Another day and another person in America killed by ICE. Today in Maine, a 26-year-old Colombian man with work permits and his young family were shot and killed by federal agents on their way to work.
“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” was a saying I always heard growing up in New Mexico. I love it because it puts me in my place. I’m a white American. My family wasn’t here at first. We often talk about immigrants as if they were a distraction, but the truth is that this country has always been made up of people who have lived here, long before America was born. Somewhere along the way, we started acting like we had always been here, and the decision of who deserved to stay was up to us.
The ICE killings in Maine occurred just days after the killing of Lorenzo Salgado-Araujo. deadly gunfire By ICE agents in Houston. Regardless of what investigators conclude about the Maine encounter, two fatal shootings involving ICE agents within days should force a national reckoning on the increased use of deadly force in immigration enforcement. They join at least 21 people already participating. died Those in ICE custody this year are the latest in a series of tragedies that are becoming frighteningly familiar. Another family is trying to understand how an encounter with the federal government led to a death sentence.
This is who we are now. when Renee Nicole Good When he was killed by a federal immigration officer earlier this year, the public was told that an investigation would follow. A few months later, agent The gunman who shot her body is employed by ICE and has reportedly been reassigned rather than removed, while her family continues to live with their loss. Responsibility deferred indefinitely amounts to negation.
For generations, this country has sold itself as a promise more than a place, asking its people to overcome oceans, deserts, dictatorships, wars, famines, and impossible odds. Because this is a country where hard work is dignified, children can succeed, and freedom is measured by possibility. Our country didn’t just welcome the story; We exported it. They made movies about it, wrote songs about it, inscribed it into speeches, and held it up as proof that this imperfect republic could still be a home for those willing to believe in it. There is no greater national tragedy than the fact that this country, which for generations has encouraged the world to build a life here, is increasingly comfortable killing its people to pursue those same dreams.
For many, that dream now feels like a prison. Immigration database includes expanded Alongside facial recognition systems, license plate readers, commercial data brokers, biometric records, social media monitoring, men in meta-glasses secretly recording women, artificial intelligence capable of sorting through vast amounts of information, and increasingly sophisticated data-sharing agreements between institutions that once operated independently. This is now a surveillance state, and if this word makes people uncomfortable, perhaps we should spend less time questioning it and more time asking how comfortable we have become in giving up our privacy, autonomy, freedom, and independence itself. America never ceases to praise itself for defending itself.
We live with cameras on our front porches, congratulating ourselves on helping us find a lost dog or catch a porch pirate, and rarely ask what else that camera is recording or who has access to its recordings. We are so used to constant surveillance that we tout it as a sense of security. This is despite the fact that the same technology is deeply intertwined with policing, immigration, and the state’s expanding ability to know much more about our private lives than a free society would normally consider. We convinced ourselves that this was the price of security, not the slow erosion of freedom.
Immigration is the most visible testing site, but it is not the only one. rear dobbsSupreme Court decision that overturned. Roe vs. Wadeprosecutors and investigators have increasingly focused on search history, text messages, location information, and data collected by apps as potential evidence in abortion-related investigations. The state is Summary of information For transgender residents through medical reporting requirements and identification changes. Journalists, doctors, librarians, nonprofit organizations, and civil society organizations find themselves operating in an environment where information that was once considered private now feels like it’s just being held until someone decides it can be weaponized. None of these developments came from the same source, which is exactly what makes them so easy to overlook. Immigration enforcement is treated as separate from transgender health care, reproductive rights as separate from campus protests, national security as separate from public education, and artificial intelligence as a mere technological innovation. But governments are expanding their ability to identify, document, categorize, locate, and ultimately take action on people’s lives in ways that seemed extraordinary just a decade ago.
Governments usually do not declare themselves to be police states. They spent years laying the groundwork by expanding databases, normalizing surveillance, building infrastructure, testing public tolerance, and reassuring everyone that each step was too limited to threaten the unsuspecting. By the time the architecture is complete, declarations are no longer needed. Actions speak louder than words, and the actions unfolding across this country scream that we are actively living in a state of surveillance powerful enough to identify people, locate them, restructure their lives, map their relationships, predict their actions, and effectively decide who belongs, who should be watched, who should be detained, and who should be removed or killed.
The remarkable political achievements of this moment have led us to believe that every community is fighting a separate battle. Immigrants are encouraged to believe that their struggle is theirs alone. Transgender Americans are told that their rights exist apart from reproductive freedom. Protesters are said to have little in common with asylum seekers. And journalists are encouraged to view attacks on higher education as fundamentally different from attacks on news organizations. This regime benefits greatly from that division, as isolated communities are easier to oppress than united ones. Once governments gain the ability to collect more information, they rarely choose to collect less. If artificial intelligence makes classifying millions of records faster, cheaper, and more comprehensive, a central question is how widely they will be applied.
Salgado Araujo’s death is much bigger than a single immigrant story. This moment calls for something braver than sympathy for the families devastated by the murder of an immigration agent. The infrastructure currently used to identify, locate, and track migrants is built on many of the same premises that facilitate the investigation of abortion seekers, the cataloging of transgender people, the surveillance of political activity, and the gleaning of startlingly detailed portraits of ordinary citizens from the digital residue of everyday life, calling for solidarity among communities that have too often been encouraged to believe that they occupy different worlds. For too long we have been led to believe that these are separate conversations simply because it is they who are being targeted and not us. Over the past year, mainstream media has hailed AI as the second coming, but its infrastructure has expanded significantly, becoming more sophisticated and capable.
America seems to have lost its humanity. If you take five minutes to read the comments under almost any article about someone being killed by ICE, you’ll find people who say they deserved to be killed. We have dismantled the American Dream, replaced the myth of a nation built by people seeking freedom with internment camps, surveillance networks, and databases, leaving families wondering how a country that promised a future became the place where that future ended. If America remains exceptional, it should be because we maintain the ability to correct course before this new normal becomes what we leave behind.
Josh Ackley Political strategist and frontman of a queer punk band dead bettys. @momdarkness
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