Renee Good and Alex Pretti have not been the only victims of immigration agent–inflicted violence since the surge of enforcement in the interior of the country. According to the latest figures, immigration forces have killed at least eight people nationwide and wounded nine more during their extended terror campaign, while causing at least 35 others to die in detention camps.
For example, on New Year’s Eve, Brian Palacios, an off-duty ICE agent, shot and killed 43-year-old Keith Porter outside his apartment complex in Los Angeles. Porter’s family and advocates swear that he was firing an assault-style rifle into the air to celebrate the new year, not in an effort to hurt anyone. Tricia McLaughlin, chief spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claimed that Porter fired at Palacios, who in turn shot back in self-defense. According to Porter’s attorney, multiple neighbors said they did not hear the agent identify himself. Shortly after the arrival of the LAPD, Porter was declared dead.
Because Palacios was off duty, there was no body camera footage. None of the apartment complex’s security cameras captured the incident. There were no bystanders, no witnesses. The lack of clear documentation of Porter’s death certainly is a factor that differentiates his story from Good’s or Pretti’s, but the most evident distinction is his race. Porter was a Black man.
Racial disparities in police violence is a tale as old as time. As of 2026, Black people are 2.8 times more likely than white people to be killed by police, with police killing 301 Black people in 2025. Since the Black Lives Matter movement took off in the mid-2010s after the murder of Trayvon Martin, the impact of racism on policing, incarceration, and the criminal justice system has become more widely understood. There have been dozens of high-profile incidents in which Black people were killed by police, some of which were documented on video, such as the murders of George Floyd and Eric Garner. The videos of their deaths went viral online, just as Good’s and Pretti’s did.
“When we see people taking videos of police committing crimes [against Black people] … people can see for themselves what is going on,” says Nana Gyamfi, executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). But when victims of unwarranted and unchecked force at the hands of law enforcement are white, the impact is different. “We wait until it happens to the people that we think should be untouched,” says Gyamfi.
“We say, ‘My God, if it could happen to Renee Good, if it could happen to Alex Pretti, it could happen to all of us,’ when we should be saying, ‘My God, if it could happen to Silverio [Villegas González, an Illinois man who was shot and killed by ICE agents in September], if it could happen to Keith Porter, it could happen to any of us,’” Gyamfi maintains. “That’s when we should’ve recognized it could happen to any of us.”
Indeed, the Villegas González and Porter cases barely registered a blip on the national radar. But after Good and Pretti’s deaths, the Trump administration is (at least rhetorically) de-escalating in Minnesota and perhaps Maine, while Democrats are demanding legislative changes to immigration enforcement, even threatening to shut down the government if they don’t get their way.
“YOU CANNOT BRING A FIREARM loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple. You don’t have the right to break the law and incite violence,” said FBI Director Kash Patel when he appeared on Fox News last Sunday. Patel was speaking about how Pretti had been carrying a concealed weapon when he was killed by immigration agents, rhetoric that has been repeated by many senior Trump administration officials. Trump himself told reporters that Pretti “certainly shouldn’t have been carrying a gun.”
These statements are at odds with Trump’s (and Republicans’) long-standing support of the Second Amendment, specifically in the context of protests. In 2020, when Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two people at a Black Lives Matter protest, Trump offered his support for Rittenhouse’s actions. Trump was joined by gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) in defending Rittenhouse (who was later acquitted of all charges), and received their endorsement the three times he ran for president.
Second Amendment advocates have been pushing back against the Trump administration’s current narrative, claiming that Pretti was exercising his right to carry a concealed weapon. In Minnesota, there is no law that disallows permitted gun owners from bringing a firearm to a protest. What’s more, video evidence shows that Pretti never reached for, or held, his gun while being confronted by immigration agents, and was disarmed prior to being shot.
Despite being on opposite ends of the political spectrum, Pretti and Rittenhouse both received backing from prominent actors in the gun rights sphere. But this support was not extended to people of color exercising their right to bear arms.
The case of Philando Castile, an African American man, is a prime example of this double standard. In 2016, Castile was pulled over by police in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, with his girlfriend and her daughter in the car. Castile informed the officer that he was carrying a firearm, and when he motioned to the glove department for his license and registration, said specifically that he was not “pulling it out.” But within the span of 13 seconds, Castile was shot seven times at point-blank range. Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who shot and killed Castile, later stated that he believed Castile was reaching for his gun, even though he never knew where it was.
Two days later, the NRA released a benign statement, refusing to comment on the shooting. Later, a representative from the NRA said that since Yanez smelled marijuana in the car, Castile was breaking the law, which was a part of why the NRA was reluctant to defend Castile. Other gun rights groups and Republicans remained mostly silent.
The right-wing response to prominent instances of Black people openly carrying legal weapons has a long history. When the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (who famously used open-carry laws to “police the police”) staged an armed protest at the California State Capitol in May 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan and California Republicans responded swiftly. Just one month later, the California state legislature passed the Mulford Act, which prohibited the public carrying of loaded firearms, and Reagan signed it into law.
