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Scapegoating Turns America’s Streets Into a Shooting Range for ICE and Border Patrol
The first thing officials in the Trump administration did after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti was to blame them, not the trigger-happy ICE and Border Patrol agents nurtured by Trump’s scapegoating.
Feb 01, 2026
I don’t remember ever hearing federal officials so quickly, in unison, blame the victim as after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7 by an agent of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. And as quick after the killing of Alex Pretti two weeks later on January 24 by agents of US Customs and Border Protection, or Border Patrol.
The Border Patrol before principally operated within 100 miles of the US border, hence its name. That changed with the so-called immigration enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) under President Donald Trump. With the lines between ICE and Border Patrol blurred, when protesters shout “ICE Out,” they mean both.
Both killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. That is, ICE’s transformation under the Trump administration led to their killing. A metamorphosis in which scapegoating is one motivating force to justify scaling up ICE and its deployment into the Twin Cities, tagged by DHS “Operation Metro Surge.” Victim blaming is one manifestation of the Trump administration’s overarching scapegoating propaganda machine.
German documentarian Neal McQueen reminds us of the poisonous functions of scapegoating in his comparison of the rise in Germany in the 1920s of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary force Sturmabteilung (often called “Brown Shirts”) and today’s ICE. “No moral equivalence is asserted,” he writes of his comparison. What he does do is highlight how both organizations, his words, “constructed their ideological purpose through scapegoating.”
Where was the mind of ICE and Border Patrol personnel shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good? Was it the mindset of a paramilitary force in combat with those at odds with MAGA and its ideology?
Scapegoating is nothing new in the US. The Ku Klux Klan (“KKK”), one example, has been a paramilitary group supporting its purpose via scapegoating. As historian William Trollinger wrote, while “the original Klan concentrated its animus against the newly freed slaves and their Republican Party supporters,” the Klan growth in the 1920s relied upon an “expanded list of social scapegoats that included Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.”
But the KKK hasn’t been an armed force within the executive branch of the US government as is ICE. With ICE becoming more so with the ballooning funding and personnel expansion during President Trump’s second term.
President Trump has proven himself a master of using scapegoating to maintain and grow his political power, as Jess Bidgood at the New York Times chronicles. His targeting Somalis in the Twin Cities in Minnesota a latest example.
A video posted in December 2025 by a conservative YouTuber alleged fraud in some Somali-run childcare centers. Allegations refuted in follow-up investigation by the state. But damage done, as President Trump and his minions ramped up attributing fraud to all of Somali descent in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the majority American citizens.
What the video missed was actual fraud occurring during the Covid-19 pandemic. And the biggest fraudster then was the convicted white female founder of Feeding Our Future. That fraud involved providing a publicly-financed nutrition program with false counts and invoices of meals provided to children. Some of Somali descent participated in the fraud, but only around one-tenth of 1% of all Somalis in the Twin Cities.
Repeatedly we hear the focus of Trump’s immigration enforcement is deporting “the worst of the worst.” The word “worst” said referring to criminal and violent undocumented immigrants. But analysis at the Cato Institute indicates these are not the vast majority of immigrants being rounded up and deported. In practice, as America has witnessed in Minneapolis and elsewhere, “worst” means not being white.
Scapegoating is evident in the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In likely nurturing trigger-happy ICE and Border Patrol agents. And in blaming Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti.
Within two hours of Renee Good’s killing, the victim blaming started, as analysis by ABC News documents. A post on X by DHS stated Ms. Good “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over” ICE agents “in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” And President Trump joined in with his own post that day writing:
The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer… it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.
Vice President J.D. Vance also jumped in, blaming Ms. Good, as did DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. All the victim-blaming lies, revealed as such in the video analysis by New York Times, that by the Guardian, and others.
