On September 12, 2025, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent (ICE) shot and killed Silverio Villegas Gonzalez in Franklin Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The 38 year-old father of 3, a line cook with no criminal history, had lived in the Chicago area for nearly 20 years. He had just dropped off his children at school when he encountered an ICE traffic stop. Witnesses say he put his car in reverse. ICE claims he resisted arrest and attempted to flee. He was shot through the back of the neck, and dragged from his vehicle by ICE agents. To this day, no ICE agents have been arrested in connection with his killing.
On December 31, 2025, the Los Angeles Police Department claimed Keith Porter was firing bullets into the sky from an AR-15 to celebrate New Year’s Eve in the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge. I spend every New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles and people fire off guns and fireworks for days in advance.
An off-duty ICE agent who lived in the same apartment complex confronted Porter. No one save the ICE agent seems to know what transpired next but the off-duty agent shot and killed Porter.
ICE agents have no jurisdiction over citizens of the United States. They cannot arrest citizens. They cannot detain citizens, or anyone, without probable cause to believe a person might be in the U.S. without proper documentation.
"The fact that Keith Porter's murderer was not arrested and to give up his service weapon on that very night is unacceptable," said Joseph Williams of Black Lives Matter.
Thirty-two people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2025, making the first year of the second Trump Administration the agency’s deadliest year in more than two decades. At least two more have died in 2026.
They died of seizure and heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, tuberculosis or suicide. Families and lawyers have alleged they died of neglect, after repeatedly trying and failing to get medical care.
On January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good of Minneapolis on video which, by Thursday, January 8, had been seen by much of the planet. But most Americans—myself included—could not have told you that ICE had shot and killed at least two other Americans before her, let alone the number and names of ICE detainees had died in custody.
The reason for this, I believe, is two-fold.
The first is video evidence. The entire world saw Jonathan Ross shoot and kill Renee Good. None of the other deaths at the hands of ICE or in their custody was caught on video.
The second is racism. Renee Good was white, a beautiful blonde relatively young woman. All of the other human beings killed by ICE cruelty or neglect were either people of color or detained by ICE as unlawful immigrants.
As any person of color can tell you, murdering Americans is something the U.S. Government has done since before its very existence. In the name of Manifest Destiny, the U.S. murdered millions of indigenous people. Through its defense of the slave trade and its enforcement of slavery itself, the U.S. murdered countless Black people. Anti-immigrant pogroms, which come around throughout our history like clockwork whenever capital needs a new boogeyman to distract workers from their own oppression, have killed more. Even Constitutional law scholar Barack Obama came up with a way legally to justify the extrajudicial murder of 5 U.S. Citizens while they were in Yemen, including a 16 year-old boy born in Denver. Trump killed an 8 year-old girl from the same family, also a U.S. citizen, almost immediately after taking office in 2017.
The U.S. Government killing Americans, regardless of legal status, is not new. Claiming that the victim was the actual perpetrator is not new. When I trained as a street medic to support nonviolent demonstrations in support of civil rights I was warned that I would be charged with a crime equal to or greater than any I suffered at the hands of police. If I was assaulted, I would be charged with assault; if they nearly killed me, I would be charged with attempted murder. This is the same playbook the Administration is using with regard to Renee Good.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - George Orwell, 1984
Nevertheless, Good’s murder seems to have been a wake-up call, at least to white Americans. We’re finally beginning to realize their race, sex, and class will not protect them from the State’s fascist agenda.
Yet, American reactions to Renee Good’s murder have largely terrified me. Why? They generally fall into one of three categories.
She deserved it. Whether due to their brainwashing in the cult of Trumpism, their hatred of women, their homophobia (Good was with her wife at the time), their flat-out ignorance of the law and our Constitutional rights, or all of the above, a disturbing number of Americans have come out in favor of Jonathan Ross’ actions on January 7th. As of this writing, more than $400,000 has been raised in a GoFundMe for him. I am stomach-sickened just writing this.
She should have followed orders. Ross shouldn’t have shot Good to death, but she should have done what he told her, regardless of its legality. This response is born in the amygdala, the brain’s seat of fear, and is rooted in a lie we tell ourselves: that we will never suffer Renee Good’s fate if we just behave differently. If we always do what any law enforcement officer or other government official tells us, regardless of the law or our rights under the Constitution, if we just OBEY THE STATE AT ALL TIMES, we will be safe. The evidence surrounding Renee Good’s murder gives the lie to this.
Yes, the ICE agent murdered an American citizen, but in our protests against this we must give the State absolutely no reason to crack down on us, hurt us, kill more of us, or impose martial law. If we do, we have only ourselves to blame. We will be responsible for making the situation worse.
