For years, the politics of US immigration enforcement rested on an implicit bargain: this is about them, not us. The raids, the detention centres, the armed agents: these were tools pointed at a specific population. If you were a citizen, if you were white, if you were armed and law-abiding, you weren’t affected.
Minneapolis has shattered that bargain in the space of three weeks.
On January 7th, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good through the window of her SUV. Good was a 37-year-old white woman and a mother of three. The Department of Homeland Security claimed she tried to run over officers. Multiple bystander videos show her vehicle reversing and turning away when Ross opened fire.
On January 24th, a Border Patrol agent shot Alex Pretti on a residential street. Pretti was a 37-year-old white man, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, a licensed gun owner with a valid permit to carry. CNN’s video analysis shows him standing in the street holding his cell phone, not his weapon. When agents tackled him, one officer removed his holstered gun. Then they shot him.
The demographics are worth stating plainly. Non-Hispanic white Americans make up roughly 58% of the US population. According to Pew Research, 42% of American households own firearms, with the highest rates among Republican and Republican leaning households (55%). These are not marginal categories. These are the people who felt they were exempt from government overreach.
Renee Good was not an immigrant. Alex Pretti was not undocumented. He was not threatening anyone. He was recording federal agents on his phone and directing traffic. He was, by any measure, a “good guy with a gun”, the very archetype that Second Amendment advocates insist will be protected by their rights.
Instead, his gun was taken from him while he was pinned to the pavement, and then he was killed. Shot in the back. 10 rounds were fired at an unarmed man in rapid succession.
What Second Amendment defenders haven’t done is reckon with the obvious implication: the armed citizen is not protected from the state. The armed citizen is a target if the state decides they are.
Federal agents now operate with expansive authority and explicit encouragement from the executive branch. White House adviser Stephen Miller told officers on Fox News: “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you is committing a felony.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension reported that DHS representatives blocked them from the shooting scene, even with a judge’s signed search warrant.
When the institutions meant to constrain state violence are overridden, the violence does not stay contained. It expands. It finds new categories of people to harm. This is not speculation. It is the pattern of every authoritarian escalation in modern history.
The question for everyone who felt distant from this issue, who believed that immigration enforcement was someone else’s problem, is whether they can still maintain that distance. Renee Good was a white mother. Alex Pretti was a white gun owner. They are both dead at the hands of federal agents whose official accounts have been contradicted by video evidence.
No credential protected them. No demographic category kept them safe. And unless something changes, there is no reason to believe it will protect anyone else.
The conclusions many will draw will be terrifying. Scared into silence and submission. That’s what the Regime wants.