When the officer shot through Ms. Good’s open driver-side window, he clearly wasn’t run over. Instead, he was positioned with Ms. Good as a target he couldn’t miss. And after all the shots were fired, you can hear him say “fucking bitch.” He then walked away, casually as if leaving a session at a shooting range proud to have hit the bullseye.
Looking at the video of Ms. Good’s killing, I can’t help but think the ICE agent already knew he had immunity before Vice President Vance announced it later that day. Knew when he shot with his gun pointed through the window at Ms. Good’s head.
A private autopsy performed for Ms. Good’s family revealed she was shot three times; in the breast, forearm, and head. The wounds of the breast and forearm were deemed not immediately fatal. But the head wound was deemed more immediately so.
And why was Ms. Good’s killer taking video of her license plate. Probably because he and other agents were told to collect identifying information on protesters; protesters joining an enemy list with Somalis. And, as should be expected, as in all wars enemies get killed.
Victim blaming continued with the killing of Alex Pretti. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, held a news conference a few hours after this fatal shooting saying:
…an individual [Alex Pretti] approached US Border Patrol agents with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun. The agents attempted to disarm the individual, but he violently resisted. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, a border patrol agent fired defensive shots…This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.
And at her news conference the same day, DHS Secretary Noem’s victim blaming was identical word for word.
But video shows Alex Pretti did not brandish his legally-carried gun. Nor violently resist. With instead holding his hands up above his head, cell phone in one hand. What violence there was happened when Border Patrol agents threw him to the ground and held him down.
One agent appeared to step back with Mr. Pretti’s gun in his hand having removed it. Then gunfire heard. Not by one officer, but two. The first shots finding Mr. Pretti motionless lying face down. Then agents stepping back fired a rapid blast of more shots into Pretti’s still body, analysis indicating a total of 10 shots fired.
The preceding description is consistent with the moment-by-moment video analysis of Alex Pretti’s shooting by CNN. And, also, by ABC News and the New York Times. And with sworn testimonies of eye witnesses.
When I watched videos of Mr. Pretti’s killing, I couldn’t help but wonder how the agents felt when firing their rapid volley of bullets. Was it to them, as the scene intensely felt to me, like a moment of target practice as if at a shooting range?
Where was the mind of ICE and Border Patrol personnel shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good? Was it the mindset of a paramilitary force in combat with those at odds with MAGA and its ideology? More that than of agents performing disciplined immigration enforcement?
Rep Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) seems to wonder that himself in his letter on January 12 to Attorney General Pamela Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noems, writing:
DHS seems to be courting pardoned January 6th insurrectionists. It uses white nationalist “dog whistles” in its recruitment campaign for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that appear aimed at stirring members of extremist militias… which participated in the insurrection… ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6th and were convicted of their offenses [but Trump pardoned]?
Aside from recruitment messages already winking to extremists, Washington Post reported on future ICE recruitment plans (also discussed on Democracy Now) to reach attendees at, for instance, gun shows and NASCAR races among other venues.
After the killing of Mr. Pretti, the killing of Ms. Good not sufficient alone, President Trump said he was “de-escalating” the surge of ICE and Border Patrol agents into Minnesota “a little bit,” replacing Commander Greg Bovino with Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan.
Then again, an ICE agent also told an observer in Minnesota just days after Alex Pretti was killed, “You raise your voice, I will erase your voice.”
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The Disappearing Face of Authority
When those who enforce the law hide their faces, democracy itself is under threat. But history shows people can—and have—pushed back.
Jul 23, 2025
In Los Angeles, they came at night, black helmets, tactical gear, no names, no insignia. Protesters were grabbed off the streets and loaded into unmarked vans. No one knew who they were. No one could ask. Their faces were hidden. Their power, absolute.
We are entering an era in which the agents of state power no longer have faces.
Across the country, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in upstate New York to militarized police responses in Atlanta, Chicago, and Portland, Americans are increasingly confronted by law enforcement officers whose identities are concealed. Their names stripped from badges. Their faces obscured by masks, goggles, and helmets. Their authority rendered anonymous.
