A good friend of mine recently had a small but scary encounter with ICE**. She lives in Portland, in a residential neighborhood with a significant Hispanic/Latino population, and saw an ICE agent driving around. She took a picture of the vehicle which she is lawfully allowed to do, in fact protected by the First Amendment. The agent’s response? He turned around, drove close to her, rolled down his window, pointed to his vest, then talked smack to her before driving off.
That sounds creepy, at best. One thing he didn’t do, which ICE agents have been doing, is take pictures or video of protesters and other citizens lawfully monitoring such activity by armed agents of the federal government in the streets of their cities. Had that agent done so with my friend, she would have ended up in the federal database being compiled of protesters and observers … who ICE & DHS now routinely and grossly refer to as “agitators,” “rioters,” and “domestic terrorists” for engaging in peaceful, lawful activity protected by the First Amendment.
Maybe that kind of horrible behavior by federal agents sounds surprising to you. Maybe you haven’t been following this kind of news closely in recent weeks. Maybe you first started paying more attention after the news of the horrific shooting of Renee Good got so much attention. Now there will be more attention after the emerging news of the shooting of Alex Pretti, another citizen shot in cold blood by federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis. In this case, Mr. Pretti appears to have been exercising his First and Second Amendment rights while monitoring the public activity of federal agents. Whatever one thinks of his choice to do so, he did not deserve summary execution.
And that’s just the tip of the spear. The actions of ICE and other federal officials – particularly in DHS leadership and at the White House – have been un-Constitutional, unlawful, and amoral for weeks now. Which is part of the reason polling about ICE looks like this, even *before* this weekend’s events:
Anyone remotely familiar with politics will tell you those numbers are terrible for the Trump Administration (and Republicans in Congress), particularly the numbers among independents. Immigration used to be one of Trump’s strongest issues. It’s in the toilet now because, like the economy & the inflation – the other issue persuadable voters picked Trump on in 2024 – Trump is getting crushed, because simply put, he’s not very good at this:
Impending electoral doom in the 2026 midterms aside for Republicans in Congress (because that’s what numbers like that mean), just why exactly are many Americans protesting in cities like Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Portland, Chicago, and Minneapolis when federal crackdowns are taking place? Because federal agents are acting outside the bounds of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the laws of the United States, and basic human decency and morality.
Radley Balko is one of the best writers in America on the topic of criminal justice reform and recently wrote about pre-Alex Pretti events with ICE. Here’s a gift link to his full column. Balko notes the shocking degree to which DHS officials are blatantly lying. Not exaggerating, not stretching the truth, not saying something in the moment that is later proven incorrect; they’re blatantly lying every time something bad happens with an ICE agent. The shooting of Renee Good just happened to put a fine point on it because video disproving DHS statements became public so quickly:
It isn’t just the lying; it’s that the lies are wildly exaggerated and easily refutable. All the evidence we’ve seen so far, including a meticulous Times forensic analysis of the available footage, makes clear that at worst, Ms. Good mildly obstructed immigration enforcement, disobeyed ambiguous orders or perhaps attempted to flee an arrest. None of those are capital crimes, nor do law enforcement officers get to dole out punishment in such cases. At one point, President Trump justified her shooting by claiming she’d been “very disrespectful” to immigration officers. That isn’t a crime at all.
And it isn’t just Renee Good or now Alex Pretti, DHS/DOJ has had to walk back their blatant lies about other recent shootings:
We started to see this in the way the Trump administration responded to previous shootings by immigration officers, including of Carlitos Ricardo Parias in Los Angeles and Marimar Martinez in Chicago. Administration officials quickly declared those shootings justified — and righteous — with hyperbolic language similar to that used after Ms. Good’s killing. Those claims would also later be disproved by witnesses’ accounts and other evidence. The government eventually dropped the charges against Ms. Martinez. A judge dismissed Mr. Parias’s charges with prejudice, meaning they can’t be brought again.
But it’s not just the shootings and killings by ICE agents that are bad – though those are quite horrific enough. It’s the regular unlawful, unethical, and amoral behavior being seen daily that frequently violates federal court rulings and DHS’s own policies and procedures:
It’s clear that immigration officials are routinely breaking the law. There’s persuasive evidence that they’ve been explicitly racially profiling people in Minneapolis and elsewhere. (The Supreme Court effectively permitted profiling people by race and other factors in a September ruling.) They’ve been requiring U.S. citizens to produce proof of their citizenship on demand — also a violation of federal law. And we’ve seen U.S. citizens dragged from their cars, homes and workplaces, then arrested or detained.
We’ve seen the unlawful arrest and incarceration of Somali refugees who have legal permission to be here, warrantless raids on private homes and reports that detainees are being denied access to lawyers. And we’ve seen routine excessive force against protesters, from casual use of chemical irritants to physical violence to firing less lethal munitions at them from close range. These are all violations of the law. Not only is there no indication that the administration has investigated any of this, but the videos it posts to social media even seem to celebrate it.
That’s why a lot of Americans are pissed. Because armed agents of the federal government are wantonly and cruelly engaged in unlawful activity against American citizens in the streets of our cities. One can argue about proper immigration policy and the related laws we should have. That’s a necessary debate, the details of which Americans can disagree on in good faith. But no American who values their freedom and believes in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the fact federal law enforcement should not unlawfully trample on those rights, has every cause to be seriously pissed off.
Why? Because we have eyes. Because we can see our government is blatantly lying to us about the murder of our fellow citizens by armed federal agents. And I’m so old I worked for Republicans back when the GOP actually thought that was a problem.
**Current immigration crackdowns under Trump 2.0 are being conducted by ICE – Immigration & Customs Enforcement – as well as other federal agents, including Border Patrol. For linguistic sanity and brevity, I’ve generally shorthanded that down to “ICE” throughout this column.
Eric Earling 