On 7 January 2026, Renee Good was killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross; video captures a man’s voice calling her a “fucking bitch” afterwards. Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, maligned Good as having committed “domestic terrorism”. Good’s killing became a national flashpoint as protests erupted demanding justice for the mother of three.
Good’s killing is no anomaly. A Wall Street Journal investigation revealed 13 instances of ICE firing into civilian vehicles since July 2025, with at least eight people shot and two killed. ICE detentions are notorious for their inhumane conditions; 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 alone, matching a record set two decades prior in 2004.
That a white woman can be killed on camera, with impunity, and be demeaned and ridiculed in her death for standing up for her neighbors shows just how far down the road of violence the nation has gone.
It is a road most Americans do not want to continue on – recent polling shows the majority disapprove of how ICE operates. But to truly stop the damage requires going further – it means eradicating the security logic that ever made people think that arming a secret police on an ethnic cleansing mission could ever make them safe.
Formed in 2003, during the embarrassing and disastrous national excesses of the post-9/11 era – when the nation launched two ill-fated forever wars, and demonized Muslim immigrants – ICE’s mandate was overwrought and ill-considered. Its formation was part of the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which – as illustrated by its name – formally adopted the idea that immigrants were an inherent security threat to Americans.
The casting of non-white immigrants as threats is not itself new – it defines the nation’s immigration system from the first act in 1790, which limited naturalization to “free white persons”, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the whites-only racial quotas for migration that came soon after.
In the wake of the civil rights movement and the abolition of racial quotas with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the United States went from 86% white to just under 60%. And, while immigration law was race-neutral, its policies turned to criminalize increasingly Black and brown immigrants.
In 1986, Ronald Reagan coupled the country’s only amnesty program with a seven-fold increase in border enforcement – beginning an arms race that would shape border violence for decades.
But it was Bill Clinton’s 1996 signing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) set the stage for our current mass deportation system, by making deportation easier, and making more people deportable, even for nonviolent crimes. IIRIRA stripped many immigrants of the ability to argue their cases in front of a judge and closed pathways by which undocumented people could become documented.
Then came ICE. Mandated with targeting 100% of people who are “deportable”, the agency has long been unfettered by the (already limited) regulations placed on police or prisons in the criminal legal system. People in ICE detention are not entitled to a lawyer or the due process protections afforded to people within the criminal legal system.
Even before the supreme court authorized ICE to racially profile this past September, the agency had a long documented history of racial profiling and racism. US citizens have been caught in its net – including in one harrowing case where a man named Davino Watson was detained for 1,273 days, despite repeatedly telling officers that he was a citizen. He never received compensation.
From the start, ICE has been a racial project, with its armed operatives targeting Black and brown people. Its categorical mission and lack of oversight are reminiscent of slave patrols tasked with hunting down fugitives.
In the wake of Good’s killing, politicians have claimed that ICE needs better training. The problem, as they see it, is the ramp-up of ICE under Trump, with a $75bn increase in funding. But Jonathan Ross has been with ICE for a decade. Ross wasn’t one of the subpar new recruits who can’t run a mile and a half; according to testimony he gave in December, obtained by Wired, he was a firearms trainer, team leader, and elite member of its special response unit – a Swat team.
Seen from this vantage, Good’s killing is not a “mistake” but a reflection of how the agency is designed to operate. Take it from the border czar, Tom Homan, who said: “There will be more bloodshed unless we decrease the hateful rhetoric.” In other words, Homan, who received an award for his service under Obama, after introducing the idea of family separation, is telling citizens that exercising their constitutional right to speech will prompt government agents to gun them down.
Abolishing an agency that teargasses two-year-olds and shoots mothers in the street isn’t radical. It is basic human decency. Yet Democratic leadership has refused to back the call to defund ICE, with thinktanks suggesting “abolish ICE” goes too far.
“Abolish ICE” does not go far enough. We need to move away from a system predicated on violence in favor of one that centers people’s humanity. We need to ensure that every human in the United States facing a legal process – including deportation – has access to a lawyer. We need to expand our legal pathways rather than truncate them. And we need to divest from the logic that violence makes us safer – Renee Good’s killing, the killing of Keith Porter by an off-duty agent, and the deaths of Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres and Geraldo Lunas Campos, who all died in immigration custody already this year – prove without a doubt that it will not, regardless of the passport you carry.
Heba Gowayed is an associate professor of sociology at Cuny Hunter College and Cuny Graduate Center and author of the book Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential
Victor Ray is the F Wendell Miller associate professor of sociology at the University of Iowa and author of the book On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care