The stated rationale is familiar: protection from doxxing, retaliation, or harassment. And in an age of hyper-polarization and digital vigilantism, those concerns are not entirely unfounded. Former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Ali Soufan warns, “Visibility puts a target on your back in the age of online extremism.” That may be true. But the inverse—faceless authority—puts a target on democracy itself.
The mask is not a neutral tool. It is a statement. And it is one that a free society cannot afford to make lightly.
At what point does protecting the enforcer obscure the principle of enforcement?
A democracy policed by faceless enforcers is not merely a tactical adaptation. It is a philosophical departure.
In literature, masks symbolize both freedom and concealment, rebellion and repression. Oscar Wilde famously quipped, “Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” But there’s another truth lurking beneath: Masks don’t just enable expression; they also enable erasure.
Social psychologists have long understood this. In 1969, Stanford researcher Philip Zimbardo conducted a now-classic experiment in which participants donned hooded robes and were instructed to administer electric shocks to others. Unsurprisingly, the masked participants delivered higher shocks, exhibiting greater aggression and reduced empathy.
Even children grasp this dynamic. In a Halloween study, masked kids were significantly more likely to steal extra candy than their unmasked peers. A hidden face, even for a moment, grants permission to break the rules.
When combined with state power, anonymity can override individual conscience and turn human beings into instruments of group will.
The history of masked violence in America is not speculative; it is foundational. The Ku Klux Klan’s hooded anonymity wasn’t incidental. It was central to their terror. By day, Klan members were judges, sheriffs, or civic leaders. By night, they became ghosts, free to punish without consequence.
In Nazi Germany, SS and Gestapo agents wore masks during night raids, not only to instill fear but also to psychologically distance themselves from their crimes. In Chile under Augusto Pinochet, secret police donned balaclavas while abducting dissidents. In Iran under the Shah, SAVAK agents masked their faces during torture sessions to erase accountability.
This tactic is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes: concealment of identity to enable unchecked violence.
It is crucial to approach such parallels with care. No one is saying that masked ICE agents in American cities are equivalent to Gestapo squads in Berlin. But the comparison should serve as a warning, not a distraction. The question is not whether history repeats perfectly, but whether we are ignoring its lessons.
Of course, law enforcement officers face real threats. They have been harassed, even targeted for violence. Those risks are real and deserve attention. But the solution cannot be to erode public accountability.
We do not allow judges to hide their names. We do not permit anonymous juries. Our system of justice, however imperfect, relies on visible responsibility. To abandon that ideal in the name of safety is to accept a dangerous new social contract: one in which power flows only one way.
But here’s the hopeful truth: When communities resist the normalization of masked authority, they can win.
In Portland, Oregon, during the 2020 racial justice protests, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals deployed in camouflage uniforms and unmarked vehicles detained protesters without identifying themselves. The move drew national outrage and lawsuits. Oregon’s attorney general filed suit to stop these “secret police-style” tactics, and public pressure led to federal inspectors general investigating the practice. By 2021, Congress passed a provision requiring federal agents deployed in civil disturbances to display visible identification showing their name or a unique ID code and their agency.
In New York, years of grassroots organizing by groups like Communities United for Police Reform led to the June 2020 repeal of Section 50‑a, a decades-old law that had shielded police disciplinary records from public view. The change came amid mass protests, underlining how collective action can dismantle policies of anonymity that enable abuse.
In Oakland, California, the issue of hidden identity became headline news in 2011, during the Occupy Oakland demonstrations. An officer was caught on video covering his nameplate with tape, a violation of departmental policy. He was suspended for 30 days, and his supervising lieutenant was demoted. Public outrage led to stronger rules requiring all Oakland officers to display badge numbers and name tags even when outfitted in riot gear.
These victories didn’t happen overnight. They were the result of sustained advocacy and legal challenges. And they remind us: Faceless authority can be challenged, but only if we refuse to accept it as inevitable.
