I experience both physical and emotional reactions to watching videos on my social media feed of mother Renee Nicole Good and intensive care nurse Alex Jeffrey  Pretti being killed in the icy streets of Minneapolis in broad daylight, just weeks apart.

As the videos play, my chest tightens with shock, fear, and indignation. This is not the first, second, or third time I’ve witnessed someone’s death on my phone.

Brutality at the hands of ICE agents is all too common, completely normalized, and people are dead as a result. These aren’t isolated incidents: this is the predictable outcome of a system built for force and funded to grow at all costs.

I was a college freshman at Yale when America was engulfed in fear and panic after the unspeakably horrific terror attacks of 9/11. My mom was worried because I  was just a short drive from New York City. Fellow freshmen spent hours frantically trying to reach their loved ones in Manhattan, but phone service was down, and almost no one had cell phones. The terror was palpable.

After 9/11, fear metastasized into a new, massive federal agency: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Its mission was to “protect the homeland,” and in service of that mission, DHS normalized the idea that some communities — Muslims, noncitizens, or anyone who dissented — should live under permanent suspicion in order to prove their Americanness.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was formed inside that new DHS bureaucracy, and from the beginning, it pursued a vision that was neither modest nor targeted. Their 2003 strategic plan, “Operation Endgame,” treated deportation as the golden measure of success, pushing the agency toward maximum enforcement and maximum churn.

When your job is numbers, every person becomes a statistic and a justification in pursuit of their end goal. No matter their pending immigration application, their U.S. citizen children, their ties to their community, or their payment of taxes, for a noncitizen, any contact with law enforcement – even for a traffic offense – results in being labeled as a “criminal alien.”

The fear-driven othering feeds the deportation machine.

Over the ensuing two decades, both Democrats and Republicans served as willing cheerleaders, giving ICE ever-more resources for immigration enforcement, detention, and surveillance. Immigration detention funding ballooned more than 400% from approximately $3 billion in 2019 to over $14 billion in 2025, according to a budget analysis done by The Forum.

The GEO Group pioneered for-profit immigration detention in Aurora in 1987, and in December 2025, ICE awarded GEO a no-bid contract to open a second facility in Hudson.

Corporations like Flock and Palantir, which contract with governments to provide surveillance for immigration enforcement, now also celebrate their record profits. While justifying ICE’s endlessly-expanding budgets, politicians from both parties routinely claim that those resources prioritize immigrants with criminal histories, and that as long as you are a law-abiding, “good” American, you have nothing to fear. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti tell us otherwise.

It simply doesn’t have to be this way. ICE is escalating its cynical politics of cruelty and fearmongering, pitting Americans against each other and lying to the public to justify billions in annual immigration-enforcement spending. Stopping this madness will take everyday Coloradans speaking up and pressuring elected officials to change course.

Now’s an important time to remember that the Constitution protects us all, regardless of immigration status. Download a Know Your Rights card, and add the Colorado Rapid Response Network’s phone number (1-844-864-8341) into your phone in case you witness ICE activity.

This session, the Colorado legislature will consider Aurora Sen. Mike Weissman and my bill, Senate Bill 5, to ensure civil remedies are available to Coloradans when their constitutional rights are trampled upon by immigration enforcement entities.