Every American presidential administration has points of interest and tactics to attain its political agendas. Consistently, immigration has risen to the top of the political hierarchy of critical issues. In more recent years, the Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden administrations have each had a variety of ways to address undocumented immigrants. However, none have been as destructive as that of Trump’s second term in office. In Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, he swore to lead the greatest mass deportation in American history, excitedly proclaiming that “the day [he] takes oath in office, the migrant invasion ends” at a North Carolina rally.
During his own term, Obama declared that deporting approximately all eleven million undocumented immigrants is not realistic. He promised to focus on arresting immigrants with criminal charges and illegal newcomers, leaving out the law-abiding immigrants that have lived here for decades. Most other administrations have had policies similar to this. Trump’s administration, on the other hand, has a very different view on illegal immigration: all immigrants, regardless of their criminal history, are vulnerable to detention and deportation. Trump has weaponized the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and villainized all immigrants. Trump has tried to turn the public against immigrants, calling Somali immigrants “garbage” during a White House Cabinet meeting and spreading false claims that Haitian immigrants had eaten pets in Springfield, Ohio during his 2024 presidential debate against Kamala Harris on national television.
In a United States Supreme Court case, the judges—influenced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh—ruled that ICE agents could stop and question people based on race, ethnicity, or language spoken. However, the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees equal protection under United States law. The New York Times reports that arrests or detainment of immigrants in their communities, rather than in jail, have increased by four times and the rate of arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions has increased by six times since Biden’s presidency.
The budget of ICE has skyrocketed under the Trump administration with $85 billion being allotted to the agency. In past years, the budget for ICE has been ten billion. Additionally, training of ICE agents has been under question recently. In an interview with an ICE veteran published in The Atlantic, the veteran attested that new ICE recruits only spend about four hours on de-escalation training: training that could have prevented the murders of innocent Americans.
Anti-immigration sentiment among members of Trump’s party and ICE arrests have increased while conditions in ICE detention centers are deplorable. According to The Guardian, ICE detention centers have had excessive overcrowding and cases of medical neglect, as attested by lawyers, detainees, and families of those in custody. The cruel conditions of detention centers run by an administration so unconcerned with the well-being of immigrants has led to many deaths, including the violent murder of Cuban immigrant Geraldo Lunas Campos. On January 3, guards at an ICE detention center located at Camp East Montana, Texas, killed a man detained in the facility. His autopsy concluded that the cause of death was asphyxia due to compression of the neck and torso by ICE agents. Lunas Campos did have a criminal record, but that does not justify his murder. Eyewitness accounts, official reports, and guards’ claims of the scene vary and claims do not agree on whether Campos was provoking the agents. Regardless, Campos told the ICE agents that he could not breathe before his death and became unresponsive long before he was killed. The ICE agents should have been able to effectively de-escalate rather than resort to killing someone who had been incapacitated. This murder at the detention center shows deep cracks within Trump’s immigration agenda that cannot be overlooked.
Trump’s use of ICE violence has extended far beyond just immigrants; ICE is now targeting people who simply oppose Trump and his beliefs. Trump sent two-thousand ICE agents to Minneapolis, a city with a Democratic mayor, in a state with a Democratic governor. Agents have stopped almost anyone they see as a potential undocumented immigrant solely based on appearance. Parents are pulling their children out of school out of fear that they will be deported or accosted by ICE.
The standoff between ICE and the community reached a tragic breaking point on January 7, 2026 when violence unfolded in the streets of the city. Renee Nicole Good, who had lived in the United States her entire life, was fatally shot in her car by an ICE agent. On that Wednesday morning, Good was driving back to her house after dropping her six-year-old son off at school. On a street less than a mile away from the site of George Floyd’s murder, Good was stopped by three ICE agents, one of which tried to reach through her car window and ordered her to get out of the car. Another agent, Jonathan Ross, stepped in front of the vehicle. In the exchange, Good told the officer, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad,” and began to accelerate her car away from the scene. Immediately, Ross reached over and shot Good three times, claiming the shooting was in self-defense.
In The New York Times footage analysis, it is clear Ross deliberately stood in front of an actively-running car, but was not hit. In the video footage, conversation can be heard between a bystander and ICE agents after the shooting. The objective facts are that the bystander, who happened to be a physician, tried to check Good’s pulse and give assistance but was denied permission to give care by ICE agents. There is a constitutional right to medical care when needed and Renee Good was illegally denied of that. The most vile part of this act is the immense effort the Trump administration has put into covering up and twisting Good’s killing. No matter the storyline that Trump fabricates, the facts show that an ICE agent acted inappropriately and murdered an unarmed and vulnerable woman. Trump falsely claimed that Good had “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over” Ross, even as the video evidence shows the officer walking away unharmed. Soon after the murder, Trump wrote, “It is hard to believe he [Ross] is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital,” to paint Good as a villain in an attempt to justify an unjust death. Additionally, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem described Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism.” In an egregious act of injustice, the Justice Department has ordered an investigation of Renee Good’s mourning widow, Rebecca Good, for potential links to anti-ICE groups. Ross, however, has not been federally investigated and instead, has had a GoFundMe created that has amassed over $750,000.
