ICE Puts All of Us in Danger

On January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis — a city long enriched by immigrants and now under assault from thousands of ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents.

Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three, was driving alongside her wife, Becca. They were observing an ICE raid in their community. “We stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns,” said Becca.

Sadly, at least three other people have been killed by ICE officers in the last five months, according to The Marshall Project.

Among them was Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old father and cook originally from Mexico, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in a Chicago suburb. Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old father of two — and, like Good, a U.S. citizen — was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles.

While the families of all these victims await justice, the violence continues. ICE agents have shot at least nine people in their vehicles since September. The Department of Homeland Security has routinely invoked “self-defense” to justify these shootings, despite video and witnesses repeatedly contradicting their accounts.

From Los Angeles to Washington D.C., Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Portland, Charlotte, and now Minneapolis, violence has followed wherever Trump has dispatched immigration agents in the name of “public safety.”

On the same day Good was murdered, ICE conducted a raid at a nearby Minneapolis high school, reportedly tackling a teacher and harassing students. The next day, ICE agents in Robbinsdale, Minnesota forcibly detained a U.S. citizen and Red Lake Nation descendant for no apparent reason. Stories of new outrages emerge almost daily.

And last fall, federal agents descended from Black Hawk helicopters in a midnight raid of an apartment building in Chicago, detaining all its residents, including children. (That’s in addition to killing Villegas González — and shooting another person five times.)

This escalating violence is an outgrowth of ICE’s appalling treatment of immigrants. Across the country, people have been rounded up, thrown in deadly prisons, and ripped from their families — a trend that has sharply escalated under Trump.

Thousands of masked agents in unmarked cars — equipped with military-grade weapons and the latest surveillance technology— treat cities like war zones while executing raids at workplaces, places of worship, and schools.

Citizens and non-citizens alike have been racially profiled and kidnapped at courthouses and off the streets without warrants or probable cause. Trump has also used ICE to attack free speech, abducting and jailing students like Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Rümeysa Öztürk who spoke out against the Gaza genocide.

In addition to the shootings, 32 people died in ICE custody last year alone — and as of this writing, four more people have died in custody so far this January.

Abysmal conditions in ICE prisons, including medical neglect, have resulted in these tragic and avoidable deaths, leaving families shattered and still searching for answers. Nearly 69,000 people are currently being held in ICE prisons, the vast majority of them without a criminal record. According to ProPublica, ICE also detained over 170 U.S. citizens last year.

ICE has repeatedly denied members of Congress entry to its detention facilities, interfering with Congress’s constitutional oversight authority. Still, Congress enables ICE’s abuses through billions in funding increases. ICE’s $14 billion annual budget for detentions alone, note Lindsay Koshgarian and Sarah Lazare, is more than the total military spending of 124 countries.

Across the country, more communities are responding to our nation’s descent into lawlessness by uniting around our shared humanity and demanding justice. A recent poll shows, for the first time, net positive support — including among self-described moderates — for abolishing ICE.

These Americans understand that no one is safe as long as ICE still exists, operates with impunity, and terrorizes communities. How many more deaths will it take for Congress to hold this agency accountable?