Editor’s Note: All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.
On Jan. 7, American citizen Renee Good was shot and killed in cold blood by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. This brash execution sparked uproar from both sides of the aisle, inciting days of protests and candlelit vigils in the brutal Minnesota winter, and the typical agenda-setting self-defense claims from Republican actors and media.
Relations with ICE, especially in Minnesota, continue to grow more hostile by the day. Citizen Alex Pretti was shot and killed in broad daylight during a protest in Minneapolis just 17 days following the murder of Good.
In the days between the two shootings, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., compared the current ICE practices to Gestapo tactics — the secret police under the Nazi regime. He referenced what his father would’ve experienced had he not escaped Germany: “He would have seen paramilitary forces going door to door, rounding up people just like him — exactly the kinds of tactics we now see unfolding. ICE, as a paramilitary force … seizing people, dragging them out of their cars or homes.”
These claims are nothing short of being historically backed and necessary to understanding the extent of the daily atrocities committed by ICE. However, the claim that these tactics are at all new to America’s history erases the stories of those terrorized by other forms of unbridled police forces over the past 250 years of our country’s existence.
“It is more comfortable to compare the current horrors of this country to a foreign regime because we do not have to face the fact that this is an American pattern.”
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is the primary foundation for cross-state law enforcement and intervention in this country. This act required local police in free states to capture enslaved people who had escaped the South and “return” them to their owners. This infringed upon a bounty of rights in the Constitution, as laws regarding enslaved people of the era typically did. The acts denied people who were enslaved the right to a jury trial or due process, which is a similar infringement of processes we’re seeing today through the withholding and deportations of undocumented immigrants without trial.
From the Fugitive Slave Act, America saw an increase in power for slave catchers — those employed by slave owners to capture and re-enslave people who had escaped bondage. Slave catchers were rampant, and the threat of being racially profiled, kidnapped and stripped of freedom was glaring and nearly unavoidable, so much so that northern Black people, regardless of status, carried around documentation of their freedom in fear of being mistaken and displaced. Sound familiar?
In the 19th century, the United States sowed seeds of racially charged law enforcement domains; in the 20th century, it took a new form in the Texas Rangers during the period of La Matanza. Translating to ‘The Massacre,” La Matanza was a period between 1910 and 1920 when the Texas Rangers murdered thousands of Mexicans. They justified this killing spree by painting Mexican people as “bandits” looking to murder, steal and threaten society. Family members of those killed recalled that the rangers ordered the dead bodies to be “left to rot as a warning to others.” Those wrongfully murdered during La Matanza were part of families who had lived on this stolen land for years, now living in a constant state of fear due to their ethnicity.
The logic, the scare tactics, the justification — it all eerily resembles the agenda of ICE sympathizers on the right, who frame undocumented immigrants as inherently dangerous and as criminals. This is not out of the ordinary; it is a result of the historical American sentiment that erodes the Constitution’s integrity and labels entire groups of people as disposable.
It is more comfortable to compare the current horrors of this country to a foreign regime because we do not have to face the fact that this is an American pattern. When we label these practices as un-American, we avoid confronting how systemically intertwined they are in our institutions. This racist operation spanning our country — especially in Minnesota — is a result of a humiliating American tradition that survives only because we keep pretending it is new.
Understanding history and recognizing patterns are tools far more powerful in fighting ICE than one might realize. Hindsight provides confidence in identifying the right side of history. The lingering presence of the state-sanctioned terror from slave catchers and La Matanza continues to walk our streets with a clear intent of violence.
But the active voices and organizations in opposition also remain. They have fought this fight for centuries now, laying the groundwork for change by refusing to accept state terror as normal.
We must be willing to confront our history and recognize that it is familiar, not foreign. There is a long road ahead, and recognition is the first step toward refusing to accept this again.
Reach Caroline Studdert at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
