How Many More Deaths Will It Take for Congress to Hold ICE Accountable? |
On January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement 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 US citizen—was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles.
Across the country, more communities are responding to our nation’s descent into lawlessness by uniting around our shared humanity and demanding justice.
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 DC, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Portland, Charlotte, and now Minneapolis, violence has followed wherever President Donald 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 US 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