COOL IT WITH I.C.E.

Outrage over the sickening brutality of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and their ham-handed chain of command is certainly warranted. But we Democrats, more than ever, must be more aware, more strategic with our rhetoric. Let’s recall the ruinous effect of the Democrat left wing’s well-intentioned rallying cry after the police murder of George Floyd five years ago.

PHOTO: Chloe Jones | Arizona Mirror

“Defund the police!” was a gift to MAGA, who easily co-opted it and made it their own call to arms. Smoking-gun proof, they crowed, of Democrats’ radical agenda indulging crime. It proved a deciding factor in the electoral-college victory of the most disastrous president in our country’s history.

We must not repeat that blunder with our anti-ICE rhetoric. Specifically, with absolutist terms like “Abolish ICE.”

Remember, what most of us moderates object to is not ICE’s legitimate mission of enforcing U.S. immigration laws. We understand that those laws exist for a reason, and that folks who break those laws should be held accountable. That includes deporting them…some of them. 

PHOTO: Getty Images

If we want to reform that mission, democracies do that by advocating and enacting legislation, not by outright sabotage.

Where the Trump regime has gone off the tracks is in their weaponizing this agency of Homeland Security to exact vengeance just on Trump’s political enemies. Their indiscriminate, Gestapo-like tactics. Their pointed denial of due process—a guarantee clearly mandated in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. 

And the well-documented brutality of some ICE agents who've been attacking not just the targets of their search for illegal aliens, but folks merely witnessing and documenting their abuses.

PHOTO: Jose Luis Magana/AP

So, yes, let’s keep calling out ICE for these illegal, immoral excesses. But drop the strident “Abolish ICE!” demands. What we want is for them to do their jobs, but in a way befitting a civilized, self-assured country, indeed one founded and grown by immigrants. 

This time, let’s be smarter. Show some discipline. Make sure our language suits our complaint. How about “No ICE Gestapo!”, “Unmask ICE!”, or “Stop Weaponizing ICE!”? You get the idea.

This time, make MAGA write their own call to arms. 

ONE SMALL STEP – The Indefensible Murder of Renee Good

One step. 

That’s all it would have taken Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross to spare Renee Good's life last Wednesday, Jan. 7. 

She was a young protester simply following an ICE order to leave the area. As she was doing so, other agents ordered her out of her car. Good likely saw this, as anyone would, as a bunch of armed Gestapo thugs with a reputation for “disappearing” folks set to drag her from her vehicle for no apparent offense. 

Yet she responded with a warm smile and the words, "That's fine, dude, I'm not mad at you," and started to pull away.

        Ross decided the penalty for (disobedience) was death.

In the second or so it took Ross—standing not in front of the SUV as Trump regime officials insist, but near its front left headlight—to draw and point his weapon, he could have simply taken one not-very-big step to his right.

PHOTO: Screen capture from Agent Jonathan Ross's cell phone video

And guess what, that is exactly what he did; he took one not-very-big, not-all-that-desperate step to his right. No ramming, little or no contact, no threat to him or anyone else. In fact, Good was clearly starting to turn to the right, away from Ross.

It appears her only infraction was disobedience. And Ross decided the penalty for that was death. Not a warning shot; not a shot to disable the vehicle or its unarmed driver. Three shots, at point blank range, into Renee Good’s head as she drove past without touching him.

I don’t really care what kind of a day Agent Ross was having. Nor his reported previous experience with a suspect trying to flee. What I and other compassionate human beings care about is that one small step.

Why wasn't that step, one that clearly took him out of harm's way, not enough for him?

TRUTH: NO CONSEQUENCES
This senseless tragedy, this brutal murder, is just the latest in the deluge of lawlessness inflicted on our once-great country by the authoritarian Trump Regime. What's more frightening than these cretins' deadly ineptitude is the near certainty that, with Congress and the Supreme Court all bought and paid for, none of them—especially the Rambo wannabe who blew Renee Good's brains out—will ever face justice.

America, please prove me wrong.