I have been dreading writing this column all week. There are so many things I’d rather be doing: laundry, taxes, prepping for a colonoscopy. I just really don’t want to write. Not this, anyway. Not right now.
And yet, I have a deadline and an obligation. So here goes.
Let me start off by saying that we need to abolish ICE. I’m hearing lots of chatter about how ICE needs more, better training. No, they do not. The issue with ICE killing people isn’t one of training any more than the issue of the Gestapo killing people was one of training. The purpose of ICE, much like that of the Gestapo, is to terrorize, imprison and murder citizens who have been deemed less than human by a blood-thirsty regime.
What is it people imagine would happen if ICE officers had more training? With more training they could, what? Terrorize, imprison and murder more effectively?
Gosh, if only Jonathan Ross had gotten the proper training he would never have murdered Renee Good. Too bad they set an inexperienced newbie loose with a gun in Minnesota.
Except Ross was hardly some untrained rube. Ross was “a veteran deportation officer in ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division,” Wired reports. “A member of a Special Response Team, ICE’s version of a SWAT team, he’s had duties as a firearms trainer and led teams drawn from multiple federal agencies including the FBI.”
See? Not exactly his first day on the job. We’re looking at a well-trained, fully professional murderer.
Renee Good was a mom. She was a wife. She was a poet. She had a dog. She saw ICE as a threat to her neighbors. She was standing up for something she believed in. She was not there to harm anyone. To Ross she was a “fucking bitch” and someone he had every right to kill.
Furthermore, the Department of Homeland Security told Wired that Ross “acted according to his training.”
Except, Mother Jones reports, “For decades, cops have been trained not to shoot at moving vehicles.” And yet ICE keeps doing it.
“At least nine people across the country who have been shot by immigration agents since September,” according to Mother Jones, “were in a vehicle at the time of the shooting.”
Wow, what a very strange coincidence.
As I write this, ICE agents are still terrorizing citizens in Minnesota. They still have the full support of Trump, Dalmatian aficionado Cruella de Noem (who some Democrats are moving to impeach, but with a Republican controlled House that is unlikely to go very far) and the majority of Republicans.
Any Democrat demanding anything other than abolishing ICE and pursuing criminal charges is fucking weak and is helping to prop up fascism.
As Andrew Lawrence, Deputy Director of rapid response at Media Matters, so helpfully pointed out on Bluesky, “They abolished the department of education, we do not need a trojan horse to abolish ICE, we can just do it.”
The Department of Education was created in 1979. And the Trump Administration just got rid of it.
ICE, on the other hand, on top of actually being a real and present danger to the country, is much, much younger. It was established in 2003 by the same federal government that lied to the country to start a war in Iraq.
It’s actually not hard to imagine life before ICE for the majority of Americans.
“When you are asked to imagine a world without ICE, you’re basically being asked to remember where you were when Lilo & Stitch came out,” author Madiba Dennie helpfully posted on Bluesky.
ICE, we were told in 2003, would keep us safe. I don’t know about you, but when I see videos of ICE terrorizing people across the country, I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe at all.
There exist many videos of Renee Good being executed by Jonathan Ross. One of them is from Ross’s own cell phone camera. In that video, we hear Good say, “I’m not mad at you” shortly before Ross fires three times just inches away from her head. Afterwards he can be heard saying, “Fucking bitch.”
I do not recommend watching that video. Or any of the videos. They are all stomach turning. But don’t turn away from the fact that this happened. And that it will happen again and again.
President Trump, Vice President Vance, everyone at DHS, right-wing commentators — they all want you to believe that Renee Good had it coming. They are literally calling her a domestic terrorist. Claiming she tried to run over Ross with her car. There’s more than enough video evidence to show that is not at all what happened.
Renee Good was a mom. She was a wife. She was a poet. She had a dog. She saw ICE as a threat to her neighbors. She was standing up for something she believed in. She was not there to harm anyone.
To Ross she was a “fucking bitch” and someone he had every right to kill.
It could have been any one of us. It will be again.