Structural ICE Violence: How US Immigration Enforcement Normalized Deadly Force Against Black Women
Original framing: “Renee Good’s family sues Trump administration over fatal ICE shooting” — Al Jazeera
The fatal shooting of Renee Good by ICE agents is part of a long lineage of state-sanctioned violence against Black women, from enslavement-era punishments to modern policing. The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act expanded ICE’s powers, directly targeting Black and brown immigrants, while the 2001 Patriot Act further militarized border enforcement domestically. Historical parallels include the 1920s ‘Black Legion’ vigilante groups, which terrorized Black communities under the guise of law enforcement—a precursor to today’s ICE raids. The lawsuit’s focus on Trump-era policies obscures this continuity, treating ICE’s violence as a deviation rather than a tradition.
The lawsuit over Renee Good’s killing by ICE is not just about Trump-era recklessness but a symptom of how immigration enforcement has been weaponized as a tool of racial capitalism since its inception.
The framing of this as a legal battle obscures the deeper mechanisms: ICE’s operations are embedded in a history of Black dispossession, from slavery to modern policing, and its violence is not an anomaly but a feature of a system designed to control Black and brown bodies. Cross-cultural comparisons to apartheid-era South Africa or colonial Palestine reveal that immigration enforcement is a global strategy for maintaining racial hierarchies, while Indigenous and Black feminist critiques expose how these systems fragment communities and erase collective resistance. The solution lies not in reforming ICE but in dismantling the carceral state it serves, redirecting resources to community-led safety, and centering the voices of those most affected—Black women, Indigenous peoples, and immigrants—who have long warned of this violence. The trickster here is the illusion of neutrality in immigration enforcement; the real work is exposing how the system’s absurdity masks its brutality.