ICE Was the Point
This racialized policy didn’t come out of nowhere. But it harms everyone.
Yesterday, a woman was killed by a federal immigration officer after being given mixed and contradictory signals about what she was expected to do while expressing her right to assemble and speak out in her neighborhood. Immigration and Customs Enforcement claims the officer acted in self-defense. However, the video of the incident tells a different story: the woman attempting to back her car up and leave the area, the officer positioned beside the vehicle, not in its path, and a gun drawn and fired while she remained seated in the driver’s seat.
This cascading failure should never have happened. It began with a decision that should not have been made at all, deploying armed federal agents into a residential neighborhood to enforce a draconian immigration agenda built on racial demagoguery and widespread public misunderstanding of how immigration actually works. When enforcement is designed as spectacle rather than narrowly tailored public safety, confusion is not an accident. It is the foreseeable outcome.
What happened yesterday is not simply the result of one reckless action. It is the downstream consequence of an American public that allowed racial grievance politics to carry someone to the Oval Office for a second time. That kind of politics not only harms the people it is intended to target, but also harms the people who are not. It erodes restraint, degrades judgment, and reshapes institutions in ways that put everyone at risk. When fear becomes policy, accountability is the first casualty.
The woman killed was Renee Good, a mother of three. She was likely trying to live an ordinary day while responding to something deeply wrong unfolding around her. Now her children are growing up without their mother. This is the cost of refusing to name what has animated the modern GOP for decades, racism and sexism, and of pursuing failed political strategies that attempted to accommodate those forces rather than confront them during the pivotal election of 2024.
The result is a partisan, militarized federal force operating in civilian spaces, exactly the condition that alarmed the framers of the Constitution, whose political imagination was shaped by standing armies and the Quartering Acts. Their fear was not theoretical. It was rooted in lived experience with armed power unaccountable to the communities it occupied.
The most unsettling reality is that even a future transfer of power may not be enough to undo this system. A federal bureaucracy fueled by xenophobia, racial grievance, and personal loyalty will not be dismantled easily or cleanly. Reversing it risks further division. Leaving it intact risks normalization.
For now, we hold Renee Good in our thoughts and prayers. But grief alone is not enough. The conditions that produced this killing did not begin yesterday, and they will not end with one investigation or one election. In the next section, I trace how we arrived here, and why dismantling this system will be far harder than stopping the man who built it.
This Was Not An Accident. This Was A Pattern.
One of the ways we arrived at this moment is through the media’s long mishandling of the immigration debate, specifically its refusal to challenge the obvious racial asymmetry at the heart of it. The panic was never about immigration as a global phenomenon. It was about people from the Global South seeking asylum. Yet much of the legacy press treated that distinction as impolite to name, laundering racial grievance through vague language about “law and order” and “border security.”
That failure created fertile ground for political manipulation. A candidate was able to rise by exploiting those blind spots and stoking fear among revanchist populations, as well as appealing to people unfamiliar with the immigration system or convinced they had “done it the right way,” thus presenting racialized exclusion as neutral enforcement. Parts of the media ecosystem amplified this framing until it became normalized. Others accommodated it in the name of balance. Eventually, some were absorbed by it outright. The result was not just electoral success, but political capital built on fear.
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