“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” ― George Orwell
She wasn’t supposed to be there. She had no right to be there. Being there was her first mistake.
Well, not exactly. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects the rights of its Citizens to convene, assemble, and protest in public. These are separate protections, repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court.
So, if we’re being honest, Renee Good was free to be in public and free to protest.
Yet, here’s where the plot thickens. Because many who use this argument don’t seem to realize that the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee, Jonathan Ross, had a prior altercation with a vehicle six months earlier that left him hospitalized. At least, we get this medical insight directly from Vice President J.D. Vance.
The problem with this is that it proves via medical history that Jonathan Ross SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN THERE. Obviously, he was not psychologically healed enough to return to duty. This is evidenced by his excessive force and extreme use of vulgar language toward a woman he did not know. Legally speaking, this ruins any defense he might have in a court of law. If tried, the very fact that he was unfit due to prior incidents that may have traumatized him, any good lawyer worth this salt will use this to throw the full weight of the law onto him.
Mind you, at the state level, this also leaves him vulnerable to incarceration because such a ruling excludes presidential pardons. In effect, he could not be pardoned. The lawyers would likely talk about how he was mentally unfit to be there, how his trauma wasn’t resolved, and how it was reckless for him to be put back in the line of duty, where he was clearly not able to de-escalate a situation where other POLICE officers and legal authorities are saying the shooting could have been easily avoided.
But, I’ve heard it said, she was merely there to harass ICE, and so she F*CKED AROUND AND FOUND OUT.
Actually, no. ICE is not civil service. They are not required to pass any civil service test that would allow them to train as law enforcement, and as such, are dangerously ill-equipped to handle scenarios of engagement where there is civil unrest. Their job requirements as immigration officers do not include engaging with the citizenry, and, therefore, as Federal agents, they are ANTAGONISTIC to civil peace. They do not serve the public or the public’s best interests.
Taking this into consideration, we realize that if Renee Good was indeed harassing them (ICE), it would be a crime of a misdemeanor.
That is the most she could be charged with before the incident. And if the ICE agent were properly trained, like LEOs are, they would not have escalated events. Public Law Enforcement is trained to de-escalate such scenarios. And even though the DOJ website says that ICE agents are trained to de-escalate things, technically speaking, this seems NOT to be the case when ICE’s engagement with the public is concerned, as evidenced by the numerous videos showing exactly the opposite.
We know that ICE is being used ANTAGONISTICALLY and poses a threat to civil society, because they are not even following their own rules or guidelines, and seem to break the law when it is convenient for them.
This is not how the police act. This is not how firefighters act. This is not how EMTs act. All these public agencies act on behalf of the public’s interest with the goal to keep us safe, to ensure laws and safety rules/regulations are being followed, and helping us when something goes wrong.
ICE agents are not beholden to civil service rules, although they must still obey Federal and State Laws. As such, ICE, not being beholden to civil safety, are agitators, since they effectively and deliberately disrupt the public’s civil safety. In fact, they challenge the very notion of civil society because of the antagonistic relationship they deliberately create between themselves and the public and the public’s safety.
If this wasn’t bad enough, I hear many people–and let’s be honest, by people I mean mainly right-wing conservatives–defending ICE’s existence to begin with. But their very existence is anti-democratic for three principal reasons.
First, the term “Illegal Alien” is a made-up concept, like ethnic race is a made-up concept. Legally speaking, there are only undocumented people. Getting documents is only a matter of knowing where to file the proper paperwork. But there are relatively few programs that help immigrants find the information they need to legally take these initial steps and legalize their status.
Yes, unfortunately, this means these things tend to frequently get overlooked. Yes, many immigrants overstay their visas and don't acquire the proper visas to remain in the country. This act isn't criminal in itself; it's a civil offense. It's sort of like how a parking ticket is a civil infraction, not a criminal one. If I accidentally park in a restricted spot and get a ticket, it doesn't make me an "illegal driver." It doesn't make me a criminal.
They ("illegal aliens") are expressly NOT criminals under the law. They are undocumented people who need compassion, understanding, and a little bit of help. And this brings me to my second point as to why ICE is wholly unnecessary. Undocumented people are a civil matter, not a criminal matter.
Remember, ICE was created to HUNT terrorists and capture, confine, and deport those who were deemed potential terrorist threats to the United States after the events of 9/11.
