ICE Is Not an Accident: What Would Martin Luther King Jr. Do Now
Image by Bradley Andrews.
I was thirteen when I watched the Rodney King beating on the evening news with my father. The grainy footage was relentless and impossible. I credit that evening as my political awakening. I asked countless questions and received hours of patient answers. What has stayed with me is not only the horror of what was shown, but the collective astonishment that accompanies recurring episodes of graphic violence. The lesson in outrage is familiar: society confronts violence only when the public bears witness to its spectacular and undeniable reality.
In 1944, at age 15, returning by bus from an oratorical contest in Dublin, Georgia. King and his teacher, Mrs. Bradley, were seated when white passengers boarded. The bus driver enforced the cruelty of Jim Crow laws and ordered Black passengers—including King—to give up their seats. He stood up and obeyed the unjust law. He later described this moment as one of the angriest of his life, saying he was “the angriest I have ever been in my life,” and that the humiliation stayed with him for years. We all have memories that imprint into our souls.
Seeing ICE terrorize neighborhoods and detain innocent people—citizens and noncitizens alike—should be as morally jarring as “whites only” counters, hospitals, and water fountains once were. It is the kind of injustice that, when explained plainly, still shocks the conscience—especially of children, who have not yet learned to treat cruelty as normal. It will not be forgotten anytime soon.
Recent events make clear that this is not an aberration. In the past week alone, federal officials have doubled down on an enforcement strategy that prioritizes speed, visibility, and volume over preparation or restraint. The resulting violence is treated as unfortunate fallout rather than foreseeable consequence. That framing is not just misleading—it is false. What we are witnessing is not a failure of execution, but the execution of a plan.
I feel the cycle repeating. Shock, grief, and calls for accountability emerge immediately. One case involves police officers beating a limp body: another, a federal agent firing “defensive” shots through a driver’s-side window. King’s experience of racist America and our observations of 5-year-olds abducted in their driveways are the same; the state makes excuses, talks about the law, and blames victims. Coverage fixates on physical details, evidence, and personal histories.
Public violence demands resistance—it is part of our moral economy—but the selectivity of that attention is troubling. We are fluent in responding to abrupt emergencies and far less equipped to confront the slow boil of cultural and structural violence. King would praise the whistles in Minnesota while condemning the dog whistles from MAGA republicanism.
We should trust our eyes. There is nothing “self-defense” about the ICE shootings, and the administration’s claims that the victims are domestic terrorists (or anything else) are false. But the fatal shots were delivered months earlier, when the administration intentionally produced predictable suffering. Who did this? Why?
The answer is not found at the moment a trigger is pulled. It begins earlier, in offices where executive orders are drafted, training timelines shortened, and numerical targets elevated over human judgment. When preparation is compressed, oversight weakened, and escalation rewarded, violence is no longer accidental—it is structural. The question is not whether harm will occur, but who will be blamed when it does. When “defensive shots” were fired, again, in the morning hours of Jan. 24th Governor Walz responded: “Minnesota has had it. This is sickening. The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.”
Focus will be rightly placed on questions like, he was on the ground, how is that defensive? But how did thousands of agents of the state end up there? How is it that 85% of MAGA Republican and 64% of non-MAGA Republicans say ICE is “Just Right” or “Not Aggressive Enough?” Will there be another clear cover up?
Martin Luther King Jr. insisted that state violence must be judged by the conditions that make it normal, not merely by the individuals who carry it out. He resisted narrowing moral judgment to individual perpetrators because doing so allowed institutions to deflect responsibility onto “bad apples.” Decades of promises about body cameras and training have served as distractions from administrative recklessness and policy design. In what society, King would ask, is this behavior considered normal?
In Beyond Vietnam, King warned that a society reveals its moral commitments not through slogans, but through budgets and policy. A nation that “continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he argued, “is approaching spiritual death.” The same logic applies here: priorities hardened into legislation produce predictable harm. As King put it, “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.”
This outcome was produced by an administration that turned neighborhoods into war zones for political purposes. Choosing escalation at every opportunity yields predictable results. Bureaucracy and executive orders kill far more effectively than individuals animated by avarice or malice. Valuing order over justice and privileging loyalty over morality is no longer an inflection point; it is openly rewarded.
This violence is bureaucratic before it is physical. Sending armed agents into neighborhoods without adequate training is not an accident—it is policy. Calling resulting deaths “failures” or “oversights” sanitizes decisions made in advance, for political gain, at the expense of human life. ICE in 2026 resembles the Birmingham Police Department in 1963. Kristi Noem and Bull Connor share the same playbook of state power suppressing dissent through intimidation and force. When 5,000 children walked out of school to protest segregation, Connor unleashed snarling dogs and fire hoses. Many children carried toothbrushes, knowing arrest was likely.
In the margins of a newspaper, King penned Letter from Birmingham Jail. Denied proper writing implements while held in solitary confinement, he wrote on scraps of paper—napkins and toilet paper among them. His message on the urgency of nonviolent direct action could not wait. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he wrote, calling on people to break unjust laws and accept the consequences.
Donald Trump has not pulled the trigger, but his immigration policies cause needless pain, suffering, and death. They are grossly unpopular: a 2025 PRRI survey reports that only three in ten Americans support his immigration agenda. That unpopularity helps explain the strong reactions from neighbors, friends, and community members. Training adds another layer of risk. What once took roughly five months has been reduced to forty-seven days. Increased operational complexity paired with reduced preparation is a recipe for disaster. If a parent gives a four-year-old a gun, they are blamed. When an administration sends undertrained agents into the streets, it should be blamed as well.
All elected officials must be held to account. Softened language—“accidents happen” or “nothing we could do”—lets everyone off the hook. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey did not mince words, telling ICE, “Get the F___ out!” Leaders can defund reckless operations, demand proper training, and insist on accountability. Citizens deserve competence, not excuses. Split-second decisions about detention and lethal force unfold in real time; adequate preparation is essential to protect both civilians and agents.
Cutting corners to staff the streets was a bureaucratic choice driven by headlines and numbers. Policies and procedures are violent in themselves, and they can be reversed—but that reality is missing from much of the coverage. Armed agents terrorizing neighborhoods is a serious problem, but focusing only on those who pull the trigger will not prevent future harm. Real change requires confronting the policies that put those agents and their weapons in neighborhoods in the first place.
King was a moral authority and a tactician, but above all, he was a man of action. In 2026, he would make clear that ICE is not part of the promise of any American Dream. The promise of opportunity revoked by a society that blocks justice while demanding law and order, King repeatedly warned, creates the conditions under which violence becomes more likely—not because people are impatient, but because justice has been systematically denied.
King did not respond to state violence by asking for better public relations or gentler rhetoric. He demanded disruption. He organized boycotts, marches, and mass refusal. He forced institutions to confront the cost of maintaining unjust systems. If he were alive today, he would not ask ICE to behave more humanely while carrying out inhumane policies. He would demand that those policies be stopped—and he would insist that elected officials choose between order and justice, knowing they cannot have both.
Structural violence is slow, often invisible, and lethal. Spectacle cannot be our measure of accountability. To prevent harm, we must confront not just bullets, but bureaucracy—the policies and political calculations that set violence in motion. Only then can outrage become action: defunding reckless operations, restoring meaningful training, and rejecting policies that treat communities as testing grounds for political theater.
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