A columnist Monday described how the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis have revealed how federal immigration agents are trying to eliminate witnesses — but "they cannot eliminate us all."
The Guardian's Moira Donegan wrote in an opinion piece that Pretti was among thousands of people in Minnesota resisting the occupation of ICE in his city, trying to defend his neighbors from masked men and documenting the rise against the Trump administration.
"What these people are doing is protecting their neighbors, seeking to help those more vulnerable with gestures that are ordinary, effortful and kind," Donegan explained. "These gestures have also become dangerous. With the slaughter of Good, and now of Pretti, it has become clear that ICE does not want to be watched. They seem to be targeting ordinary Minnesotans – especially the helpers, the observers and the growing masses who are standing up to oppose them. The result is killings of citizens in broad daylight."
By hiding their faces, ICE agents have attempted to conceal any responsibility for their attacks, Donegan noted.
"It is of course well known by now that ICE agents do not want to be seen," Donegan wrote. "They cover their faces; they drive unmarked cars; they have been told by their own leadership not to wear insignia stating that they work for any of the deportation agencies when they are off the clock. The gangs of masked, armed men committing anonymous violence in the streets of Minneapolis of course evoke past instances of racial terror in America – like the masked men of the Ku Klux Klan, who also did their best to eradicate racial undesirables from American communities."
ICE agents have shown they are most afraid to be humiliated and identified, the writer explained.
"Perhaps ICE’s homicidal rage at the Americans who film them represents this same refusal to countenance being seen, being witnessed, being documented doing what they are doing to innocent people," Donegan wrote. "In that sense, perhaps their actions towards observers like Good and Pretti exhibit a sense of shame. Some, like Tom Nolan, a former Boston police commander and criminology professor who once advised the DHS on civil rights issues, are calling Pretti’s death at ICE’s hands a stone cold murder. You could also call it the elimination of a witness."