Remember the Homeland Security Act of 2002? Remember when Republicans and Democrats decried government overreach when the Patriot Act was passed? Why would the government need access to ALL OF OUR DATA? Do you remember Edward Snowden? Do you remember why the U.S. Government was so hellbent on ruining his life? Because he was the whistleblower who showed the American people that the U.S. Government and the NSA had a global surveillance program that was spying–not only on foreign interests, including America's allies–but on its own people as well. Something that, prior to the Patriot Act, was unconscionable.
But I’m getting off track. My point is, we already had immigration officers, we already had border patrol, we already had the U.S. Marshals Service, we already had the F.B.I.. But instead of using these agencies, this administration chose to quadruple its spending and give ICIE new paramilitary-style equipment and turn them into over glorified commando bounty hunters. Yeah, not exactly the wisest spending on the government's part.
Where was DOGE then? If you’re worried about your taxpayer dollars going to school meal programs so that school children from impoverished or low-income families can eat, but you’re not concerned about the $75 BILLION dollars spent on ICE for 2025, I don’t know what to tell you. I think DOGE could have made some better cuts other than Medicaid and school lunches. But that’s just me. $45 BILLION spent in 2024 simply to build more detention centers? Seriously?
(Side note: I’m often troubled by the notion that people aren’t more upset by the cost of these detention centers, which, by the way, are not for the secure capture of terrorists. Shouldn’t that give you pause? But, if these detention centers remain, U.S. taxpayers are the ones who are going to foot the bill for decades to come. I really don’t see how a taxpayer would be fine footing an endless bill that is basically supporting an ineffective policy vs. desiring to support policies that actually benefit their fellow mankind, such as helping sick people and helping to feed kids. I guess I’m too damn compassionate for my own good.)
Why, might we ask, weren’t the already established agencies utilized? Why were taxpayer dollars wasted to bring back and resurrect an anti-terrorist group of Federal agents instead of, say, using the F.B.I. or the U.S. Marshals? A couple of reasons. The current administration, under Trump, has been antagonistic toward these agencies. As such, Trump effectively reconstituted ICE so that he could use it for gathering up and deporting what he labeled as “Illegal Aliens.” (This terminology is highly problematic, which I’ll explain further below.)
Secondly, Trump only hires yes men, and there are too many Constitutional loyalists in these legacy agencies who would not break the law on his behalf. Trump needed to revamp an agency and pump it full of loyalists and yes-men who would blindly follow his orders. Not let any of that civil law or patriotic constitutional business get in their way of carrying out his orders–whether they are Congressionally approved or not. Hint: they’re not. Hint: Yes, this makes it highly illegal. Yes, this means it's government overreach, regardless of if its being used on “illegals” or not.
Here’s the thing, though: Conservatives have statistically been shown to support the ideas of dictatorships and are fine with the idea of living under oppression. Numerous sociological studies have been conducted showing this exact phenomenon, and you can Google it if you don’t believe me.
I’m not here to quote you a bunch of hard-won statistics, though; rather, I merely want to point out that the urge of Conservatives to stand up and defend the illicit activity of the President or of ICE agents is completely understandable. They’ve been conditioned to think totalitarianism is an acceptable tradeoff for security–for safety.
I personally don’t think it is. But I tend to lean Left.
And before you call me a bleeding heart liberal or libtard, I am not liberal. Some of my positions lean liberal, yes. But I also hold centrist and right-wing/conservative views. It really depends on the issues being discussed, and I try not to be overly limited in my ideological political thinking. What I mean by this is, I don’t think there’s just one political party or one effective political position to take that will always align with individual political policies. Sometimes, multiple positions from a variety of potential policies, across a wide-array of political beliefs, is the key to finding a well-balanced political worldview.
Which brings me to the third reason ICE shouldn’t exist in the first place. ICE is a byproduct of RACIST IDEOLOGY.
Imagine finding yourself in a foreign country where nobody speaks your language, and you’re just trying to get by. Let me ask you, without looking it up or using a translator, what is the form in Japan that you’d need to fill out to establish residency?
Without knowing Japanese, how would you know what the form is called or where to find it? Do you pick it up at the Embassy, the Consulate, the City municipality, or the district municipality, or the post office? Who’s going to help you find the information needed to track this information down? How would you contact them? How would you gather this information?
