The Real Thugs Behind the Badge

Different Name Same Play Book

As a Black woman, I don’t need a history book to tell me what state violence looks like. My body knows it. My community knows it. Our families know it. We were taught survival before we were taught civics. We learned caution before we learned confidence. We learned how to move in systems that were never built to protect Black people in the first place, so when I look at what ICE is doing, I don’t see immigration enforcement. I see history repeating itself with federal uniforms, badges, and executive orders. I see the same pattern of terror, same devaluation of certain bodies, same normalized violence: Black, Brown, Indigenous, and immigrant people treated as threats simply for existing. Of course, the language has changed, and the branding has gotten slicker, but the violence stays the same.

It is clear who the real thugs are. They are not the families targeted in ICE raids. They are not the people ICE detains. The real thugs are the “Wig and his administration of Wiggettes”. Governing through fear, ruling through intimidation, empowering violence without consequence, suppressing dissent, and silencing journalists. That is thug behavior. That is criminal behavior dressed up as leadership. Power without accountability is organized harm, and this administration is running it like a machine. People who voted for the Wig and his Wigettes chose this. They chose an administration that expanded ICE’s power, removed legal obstacles to raids, and turned federal agents into tools of fear instead of instruments of justice.

Now we are watching something even more dangerous unfold. Journalists like Don Lemon, whose job is to report, document, and preserve truth, are being targeted with censorship, marginalization, and dismissal because they speak truth to power. That is not politics. That is authoritarian behavior. Controlling the narrative, attacking witnesses, and erasing the record is how systems corrupt themselves and silence accountability, because real history is dangerous to abusive power.

And the rest of this country is sitting quietly. There is no sustained national outrage. No nightly protests in every major city outside of Minneapolis. No corporate sponsorship withdrawals. No cultural or institutional reckoning. That silence is not neutrality. It is complicity. It is comfort over courage.

What ICE is doing is not just morally wrong. It is illegal under the U.S. Constitution. The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures. You cannot raid homes in the middle of the night, stop people on city streets without probable cause, and drag them from cars or workplaces without legal justification. Warrantless raids and mass detentions are unconstitutional seizures of human beings. That is not enforcement. That is unlawful force.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law. Not a citizen. Not documented. Not “American looking.” Person. When people are detained indefinitely without hearings, denied access to lawyers, or held without any clear path to court, due process is being nullified. That is not a gray area. That is unconstitutional behavior wrapped in federal authority.

Equal protection under the law is also being violated. When enforcement disproportionately targets Black, Brown, Indigenous, and immigrant neighborhoods while white communities remain largely untouched, that is discriminatory enforcement. You cannot enforce the law selectively and call it justice. That is operational racism. Cruel and inhumane treatment in detention violates constitutional standards of human dignity. Overcrowded facilities, denied medical care, neglect, and abuse are not “detention.” They are state-inflicted harm. No badge makes that legal. No uniform makes that moral.

And people are dying under this system. At least nine people have already been killed in violent ICE-linked enforcement encounters so far in 2025 and 2026. In Minneapolis, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen and mother, was shot and killed by an ICE officer during a federal immigration operation. Less than three weeks later, 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal immigration agents in the same city amid enforcement actions. In September 2025, Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old line cook from Mexico and father of children, was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a vehicle stop in suburban Chicago. There are reports of other shootings by federal immigration officers, including multiple incidents in which agents fired on civilians in vehicles during immigration operations.

2025 was also the deadliest year in more than two decades for deaths in ICE custody, with at least 32 people dying while detained by the agency amid intensified enforcement and overcrowding. Some died of medical issues reportedly linked to neglect, others of suicide or health crises that advocates say could have been prevented, and some deaths have sparked calls for accountability and independent investigations.

These are not abstract statistics. Each name represents a family shattered, a community traumatized, and a constitutional promise broken. These are lives that should not have ended under the authority of the very government that is meant to protect them.

So why does it look like the Black and Brown community is “sitting this out”? Because we have seen this movie before. We understand what happens when the state weaponizes its power. We know protection in this country is conditional. We built our own safety nets, mutual aid, bail funds, and community defense networks because the state never built them for us. Silence is not apathy. Silence is awareness, exhaustion, and strategy. Black people are saying, perhaps cynically but correctly, “We’ve seen this script before with a different cast.”

We told y’all to vote for the latter, but no. A critical mass of “the people” chose this, and Black and Brown communities sat back in rage as the presidential results rolled in. It was Hispanic voters singing about voting for Trump, and now their tears are falling, and their communities are being torn apart. All of it is exhausting.

Everyone needs to understand this: silence alone is not enough. We also have to confront the moral contradiction of Black and immigrant communities supporting corporations that fund or enable ICE through contracts, supply chains, and lobbying. You cannot oppose state terror and finance it at the same time. Money is the bloodstream of this machine.

If the Constitution does not protect the most vulnerable, then it protects no one. If human rights only apply when they are convenient, then they are not rights at all; they are privileges disguised as law. This is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is immoral. It is dangerous. And it will not stop on its own. Silence does not protect us. Compliance does not save us. Comfort has never changed a system. Pressure does.

We have every right to refuse complicity. Every right to name the thugs in federal uniforms. Every right to name the journalists they want to silence. Every right to withdraw consent from the administration that empowered them and the corporations that bankroll them. And as a Black woman, I will not be civil with cruelty. I will not negotiate with oppression. I will not bargain softly while bodies pile up under federal language and DHS press statements. We will speak their names. We will document the truth. We will dismantle the systems that took them. And we will build something else in their place, one act of resistance, one lawsuit, one boycott, one protest at a time.

So what is the lesson we should learn from this as a people? That our survival cannot depend on the conscience of this country, that we cannot afford to treat elections like personality contests while our lives are on the line. That solidarity has to mean something before the raids start, not after. That we cannot be shamed out of telling the truth about who we warned, what we predicted, and how we were ignored. And most of all, that we have to organize with each other like no one is coming to save us, because every time we forget that, this country reminds us in the harshest way possible.