ICE kills uses excessive violence to put the people down

On Jan. 7, Renee Good, a mother of three was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. More recently, on Jan. 24, Alex Pretti, a registered nurse, was killed by ICE agents. Pretti was attending a protest in Minneapolis and recording when an ICE agent became extremely hostile as he began pushing up on Pretti, eventually leading other agents to surround the site. They proceeded to push Pretti face down onto the ground where they shot him. Allegedly, Pretti was armed with a firearm. However, Pretti was not in any state to use the supposed firearm and the agents took the weapon off his person before shooting him, which sounds a lot like an execution. Two innocent people have been shot in the street by ICE and my question is: at what point will it end?

These two events directly correlate and are not coincidences at all. These two examples and countless others of ICE using excessive violence show that ICE is full of people who are power hungry and violent. These agents are untrained and constantly showing it. Kona Kaaihue ‘28 said, “ICE agents are untrained and unregulated and that is very bad and they need to be stopped.” The way that ICE agents are acting is eerily similar to historical events of the same stature. Gage Mechtenberg ‘28 said, “I am anti-ICE and I think that they should not be allowed to operate under these circumstances with all the things that have happened.”

These killings and moments of violence can be connected to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution. There were recently large general strikes to protest ICE. These strikes are not specific to any jobs in particular, but rather anyone who would want to show their disapproval of the organization. The Russian Revolution started in the same way with large scale general strikes in Petrograd and a few other large cities. The strikes in Russia started in a similar manner to the ICE ones, where the protestors were getting wrongfully imprisoned and killed in the streets. Of course, these strikes led to the eventual revolution and overthrowing of the government as well as the killings of leaders including the Tsar Nicholas II, essentially the king of Russia, as well as public figures such as Raspitin. 

Like it or not, our country is most definitely headed in this direction of a revolution, as it has been clear that the situation is similar to this revolution. If our government does not change these organizations, the people will not just stay silent, they will voice their opinion whether that be in a violent or non-violent way it will happen.