Structural Violence in Immigration Enforcement: How ICE’s Militarization and Trump-Era Policies Normalized Deadly Force Against Black Migrant Women
Original framing: “Family of Renee Good sues ICE agent who shot her and top Trump officials” — The Guardian - World
The militarization of ICE is not a new phenomenon but a direct evolution from the Border Patrol’s creation in 1924, which was explicitly designed to enforce white supremacy by deporting Black migrants and Mexican laborers. The 1954 'Operation Wetback' deported over a million people, many of whom were Black, under the pretense of 'immigration control.' More recently, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded ICE’s powers, leading to the criminalization of undocumented status. Renee Good’s death is the latest in a long line of state-sanctioned killings tied to these policies, including the 2010 killing of Sergio Hernandez by Border Patrol agents in Arizona.
Renee Good’s killing is not an anomaly but the inevitable outcome of a system designed to treat Black and Brown migrant bodies as disposable.
ICE’s militarization is a direct descendant of slave patrols and colonial border regimes, where the enforcement of racial exclusion has always been tied to state violence. The lawsuit, while legally significant, risks individualizing accountability rather than addressing the institutional culture that normalizes such deaths—one where deportation quotas and private prison contracts create perverse incentives for lethal enforcement. Cross-cultural comparisons reveal that the U.S. approach is not inevitable; countries like Canada and Germany demonstrate that immigration enforcement can be handled without militarized police forces. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of a system that claims to uphold the rule of law while simultaneously dehumanizing those it targets. To move forward, solutions must center community-led justice, truth commissions, and the demilitarization of enforcement, while restoring the voices and knowledge systems that have long warned of this violence.