The Murderers Among Us

Since Donald Trump took office in 2025, ICE has murdered at least 34 people in the U.S. It has deported 623,900 people. Those are not negligible numbers. They are the beginning – mark that, the beginning – of the ethnic cleansing of America. They are the first shot across the bow of any contraption or conglomeration that might oppose shipping nonwhites out of country. There are 68 million Hispanics in the U.S., and it’s safe to say that Scharfuhrer Stephen Miller wants to deport them all. Will Trump’s henchmen limit their ambitions to Hispanics? I doubt it. They and what journalist Mark Ames on X so aptly dubbed their Vichy collaborators aim to deport all “Third World” – racist code – citizens, legal residents, green-card holders, asylum seekers or illegal migrants.

So far resistance to this wickedness has been disorganized. True, there have been weeks of protest over Trump’s immigration crackdown. And there have been protests over the murders  of Minneapolis mother Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti: two particularly egregious slayings, as both were American citizens who’d done nothing to provoke being killed. Good was sitting behind the wheel of her car when shot twice in the face, while Pretti had moved to help a woman, assaulted by ICE, which later lied, claiming he had a gun in his hand. He did not. He held a phone. True he was armed, but legally so: Minnesota is an concealed-carry state.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Unleash the ICE Gestapo” Noem described the Good incident as an attack on law enforcement. “I want to remind everybody that the act like we saw today, of using a vehicle to try to kill an officer…is something that every politician, every elected official, everyone in this country should be able to rally around and say that it is wrong…” Renee Good emphatically did NOT use her vehicle to attack federal agents, but Noem adds: “It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was our ICE officers were out on an enforcement action. They…were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them…and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him. And my understanding is that she was hit and is deceased…These vehicle rammings are domestic acts of terrorism.” Video footage from Good’s murder entirely contradicts Noem’s little oration.

Following these two atrocities, the weekend of January 24, DHS defied over 200 years of constitutional law and history by announcing it could break down people’s doors to enter their homes and arrest them without warrants. This is full-on police state garbage. Just like killing over 34 people is full-on police state garbage. The 32 other victims who perished in ICE custody in 2025 were described by the Guardian January 4: “They died of seizure and heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, tuberculosis or suicide. Some died at ICE detention centers and field offices, others after they had been transferred to hospitals, but were still under ICE custody.” The article notes that ICE was holding 68,440 prisoners in detention in mid-December but nearly 75 percent of them had no criminal convictions.

ICE has zero, zip, nada, zilch respect for American citizens and less for the courts, which have, at least in the Pretti case, struck back. On January 25, U.S. District Court Judge Eric Tostrud “granted a temporary restraining order against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security…barring the department from altering or destroying evidence connected to Pretti’s killing…The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said DHS representatives blocked them from accessing the scene of the shooting, even though the bureau had obtained a judge’s signed search warrant,” CBS reported January 25. Meanwhile Pretti’s family “condemned what they said were ‘sickening lies told about our son by the administration.’”

Pretti’s murder was brutal. “A witness…said in a court declaration that the man was killed after he attempted to help a woman who had been pushed to the ground by federal agents…agents pepper-sprayed three observers, including Alex Pretti, before an agent shoved a woman to the ground, and Pretti went to help her…agents pushed Pretti to the ground…four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him,’ the witness said. ‘They shot him so many times,’” reported ABC News January 25.

The deaths of Pretti and Good were the most filmed, publicized and possibly the most dramatic of ICE’s many murders. But please don’t forget those 32 other people who died in ICE custody in 2025. The first was Genry Ruiz Guillen, 29, from Honduras, a construction worker caught by the police in late 2024, then locked away in a South Florida immigrant detention center. Another was Ethiopian, Serawit Gezahegan Dejene, 45, who’d begun applying for asylum. He died at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, after a stint in ICE custody. Then in February, Ukrainian citizen Maksym Chernyak, 44, after time in the Krome detention center in Miami, died of a stroke. And the list goes on and on.

With the Pretti murder, as Jeffrey St. Clair wrote in CounterPunch January 26, DHS “blocked the Minnesota state police from investigating the killing of a Minnesota resident and U.S. citizen, and the FBI shut down any internal investigation of the shootings. They refused to reveal the identity of the shooter and removed him from Minnesota to another jurisdiction and put him right back on the streets. That’s evidence of guilt.”

It’s worth noting that in 1967, long years after World War II, famous Nazi hunter later better known as unrepentant Zionist Simon Wiesenthal wrote a memoir called The Murderers Among Us. The book’s purpose was simple – having lost nearly 90 family members in the Holocaust, Wiesenthal decided to hunt the escaped perpetrators. The idea, presented in the book, that these killers had merged back into an apathetic postwar society is relevant to what is going on in the U.S. today – on a so far much smaller scale – with ICE. Smaller scale yes, but the general idea is the same: Trump’s DHS appears determined to pass off ICE crimes as legitimate and the perpetrators as heroes just doing their jobs, who will never have to pay any price. If that happens, ordinary citizens like Good and Pretti will have died, obscenely, with no justice.

How apathetic are the strata of American society? Well, so far the news from officialdom, i.e. the U.S. congress, is dispiriting, to say the least. Dems chant that “this version” of ICE must be replaced, while polls show that the vast majority of Americans are not concerned with different “versions” of ICE, because they want ICE defunded, period. So the official opposition not only doesn’t get it, but functions more like the aforementioned Vichy collaborationists. And we all know how they were dealt with, once fascists lost power.

So Dems need to wake up and sponsor bills to eliminate the ICE Gestapo, not “fix” it. The American people already got the memo, their representatives haven’t, and I’d bet that they won’t, until ICE shows up at their homes and breaks down their doors. Then, of course, it’ll be too late.

The post The Murderers Among Us appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.