The Next American Killed by ICE Dies With Your Fingerprints on the Budget

I am writing to express my outrage at the proposed "accountability measures" for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. Ending roving patrols, mandating body cameras, requiring agents to show their faces, enforcing existing accountability standards—these are not reforms. They are theater. They are the bare minimum expectations we place on small-town police departments, now being offered as a grand compromise for federal agencies that have killed American citizens in broad daylight and faced no consequences whatsoever. Renée Good is dead. She was an American citizen. Federal agents shot into her vehicle and killed her. Alex Pretti is dead. He was an American citizen, an ICU nurse who cared for veterans, a lawful gun owner who never drew his weapon. He was filming federal agents with his phone—exercising his First Amendment rights—when they tackled him, pinned him to the ground, removed his legally carried firearm from his holster, and then shot him repeatedly while he was restrained. Video from multiple angles, verified by Reuters, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press, shows exactly what happened. And what was the administration's response? They called him a terrorist. They claimed he "arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage" and "massacre law enforcement." Secretary Noem stood at a podium and lied about a dead American citizen, slandering a man who cannot defend himself, whose family had to watch their son be murdered and then branded a terrorist by his own government. This is not a policy disagreement. This is state violence followed by state propaganda. And the proposed response is body cameras. Body cameras did not save Alex Pretti. Bystanders were already filming. The entire country watched him die. The problem is not a lack of footage. The problem is that federal agents know they can kill American citizens, lie about it publicly, and face no consequences—not from their chain of command, not from the Department of Justice, and apparently not from Congress. Senate Minority Leader Schumer himself said these agencies "operate outside the law." If that is true—and the evidence suggests it is—then the appropriate response is not to ask them politely to wear name tags. The appropriate response is to dismantle the apparatus entirely. I am not interested in reforms that assume ICE and CBP can be salvaged. I am not interested in "guardrails" for agencies that have demonstrated they will ignore guardrails. I am not interested in compromise positions with an administration that responds to the murder of peaceful Americans by calling them terrorists. I demand the abolition of ICE. Not restructuring. Not reform. Abolition. I demand that immigration enforcement be rebuilt from the ground up under civilian oversight, with clear jurisdictional limits, mandatory coordination with local law enforcement, and zero tolerance for the use of force against individuals who are not under arrest for violent crimes. I demand that the officials who lied about Alex Pretti and Renée Good be held accountable—not in some future investigation, but now, through every mechanism available to the legislative branch. And I demand that my representatives stop treating this as a negotiation. You are not negotiating with good-faith actors. You are negotiating with people who kill citizens and then call them terrorists on national television. Every "compromise" that leaves these agencies intact is a concession to state violence. The proposed measures are not a step forward. They are an insult to the dead and a signal to the living that their government will not protect them. I expect more. The Constitution demands more. The memory of Renée Good and Alex Pretti demands more. Do not settle for body cameras on a death squad and call it accountability.