If you can’t expect yourself to simply know the Japanese words for these technical documents, you cannot expect other people to know them for our country. That's just deductive reasoning. Expecting all immigrants to automatically know these things and simply know what to do isn’t actually fair. You're putting these people at a disadvantage and then punishing them for it because you cannot sympathize with their situation. You just see them as a burden, not as a neighbor. You see them as an illegal, not a human being. Might you, knowing this, be capable of seeing how this might be problematic?
“Illegal Alien” is a rage bait term to get you to think they are doing something illegal. Immigration is a civil matter, though, not a criminal matter. So, even if they are in breach of our laws, it’s not a criminal act. It’s a civil matter that can easily be corrected by being compassionate enough to put yourself in someone else's shoes and realize that helping them find the immigration office so they may fill out the proper paperwork isn’t the end of the world.
But, although “Illegal Alien” is a made-up term intended to demonize immigrants, just as race is a made-up concept to categorize human beings as categorically different so we can claim supremacy and inferiority when we are practically genetically identical at the level of our DNA, it doesn’t mean racism isn’t real.
Inegalitarian, baleful, xenophobic racists have frequently and consistently used the term “Illegal Alien” pejoratively to create a wedge in public policy and discourse to deliberately interfere with how we view and treat foreigners in this country. If you fell for that ruse, I’m sorry.
All right, I’ll boil it down to its simplest denominator. If you think we should treat foreigners badly, by rounding them up, capturing them, tearing them apart from family members, disrupting their home life, causing physical harm or mental anguish, and then sending them out of our country… If you think ICE is necessary even when it's outgrown its purpose... If you think any of this is in any way justifiable, I’m sorry to inform you that you ARE A RACIST.
That's not hyperbole. That's not sensationalism. That's not defamation. And it's certainly not rhetorical. It's a direct consequence of holding such beliefs. If you don't want to be considered a racist, don't hold fast to racist ideologies. It's as simple as that.
The president, his cabinet, and his personal hires are seemingly all racist. They constantly use polemical speech. They rely on hyperbole and spin to get their points across. They barter in lies on late-night television. They cry fake news when called out on them. They disrupt civil discourse by talking louder and by talking over you, they shift the goal posts when convenient, they deny facts and logic, and they predictably double down on blatantly false accusations including the spread false information, and they propagate divisiveness by constantly trying to rile up and divide the public into two ideological camps, even though America is much more intricate and nuanced than that.
I’m sad to see so many Americans be casually okay with this line of rhetoric. That, somehow, in their twisted narrative, "Illegal Aliens" are everything wrong in this country or that they're bringing this country down. That's nonsense. It's the equivalent of rhetorical bile. And it's racism at its most hateful.
The America I grew up in during the 80s seemed endlessly diverse. Racism existed, but people were about communities. Immigrants always made the strongest communities, and as long as they stayed to their little part of town, so to speak, the racists pretty much kept to themselves. The America I grew up in had Republicans and Democrats who welcomed immigrants. I watched the Ross Perot, George Bush, and Ronald Regan presidential debates on live television, where they applauded and welcomed immigrants into America.
I grew up in an America where there was still a whisper of the American Dream and where there were no Federal Agents shooting women in the streets because they looked at them the wrong way.
This current administration's style of discourse is anti-Democratic and untrustworthy. They constantly gaslight, gish gallop, rage bait, obfuscate, and duck and dodge every criticism or question that would reveal their position to be little more than a house built on sand.
At the end of the day, it saddens me when more people can’t see that they are being manipulated. If not the algorithms on the Internet, then certainly by the political grandstanding of the current administration. It saddens me when the people who support this administration's policies believe it's somehow just, good, or right to think like this. It's sad to me that the diverse America that welcomed immigrants that I grew up in has turned into a brood of tribalistic, bile-spewing, hate-mongers. I thought we were better than this.
I think people get too entrenched in this ME VS. THEM mentality. What we really need to be asking ourselves is, why am I being positioned in this way–and how am I letting them use me in a way that is beneficial to their agendas rather than my own?
Some will disagree with many of the points made here, and that’s fine. I think they’d be hard-pressed to find rational counterarguments or refutations to my argumentation, but they could certainly try. I am always willing to change my mind.
As I opened with one of my favorite lines from George Orwell, I’ll close by quoting one of his most haunting insights.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” ― George Orwell, 1984
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