Either ICE Is Abolished or It Will Kill Many More Renee Goods

Minnesota is just the beginning of ICE's transformation into a right-wing death squad. But it can be the end

Edited by Sam Thielman 

THERE IS NO reforming this. 

There is no re-training in deescalation tactics, no reequipping with less-lethal weapons, no transformative changes in leadership, no structural reorganization that has a hope of stopping an agency that recruits with white-supremacist messaging, demands nonwhite Uber drivers show them their papers, abuses people in detention, opens fire with "chemical irritants" at a school in response to a snowball, invades peoples' homes without a warrant, kills witnesses for the slightest perceived disrespect or noncompliance, and then calls them terrorists. 

I have been warning in print since at least 2012 that the Department of Homeland Security took a permissive attitude toward terrorism committed by white people. That permissiveness was not, as some typically frame it, hypocrisy. It has always been and always will be exceptionalism, a statement made through policy about whose political violence counts as terrorism and whose never can. 

Over many, many years, the response from the most powerful people in politics and journalism to such permissiveness has been avoidance. The blood on Renee Good's airbag is the wages of that avoidance. 

We are far past the stage of permissiveness with white-supremacist violence inside DHS. We are at the stage of active, enthusiastic commission of it. 

ICE and its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, mean to inflict terror upon nonwhites, regardless of citizenship status, and to remove them from the country. Their ambitions do not stop there. The murder of Renee "Dude, I'm not mad at you" Good by the ICE agent Jonathan "fucking bitch" Ross shows that they view anyone who even slightly resists them as their enemy. These agencies, created and shaped by the War on Terror, recapitulate the prevailing right-wing sentiment after 9/11 that the institutions and political forces that do or could restrain the War on Terror are themselves complicit in terrorism. 

As many have observed, the seemingly confusing decision by the administration to highlight footage of Good's execution that clearly shows Good posed no threat to Ross makes sense as a statement to its base about who is worthy of death: a woman who is slightly in their way, and whose wife displays deserved and very mild contempt for the invading force out to kidnap her neighbors. The message is: Wouldn't you also want to put three through that fucking bitch's forehead? 

ICE, and I include CBP in that shorthand, has long deserved abolition for what it does to migrants. Read this piece of mine. And this one. And this one. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody just in the last year, the highest total in ICE's 22 years of existence. It so happens that the dehumanization of migrants has been so thorough, and gone so unchallenged, for so long that now ICE and its allies are determined to fatally silence random normies who aren't comfortable with the deportation force unleashed on their streets. It should never have gotten to this point. But here we are. 

Kristi Noem revealed more than she thought when she gave a press conference behind a placard that read ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS. ICE has always been inherently tethered to nativism. There is no rationale for a federal deportation agency on the hunt in the interior of the country that does not conceive of the immigrant as a national-security threat, and it can only survive through the politics that frames immigrants that way. The creation of such an agency had to be laundered as a counterterrorism force. Its operations, redolent of the exceptionalism referenced above, unavoidably enforce a racist social hierarchy. But never before in its 22 years of existence has DHS declared that it means harm, with lethal force on the table, to Americans with different politics. Now it is declaring that while deportations are cool and all, what would really be based is to operate as a death squad. 

The brazen nature of Noem's slogan immediately conceals the fact that Ross is living and Good is not. ICE never lost "one of ours," not once, no matter how much Tom Homan wants to play victim. Government agents who wear plate carriers to kidnap day laborers and Uber drivers are not the ones in danger. They are the danger. They are looking for any excuse to show you what "all of yours" means. This is the necrotic tissue of a rotting United States, displayed proudly.

An awful lot of people in politics and journalism who have avoided this rot are going to persist in doing so. The folly of the Obama and Biden people, in their unwillingness to confront the rot they presided over, was to think they could continue in constrained form the operations of the War on Terror without fueling the nativist politics of the War on Terror. Such people are going to consider this newsletter edition hysterical. When they seek to govern again, they will do so by attempting to channel the outrage generated by this moment while rejecting abolition. They must have Renee Good's bloody airbag shoved in their faces until they have no choice but to champion abolition or get out of its way. There can be no accommodation of a security agency that targets the public. Any politician or take-merchant who seeks such accommodation brings us closer to the day when ICE puts three between the eyes of someone you love. 