The logic of masking metastasizes. Today it may be ICE. Tomorrow it could be traffic cops, school resource officers, or regulators enforcing housing codes and environmental policy. Once anonymity is normalized, it becomes nearly impossible to roll back.
Imagine being confronted by a law enforcement officer whose face is completely obscured. What would you feel? Fear? Confusion? Powerlessness? These are not accidental responses. Perhaps that is the point.
But a free society cannot function on intimidation.
We live in an open society. Police do not rule us; they serve us. To wear a badge is to accept a burden, to be known, to be scrutinized, to be restrained by the public’s gaze.
The philosopher Michel Foucault warned that power is most effective when it is least visible. But the inverse is also true: Power is most just when it is most seen.
A democracy cannot thrive on ghosts. It requires people, real, visible people, making visible decisions in the full light of day.
So, what can be done?
To stop the normalization of faceless power, we can:
- Demand transparency laws banning face coverings in non-high-risk operations;
- Support local watchdog journalism that documents abuses of anonymity;
- Join campaigns for demilitarizing police departments and banning unmarked uniforms during public interactions; and
- Insist on civilian oversight boards with real teeth to enforce accountability.
The mask is not a neutral tool. It is a statement. And it is one that a free society cannot afford to make lightly.
If we want a future where power serves people, not the other way around, it begins with insisting that authority shows its face.
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Donald Trump, The Treasonous Confederate Army's Last General
Just as dictatorial rule in the antebellum South and the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation was established and reinforced by structural racism, Trump also employs white supremacy to pursue unchecked power.
Mar 26, 2025
It has been 160 years since the last shots were fired in the deadliest war in U.S. history, in which up to 750,000 Americans died in a rebellion by Southern states to preserve slavery. Devotees of the Confederacy have never surrendered the Lost Cause mythology, and it’s increasingly apparent Donald Trump and his administration are among them.
The Confederacy went to war to defend the antebellum economic, social, and cultural system, an autocratic fiefdom of slave states run by an oligarchal plantation class enriched by a virulent racialized foundation. “Into the hands of the slaveholders the political power of the South was concentrated by their social prestige, (and) property ownership” that created their wealth through chattel slavery and the lie of Black inferiority, wrote W.E.B. DuBois in his 1935 opus Black Reconstruction in America.
The world that marries white supremacy with authoritarian rule that inspires those who wave Confederate flags and venerate Confederate monuments is replicated in Trump’s aspirations. It filtered through Trump’s first term, most notoriously in his embrace of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose removal of a Robert E. Lee statue as “some very fine people.” But it is fully unleashed in Trump 2.0.
Just as dictatorial rule in the antebellum South and the post-Reconstruction decades of Jim Crow segregation was established and reinforced by structural racism, Trump also employs white supremacy to pursue unchecked power, this time under a guise to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The revisionist portrayal of the Civil War slipped out from the Pentagon under Trump loyalist Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Arlington National Cemetery, the Washington Post reported, “scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website,” part of a “broader effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to (DEI) from its online presence.” DEI “is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military,” intoned a Pentagon spokesperson.
Biographies of prominent Black, Latino, and women service members were suddenly erased, from Sgt. William Carney, the first Black American to earn a Medal of Honor during the Civil War, to prominent heroes of later wars. Though public outrage forced restoring recognition of the service of Jackie Robinson, World War II Tuskegee Airmen, a decorated Japanese American unit while Americans of Japanese descent were interned, and the famous Navajo Code Talkers, most of the erasure remains.
Along with other purges, Hegseth fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, veteran Black Army leader Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown and replaced him with a less qualified white man after Brown recorded a four-minute video about conversations with his son following the police murder of George Floyd. That act exposed the fabrication of “merit” behind the anti-DEI crusade while also reimposing a portrait of white men as the presumptive standard of qualification.
