Their names are now etched into the minds of hundreds of millions of people; Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the former shot dead in her car by an ICE agent, the latter surrounded by agents and shot in the head by two of them after they pepper-sprayed and beat him with the spray can. The situation involving ICE has now reached a level of controversy that even the typically Trump-aligned Republicans have come out against the Trump administration’s actions in regards to the shooting.
It is important to state first that these killings are a moral catastrophe. Good had shortly prior been letting ICE agents through an intersection, and she was driving away when an ICE agent made the decision to shoot her, and Pretti was non-violently defending a woman who had been shoved by an agent before he was pepper sprayed and swarmed by agents who then fatally shot him. Video evidence proves this, and yet the administration has embarked on defamatory PR campaigns to slander the victims and paint them as domestic terrorists. It is repulsive behavior and has crossed every line under our most fundamental ideals such as the rule of law and social contract.
However, what is truly disturbing is the fact that out of everyone who has been shot, not just by ICE but by other law enforcement forces, that somehow these two are somehow so much more important than the other victims, that their killings necessitate 24/7 coverage, national protests and now a partial Government shutdown while the other victims of ICE homicides are largely forgotten. Why don’t those deaths warrant this caliber of resistance? What is different about Good and Pretti?
Here is the problem: When it comes to killings of US citizens and civilians by law enforcement, when it comes to the cases of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, when it comes to other violence such as the beating of Rodney King, the 1985 MOVE bombing, the firehosing and police dog attacks on civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s, the bottom line is this is not new. Law enforcement has a long and well documented history of violence against innocent Americans. The most important reason that this is getting coverage is because opposition to Trump and his administration is widespread and because both people shot are white.
If you doubt this, then ask yourself this question: Can you name one of the seven hispanics who were murdered by ICE agents in the streets, or even one of the 32 people who have died in ICE custody? 41 citizens have died by ICE’s hands, yet the overwhelming majority of coverage has been dedicated to two white individuals. Do the hispanic lives of not matter as much as the white lives of Good and Pretti?
This shooting does not illustrate the growing tyranny of the United States government. The only thing it is showing is that now white people are not safe from the police either, and that the tyranny and terror the United States Government has waged against blacks, against hispanics, against queers, against any and all minorities in the United States is not limited to those minorities anymore. The coverage of this event is a disgusting miscarriage of justice that utterly fails to recognize or document the frequent, institutional nature of these two killings and how it represents our country as a whole.