The Mulford Act also received the support of the NRA.
THE TARGETS OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT are overwhelmingly people of color; Pretti and Good were legal observers. All but two of the 35 detainees who have died in custody since 2025 were of Hispanic, Black, or Asian descent; Maksym Chernyak, who died last February, was originally from Ukraine, and Nenko Stanev Gantchev, who died last month, was from Bulgaria.
Black immigrants specifically are at high risk of incarceration, detention, and deportation due to high levels of contact with police. The numbers are staggering: 76 percent of Black immigrants are deported due to contact with police, which is reflective of the arrest and incarceration rates among Black Americans. Thus, Black immigrants experience the perils of anti-Black racism in both the immigration and criminal legal systems.
Trump has made Black immigrants (particularly Haitians and Somalis) the target of his mass deportation campaign, and has been ramping up efforts to target such communities. In his infamous debate against former Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election, Trump propped up a racist lie that Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Shortly after he reassumed office last year, Trump moved to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for immigrants from several countries—including Haiti—which is set to expire on February 3. Local authorities in Springfield are preparing for a massive 30-day ICE surge, which is slated to begin directly after TPS is lifted. According to Springfield officials, ICE has not formally communicated its operation plans, which in turn has created a culture of great uncertainty and fear.
But unlike the killings of Good and Pretti, who were both white observers, the threat of ICE descending upon yet another community to remove primarily Black immigrants has not garnered the same level of outrage.
A parallel can be drawn between the response to the Kent State shootings in May 1970 and the deaths of Good and Pretti in Minneapolis. In the aftermath of the National Guard opening fire on dozens of students protesting the Vietnam War on Kent State’s campus, the world reacted in horror. A massive wave of protests occurred on college campuses across the country, and the shootings garnered substantial media attention.
A civil suit was filed against the Ohio National Guard by the injured Kent State students and their families, which ended in the Guard paying $675,000. In the settlement, the Guard acknowledged that the shooting should have never occurred.
Ten days later, a similar incident occurred at Jackson State University, a public, historically Black college in Mississippi. For several months prior, Black students had been protesting against white motorists who would drive through Jackson State, hurling racial slurs at students, throwing objects from their cars, and attempting to hit people crossing the street. On May 14, 1970, there were no students protesting on campus. Yet police arrived at the university in full riot gear and heavily armed, after an unknown person set fire to a dump truck.
Claiming that a sniper shot at them from a women’s dormitory, the police fired nearly 400 bullets indiscriminately, killing two Black male students, and injuring 12 others. No one was ever charged for the murders, and the families of the students killed lost their civil suit, which was appealed up to the Supreme Court.
Just as Kent State and Minneapolis today can be connected, Jackson State and Springfield also see similarities. The victims in both scenarios were Black people who were and will be targeted by state-sanctioned violence ushered in by anti-Black racism. Furthermore, the media attention that the Jackson State shootings received was minuscule compared to that of Kent State, just as the impending ICE operations in Springfield are currently receiving little notice, in contrast to ICE activity in Minneapolis.
ALTHOUGH MANY DRAW PARALLELS between modern-day law enforcement and colonial slave patrols, ICE activity is actually much more similar to that of the Ku Klux Klan or bounty hunters, says Sally Hadden, a professor of history at Western Michigan University. “I see the racial profiling that’s going on, and it’s closer to the Klan than it is to the police … we don’t know who went into the Klan, because the membership rosters were secret and many times not reported.”
Today, immigration agents operate almost exclusively under the guise of anonymity: wearing face masks, not carrying documentation, and refusing to identify themselves. The similarities to bounty hunters are also unmistakable. The Trump administration has told senior ICE officials to meet daily ICE arrest quotas of at least 1,200 a day nationwide. In June, ICE told its officers that it would offer cash bonuses to agents who deport people within a week or two: either $200 or $100. This program was canceled before it could even begin, but DHS has attempted to bolster recruitment efforts through signing bonuses and student loan repayment or forgiveness.
But although ICE and Border Patrol are justifiably compared to historically racist vigilante groups, in the end, they’re more akin to police. “ICE has some legal protection, they’re officers of the law,” says Hadden. “This isn’t vigilantism so much as it is excessive force, it’s excessive brutality.”
That excessive brutality, and the links between immigration enforcement and policing, is all too familiar to Black people from all backgrounds in the U.S. Indeed, in many parts of the country, local police departments work closely with ICE, arresting and detaining people suspected of being undocumented, often using racial profiling to do so.
Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered in 2020, has become the epicenter of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. It’s a woeful reminder of how violence perpetrated by law enforcement spans time and agency, yet always impacts America’s most marginalized communities.
As the proverb goes, when white America catches a cold, Black America catches pneumonia. Or perhaps more accurately, Black America has been battling a sickness all along.