Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) is not a public safety agency when its primary function is tearing at the seams of the social contract through invasive, militarized policing on American soil. For an organization whose motto is “Protecting National Security & Upholding Public Safety,” a blood-soaked Honda Pilot belonging to a widowed mother of three who wrote poetry makes for a grotesque definition of “America First.”
I don’t want to talk about the murder of Renee Good, but pretending that empowering unqualified actors who lack even basic civic grounding could ever lead to a utilitarian outcome is more laughable than the idea that J.D. Vance & Usha Vance are happily married.
Last year, we accepted the militarization of our streets in major cities under the guise of “training exercises.” Now we’re expected to watch split screens of Delta Forces extracting Maduro with surgical precision abroad, only to see troops operating under the same flag at home clumsily reach for their sidearms, shout slurs after a headshot, and label the aftermath “domestic terror.” The irony is impossible to miss.
This isn’t supernatural. Tim Walz walked away from re-election days before this, and the absence of leadership calcified into failure. There were no meaningful efforts to discredit, legally restrain, or even publicly confront these thugs. That silence is the clearest evidence that Walz was never the right leader for this chapter of the American experience. Minnesota has now endured repeated acts of political violence, with no indication that this so-called “historically significant” moment is drifting toward a quiet midterm election.
Political violence is un-American and destructive, but when the state puts bodies on the line for ideology rather than law, the consequences can ignite movements far larger than those in power ever intended. The quickest route to immortality is martyrdom.
Joshua Cooper
Oak Park