It is not the politician nor the journalist shaping resistance in Minnesota. (By contrast, ICE has a pattern of following the lead of influencers who post racist lies in vertical video.) As we have seen in Los Angeles, Charlotte, Chicago and elsewhere, the people under siege have not waited for the elected officials of the feeble political opposition to lead them. The Democratic Party, consistent with its War on Terror form, is proving itself incapable of leading people out of this danger. From the ranks of those who are defending their neighbors will emerge organic leaders whom the party will, if recent history is a guide, at first resist. The victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York shows that the people will lead their own way over the objections of the party's functionaries. It also shows that socialism beats fascism, and so that must be the choice, because it is the choice. But first socialism and abolition must prevail against the capitalism and letter-writing of the Democratic Party in the undercard match. 

ICE must be abolished. CBP, at an absolute minimum, must be restrained by legislation from operating within the hundred-mile-from-a-port-of-entry envelope that current law defines as "the border." DHS must be broken and scattered to the bureaucratic winds. Ross must be charged and prosecuted for Good's death. Everyone within the ICE detention chains of command where 32 people have died just in the past year must to be investigated for neglect, or worse, and charged accordingly. Ahead of abolition—but never as a substitute for it—DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that Ross "acted according to his training," so that training, with its lax permissions for lethal force exposed in earlier iterations by Lila Hassan, must be investigated and revealed to the public. ICE's ballooning budget and its recruiting plus-up, which many journalists who cover this stuff presume is drawing from right-wing militias, must be stripped from the federal budget. It should be illegal to make money off a deportation force. 

These are no longer policy options. They are acts of basic self-preservation against an agency that openly pits itself against the populations of the cities it invades. 

It has similarly been instructive to watch the right rationalize the execution of a white woman and struggle to understand why Good and many like her find ICE intolerable. The highest levels of the U.S. government have called her a domestic terrorist, a reaction so instinctive 25 years after 9/11 that its laziness and cynicism are its most distinguishing characteristics. They have leaned into weird psycho-sexual explanations about sublimation fantasies to strapping hypermasculine ICE agents. They cannot fathom the concept of solidarity, no matter how organically it emerges before their eyes amongst average Americans whose instincts are to protect their neighbors. 

All that confusion, whether genuine or propaganda, reflects a fundamental truth.  It's one that a slogan like ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS both knows and fears: There are far more of us than there are of them. 

FROM HIS FOREVER-CELL AT GUANTÁNAMO, the man known as Abu Zubaydah has won a "substantial sum" (though undisclosed) from the United Kingdom government in exchange for him dropping a civil action holding UK security services complicit in his well-documented torture. 

"We are still nibbling at the edges of injustice," Abu Zubaydah attorney Helen Duffy told FOREVER WARS. "This compensation is certainly a step forward. But much depends on whether it helps catalyze action on Guantánamo by states and others that is long overdue. As you will know, the U.S. courts have thrown out comparable damages claims on the basis of excessive approaches to 'state secrecy.'"

The U.K. agreement follows a 2023 recommendation from a United Nations panel that Abu Zubaydah not only be freed but compensated for the abuse his captors inflicted upon him. He is no closer to freedom after that recommendation—or, for that matter, this settlement—than before it. But you will learn much more about the man himself in THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN. 

IN THE YEARS AFTER 9/11, one of the highest-profile men used as examples of the Islamic Enemy Within was the Northern Virginia Muslim lecturer Ali al-Tamimi. al-Tamimi, shortly after the attacks, encouraged a group of youths, shorthanded as the Virginia Paintball Jihad, to train in Pakistan with the Kashmir-focused terror group Lashkar e-Taiba, ostensibly in defense of Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan. For this, and not any act of violence nor in furtherance of any plan for one, al-Tamimi was convicted in 2005 of soliciting treason and other charges. 

On Friday, following a series of successful appeals, an appeals court voided all remaining charges against al-Tamimi. (At least two of the "Paintball Jihadis," Seifullah Chapman and Masoud Khan, had their charges dropped on appeal in 2018.) Wrote Judge James Winn, "Ali Al-Timimi was convicted based entirely on words he spoke in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks—words that were inflammatory, disturbing, and deeply offensive, but that urged no concrete criminal plan and did not provide operational assistance for the commission of any particular offense." 

This is what it looks like when hysteria fades. But it can never conceal the fact that the hysteria was strong enough to steal 20 years from this man's life.