In response, Rebecca Good has issued a public statement, explaining her own perspective of her wife’s brutal murder. She claimed that Renee believed there is “kindness in the world,” and that people must “find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow.” Rebecca consistently described Renee as someone who “sparkled,” someone who embodied goodness and chose peace over conflict. Rebecca declared, “We had whistles. They had guns.” She is left with three children to raise, cruelly forced into a moral hypocrisy where she must teach her children to trust in a world that has irrevocably violated Renee’s most-highly upheld values of kindness and compassion.
Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was fatally shot during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. Video footage across many different news outlets depicts Pretti approaching officers after they had shoved another protester to the ground. In the recordings, he is holding only a phone and appears to be attending to the other protester when the agents pepper-sprayed him and forced him to the cold pavement. At no point in the video does Pretti make any aggressive movements toward the officers, raise a weapon, or otherwise pose an imminent threat before he is tackled and shot. Federal agents initially claimed the officer fired in “self-defense,” and asserted that Pretti was resisting and attempting to reach for a weapon, yet the video evidence very clearly shows otherwise. In reality, Pretti was holding his phone in one hand, and blocking the pepper spray from his eyes with the other. Pretti did have a gun that was concealed on his person, as well as a valid Minnesota permit for that firearm, but made no attempt to reach for it during his attack. Seconds later, Pretti was shot over ten times by multiple officers, and later pronounced dead at Hennepin County Medical Center. It was only after Pretti was deceased that officials discovered the gun on his body. A man who devoted his entire life to helping others was killed for showing basic compassion. From this event, it is clear that the lines between public safety, state violence, and responsible gun use have been completely obliterated. White House advisor Stephen Miller posted on X after the shooting that Pretti was “a would-be assassin [who] tried to murder federal law enforcement” and a “terrorist.” The attempts to villainize Pretti alter the narrative to fit their agenda, despite the clear-cut facts surrounding Pretti’s murder. In both the Minneapolis shootings, state investigators were initially blocked from investigating the scene. The deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti will mark a defining and devastating moment in American history, but will certainly not be the last. As ICE breathes down the neck of each of the 342 million Americans, the Trump Administration can make one thing unmistakably clear: safety is no longer guaranteed to any American citizen.
More recently, the detention of five-year-old Minnesota citizen Liam Ramos has demonstrated the very blatant lack of morals of ICE officers and the Trump Administration. The facts are clear: officers pulled a preschooler away from his own driveway, used him as “bait” to probe his home, ignored desperate pleas from the adults of the household, and transported him across the country to a Texas detention center. This was an act so grotesque and inhumane that it simply cannot be defended by procedure, law, or policy. Liam Ramos is not a criminal, threat, or even undocumented, yet the officers treated him with such a lack of due process that it overtly contradicts the principles our nation was founded on. To allow for five-year-olds to be treated as collateral damage is to abandon all respect for basic human rights and decency.
Similarly, in Minneapolis, after ICE agents surrounded two-year-old Elvis Tipan and her father’s car in their own driveway and broke the windows while the child was still inside, the two were taken into custody. Despite a court order requiring the toddler’s immediate release, the officers put her in a vehicle without a car seat and flew her to a detention facility in Texas. ICE officers did not allow for the child’s mother to take custody of her daughter during the arrest, and later falsely claimed that she refused to cooperate. Eye-witnesses, however, claim that she was nearby, terrified and pleading to be allowed to take her daughter. A government that ignores judicial authority, terrorizes a family, and detains a child who cannot yet speak for herself is asserting dominance through violence and cruelty. In the Trump Administration, for ICE officers, court orders are optional and human rights are negligible the moment they interfere with power.
We, the people of the United States, must recognize that the terror that ICE has inflicted upon our fellow citizens is no longer an issue that regards politics, but is now an issue that regards very elementary morals; political division is part of this problem, not its solution. The events that have played across Minneapolis and continue in ICE detention centers represent the sad truth and current state of America. The American people cannot watch idly as constitutional rights are blatantly disregarded and people, regardless of citizenship, are forced into submission. As a nation, we must unite to advocate for the basic human rights that are being denied to thousands. With Trump in power, we are in the midst of an era where violence is not an aberration, but a calculated strategy. It is used to exert control via propaganda, intimidate communities into silence, and rally the nation around the fear of immigrants as the common enemy.