The sane, empathic Americans of Numbers 2 and 3 are making a fatal mistake. They are reacting to this atrocity, this crime, this fundamental violation of all that it means to human, like abused children, the powerless subjects of an insane patriarch, rather than adults with agency and a moral responsibility to confront evil.
Acting from a place of trauma and terror is understandable. This was traumatizing and terrorizing. But if the President wants to impose martial law and suspend elections, he will find a way. And it will not be your fault.
We must not yield to terror, no matter what. Terror is the authoritarian state’s primary and most powerful weapon.
"This is the larger meaning of federal agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol in U.S. cities. While they are attacking primarily people of color, the message they carry is directed at all Americans: you must do what the Trump administration and its loyalists demand,” historian Heather Cox Richardson said after Good’s murder.
The cruelty, the violence, the unlawful, renegade madness, the murder is precisely the point. They want us terrified and unwilling to resist.
“The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.”
-- Heinrich Himmler, architect of “The Final Solution.”
The Administration’s support for Jonathan Ross has only emboldened ICE. Since Renee Good’s murder, ICE shot a couple in a medical clinic parking lot in Portland, and has begun conducting house-to-house raids in Minneapolis. The Administration announced it is sending another 1,000 ICE agents to Minneapolis, in addition to the 2,000 already there. At least 5 indigenous Americans in the Minneapolis area have been assaulted and/or kidnapped by ICE, who apparently lack utterly the capacity for irony.
Among them was Anishinabe 20 year-old Beto Ramirez, of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, whom ICE tailed in a black SUV on his way home. Frightened, Ramirez called his aunt and then pulled into a grocery store parking lot to wait for her.
Video showed agents striking Ramirez multiple times on his head and face and dragging him out of his aunt’s vehicle.
“I was complying with them and they just started acting crazy,” he told ICT. “They were trying to make it seem like I’m some kind of murderer, like I did something wrong.”
Ramirez said multiple times he tried informing the agents he was a US citizen and a descendant of a federally recognized tribe, but his words fell on deaf ears, he said.
After brutally and abusively detaining him, they lied to him and told him he was going to be charged with assaulting an officer, that he would spend the rest of his life in prison. “I felt like I was kidnapped,” he said.
What, then, must we do?
Understand the historical moment we are in. We’re not “sliding into fascism.” We’re there. When government agents can abduct, torture, deport to third countries and kill people with impunity, we’re there. If you want to understand what is happening right now in the United States, you need to study the history of Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Pinochet’s Chile, El Salvador during the U.S.-backed juntas and death squads, Argentina during the “Dirty War” of the 1970s.
I also strongly suggest you check out this excellent interactive map which shows and describes every armed incident between ICE and Americans in the past year.
Organize offline. Get to know your neighbors, even the ones you disagree with. Listen to each other, try to understand each other. Feed each other’s bodies and strengthen each other’s spirits. Find your strengths. Inventory your communal resources, assets, and weaknesses. Build communication tools off line/without phones.
Develop mutual aid organizations and a strike fund. A general strike is the best nonviolent tool we currently have at our disposal, but we lack the organizational infrastructure, the strong civil society needed, to mobilize such a thing on short notice. As anyone who has even been in a union will tell you, no one is going to wait until after the revolution to feed their children. There needs to be a strike fund, managed by people whose integrity is beyond question, to provide for the people who lose their jobs, their health care, or are endanger of becoming homeless, if we want people to take such radical action.
Know your rights under the law. Just to be clear: this is not an impenetrable shield which will ensure your safety, let alone survival. But you should know your rights anyway on the off chance the law might work on your side.
In recent months, some officials have attempted to discredit “Know Your Rights” education by portraying it as subversive or a tool for evading law enforcement, according to the Immigration Resource Council. “Tom Homan, President Trump’s “border czar,” stated that immigrants are “very difficult to arrest” when they are “educated” about their rights.” That goes for the rest of us too.
It is not illegal to inform people of their rights. In fact, the freedom to share information—particularly legal knowledge—is a cornerstone of democracy.
The U.S. Government is murdering civilians in the street with impunity. Things are not going to get better from here by waiting and hoping. Hiding, playing dead, living in fear will only add fuel to the fire.
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - Gandalf the Gray.
“Time? What time do you think we have?” — Saruman the White.
The aliens aren’t going to save us, the Democrats aren’t going to save us, another country inflicting regime change isn’t going to save us; hell, Jesus himself probably couldn’t save this country because an awful lot of his so-called followers would jump at the chance to arrest him and execute him for being a homeless Palestinian immigrant.
We must resist, organize, educate ourselves, lift up one another, care for another, and confront this evil everywhere and fight it without quarter. We must take back this country from the oligarchs, organized criminals, and fascists.
And we must do it now.
“Power concedes nothing without a struggle. It never has and it never will. The struggle may be violent or it may be nonviolent, but it must be a struggle” - Frederick Douglass
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