“The full throttled attack on Black leadership, dismantling of civil rights protections, imposition of unjust anti-DEI regulations, and unprecedented historical erasure across the Department of Defense is a clear sign of a new Jim Crow being propagated by our Commander in Chief,” said Richard Brookshire, co-CEO of the Black Veterans Project.
The DEI crusade
Within hours of his inauguration, Trump signed executive orders and directives to eradicate “all DEI related offices and positions; equity action plans, actions, initiatives or programs; equity-related grants or contracts; and DEI performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.”
Next Trump overturned President Johnson’s 1965 executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors and subcontractors. "These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces,” noted constitutional law professor Melissa Murray, “were all part of the federal government's efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s.”
A systematic purge of employees in federal agencies led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) followed. Not coincidentally, it had a disproportionate impact on Black federal workers, as well as women and LGBTQ employees. Trump also, without evidence, blamed DEI hires for the disastrous National Airport plane crash.
Concurrently, Trump targeted legally mandated equal employment opportunity and civil rights offices that empower federal workers to file complaints and enforce antidiscrimination laws, through multiple federal agencies. Cuts also harm public health, including programs to reduce racial and gender disparities in maternal and infant health, cancer, and chronic disease.
A number of private employers have followed suit, including Amazon, Meta, Google, Walmart, Target, Goldman Sachs, Pepsi and McDonalds, ending programs intended to expand diversity within their own workforces. “Five years ago, (many) were posting about Black Lives Matter,” says Theodore Johnson, a senior adviser at the New America think tank. Now these companies are “following government cues,” getting rid of race-conscious policies as they scramble to comply with the administration’s directions.
Education has been a major assault with mandates that K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities end DEI programs, alleging they are “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies,” note professors Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith. The goal of redefining education also seeks to indoctrinate a new generation of young people in conservative ideology. Private colleges were not immune, especially as Trump slashed Biden-era initiatives and federal funds to support Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges, and Hispanic institutions, while forcing others, like Columbia University, to silence and criminalize dissent.
Trump has made DEI the cudgel for efforts to erase post-Civil War Reconstruction and subsequent New Deal and Civil Rights movement reforms, while seeking to reimpose Jim Crow era segregation and one-party rule. All while evading legal statues, court orders, and shaking down media and law firms deemed disloyal, punctuating the agenda of a monarchial coup in progress.
Trump’s executive order bidding to overturn the 14th Amendment right of birthright citizenship symbolizes this push. It represents a full-throated attack on what radio host Clay Cane calls “a “bedrock principle of American democracy. To dismantle it is to open the door to the erosion of all rights gained through the blood, sweat, and tears of those who came before us.”
In his seminal work The Second Founding on the Reconstruction amendments and laws, historian Eric Foner argues they “not only put abolition, equal rights, and black male suffrage into the Constitution, but in its provisions for national enforcement made the federal government for the first time what [abolitionist Sen. Charles] Sumner called ‘the custodian of freedom’.”
A key phrase of the birthright citizenship clause, Foner emphasizes, says no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws… for the first time (it) elevates equality to a constitutional right.” The Equal Protection Clause became the vehicle “for radically expanding the rights” for all “persons” not just citizens.
Aided by the 15th Amendment’s right to vote for Black men, the reforms “inspired an outburst of political organization” with “direct action to confront long standing discrimination” and created new state constitutions creating “the region’s first state-funded systems of free public education,” and other democratic reforms that produced “a fundamental shift of power in the South and a radical departure in American government.”
Overall, the second founding, observes Foner, “forged a new constitutional relationship between individual Americans and the national state and were crucial in creating the world’s first biracial democracy.”
That’s what is at stake today. Public protests have forced some setbacks for the Trump coup. It will be up to all of us to escalate those efforts with the same focus of street actions, mass protests, and a united front that led to prior eras of expanded rights in order to protect a genuine democracy.
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