Ross’s video shows how polite and civil she was in adhering to his “orders,” further adding to her innocence and compliance with the agent’s demands. Despite her politeness, the agent called her a “Fucking bitch” after he shot her.
Just one day later, ICE shot two more people in Portland, Oregon. Not unlike Good’s murder, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) went on the defensive to exonerate the agent by saying the agency “believed” the driver was a “member of the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua,” and that the passenger was “a Venezuelan illegal alien affiliated with the transnational Tren de Aragua prostitution ring.” As is typical with DHS, the agency provided no evidence to prove those claims.
Despite the outrageousness of these shootings and the actions of ICE agents in violent encounters earlier this year that resulted in death, they are not anomalies. You may not have seen them before because previous administrations didn’t spend $200 million to create propaganda videos as the Trump White House did earlier this year when they told agents to be “camera-ready.” Regardless, the entire world now knows what agencies under the DHS banner do far too often, as the videos exploded onto social media platforms globally. Among the worst of those agencies are Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Border Patrol agents.
Those agents are roaming the streets, and they’re bringing their brand of violence to ICE and to the myriad other agencies they are currently working with in cities across the country. Border Patrol agents already have an extensive reach into citizens’ lives, as does ICE and its parent agency, DHS. The breadth of data collection by DHS agencies is expansive and is often shared with local and state agencies through Fusion Centers. Local and state agencies also provide data to DHS via Fusion Centers, highlighting just how expansive it all is.
With all the data collection tools in hand to target specific nonwhite communities, heavily armed agents adopting Border Patrol’s aggressive and violent tactics are primed to kill people. The hateful rhetoric about immigrants that is rampant in every branch of DHS, alongside using language that promises the “unleashing of police” and federal agents, while also proclaiming to them that they have immunity from prosecution, where we are today, was inevitable. Before the Trump administration, DHS, particularly Border Patrol and ICE, was essentially already rogue.
The Latinophobia and hate in the current Trump administration have exposed how dangerously powerful DHS is and just how much the agency impacts our lives. Today, Trump is weaponizing nearly every federal agency (as they are being infested with the normalization of Border Patrol’s tactics) against anyone expressing anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Christian views based on dubious and largely unknown criteria. Essentially, they’re willing to label anyone a domestic terrorist. They lived up to that when they did it to Renee Nicole Good, after killing her.
DHS has a death grip on US society. It must be reined in. It matters little who is president, whether a Democrat or a Republican; the culture was inherently bigoted from day one, and it embraced what Border Patrol brought with it when DHS was created in 2002, and took the racist agency under its umbrella. And despite what their vests say, they are not police. That matters too.
I’m an independent journalist digging deeper into the stories you see or don’t see on the news. Find my work at Unicorn Riot, The Antagonist Magazine, Latino Rebels, Orinoco Tribune, and more. I’m also on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a donation via Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App.
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