Here We Still Are

I keep hearing a version of the same sentence. From friends and folks I see across social media; underneath every news report about these killings, down in the comments: “Well, maybe don’t try to run down a federal officer.” Said like it settles the matter. Said like it’s the end of the conversation instead of the whole trick of it.

So let’s not let it be the end of the conversation. This is my rebuttal. Let’s take that sentence apart on the record, in daylight, before it can do its job.

Renee Nicole Good was a United States citizen. A mother of three. On January 7, in Minneapolis, she came upon immigration agents doing their work and she stopped, the way a person with a conscience stops, to watch and to bear witness. She was shot three times. The independent autopsy her family commissioned found a wound through the right breast, a wound through the left forearm, and the shot that killed her: fired through the driver’s-side window into her left temple, exiting the right side of her head.[1] She died there in her car.

Sit with the geometry of that last shot for a second, because it matters. A bullet that enters the left side of a driver’s head, at the temple, came from beside the driver’s-side window; it did not come from someone standing in the path of an oncoming car. Yet the government’s account was that she “weaponized” her vehicle; that she was the threat; that this was her fault. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Trump called her a “domestic terrorist” in the days after agents killed her; they hung the same label on Alex Pretti. Months later, pressed at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Noem would not answer for the label and would not take it back, saying only that she had tried to “provide factual information.”[3]

Then the video came out, as it keeps coming out, and it did not uphold the vehicle-as-weapon story. Law enforcement experts will tell you flatly that stepping in front of a vehicle and firing into it breaks with accepted American policing practice, and with the federal government’s own rules. Those rules say an officer may use deadly force only with a “reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury,” and that officers should not put themselves in a spot where they “have no alternative.”[2] Standing in the path of a car, then citing the car, is manufacturing the “no alternative.” Firing the kill shot sideways through the window is not even that. It is the excuse and the act in one motion.

That’s one name. Here is the thing the excuse cannot survive: it is not one name.

The list

I’m not going to say “every single time,” because someone will go hunting for the one messy case to wave at the whole pattern. I don’t need “every.” I need the list. Read it slowly.

Alex Pretti, Minneapolis, January. A U.S. citizen. The administration cast him as an armed threat. But the video shows an officer had already removed the handgun from Pretti’s waistband before he was shot; he was on the ground, half-kneeling and half-prone, his hands flat on the ground, disarmed, when the agents fired.[4] Within days the administration’s own story fell apart in public, and two of the agents who fired were put on leave.

Silverio Villegas González, suburban Chicago, September 2025. Officials said he hit an agent with his car. He had just dropped his kids at school. Police records and bodycam footage challenged the government’s account, and Illinois launched its own investigation.[7]

Ruben Ray Martinez, south Texas, March 2025 (a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, and the country only learned of it more than a year later). DHS said he “intentionally ran over” an officer, who ended up on the hood, and that another agent “fired defensive shots.” Texas body-camera footage showed Martinez given conflicting directions, then slowly rolling forward and to the left; from the video, it is not even clear the car struck an agent at all.[5]

Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, Minneapolis, January. Shot in the leg. The agent who shot him was later charged, including with falsely reporting the event.[12]

Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, Biddeford, Maine, July. He was not even the person they had come for. DHS said the agent fired “fearing for public safety” as Guerrero “attempted to flee”; he was reportedly authorized to work here, and by the account of Maine’s own officials, he was never the target of the operation at all.[9]

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Houston, July. Fifty-one, a Mexican father of three and a construction contractor, thirty-five years in this country and, his family says, in the middle of applying for legal status, driving his crew to a job in a white work van. The agents had come for someone else. DHS said he “weaponized” the van and rammed an officer who fired “in self-defense,” and an FBI warrant claimed the bags inside held a substance “consistent with methamphetamine.” Both stories collapsed. Harris County’s own crime lab tested the “meth”: no drugs at all; his family says it was the salt-and-water electrolyte mix outdoor crews drink to get through a Texas summer. And the three men riding with him swore in court that no agent was ever in front of the van, that Lorenzo had already put it in park, and that the officer shot him anyway. There were no body cameras, and no footage of the “threat” has ever surfaced.[13]

And on, and on: Portland; Los Angeles; the Central Valley; New Jersey; Harrisburg. People fired on in their cars over the span of months. In case after case the government reached for the same sentence, the exact one filling those comment threads: he ran at us, she weaponized the vehicle, they left us no choice.

Then look at what happens in court, because this is the part that should end the argument. Of the people charged with assaulting a federal officer after these encounters, charged, in several cases, over the very “weaponized vehicle” the government invoked to justify shooting them, most have not been convicted. By the Times’s summer accounting, of thirteen people charged, seven have already had their cases dismissed, two pleaded guilty, and four were still pending.[6] Judges and prosecutors, looking at the actual evidence, keep throwing these cases out.

And the agents? In the most vivid example, an ICE agent in Minneapolis claimed three people beat him with a shovel and a broom before he opened fire on a Venezuelan immigrant. Video contradicted him. The charges against the man he shot were dropped, and the agent, Christian Castro, was charged by Minnesota prosecutors with assault and filing a false police report. He was arrested in Texas, where he is now fighting extradition rather than face a Minnesota courtroom.[12]

So hold the two things next to each other. The drivers face up to twenty years for a story that keeps collapsing on video. The shooters get administrative leave, a friendly jurisdiction, and a lawyer. When the people who investigate are the same people who fired, and when they block anyone independent from looking, “we don’t know what happened” is not humility. It is the design. We do know. We keep knowing, one released video at a time.

So let me stop dancing around the word. When you intentionally shoot a person to death and that person was not a threat to you, you have murdered them. That is not me being inflammatory; that is the definition. Murder is killing without lawful justification and with malice, and malice, in the law, has never required that you hated the person; it requires only that you meant to kill or to do grievous harm, and had no lawful excuse. A badge does not dissolve that. A badge has never been a license to kill with impunity, no matter how many press releases call it “defensive shots.” Renee Good, in her car, was not a threat, and she was killed on purpose. Alex Pretti, disarmed and flat on the ground, was not a threat, and he was killed on purpose. I am going to use the accurate word for that. These were murders.

Who they hand the gun to

It is worth asking who is being handed the gun. Over the past year, ICE has raced to more than double its force, from around ten thousand officers toward twenty-two thousand, in a matter of months. To get there, the academy training was cut from seventy-two days to forty-two, use-of-force instruction included, and reporters have documented officers put on the street before their background checks had even cleared. When the Associated Press managed to identify forty of the new officers, three had already been sued for misconduct at earlier law-enforcement jobs.[10]

Which brings us back to Maine. David Brouillette, the agent who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, is the kind of hire that system produces. He had spent years cycling through short-lived jobs; a corrections post, a VA police role, a state enforcement job, a volunteer fire department that removed him after a shouting match and a refusal to follow orders. Two ex-wives had taken out protection orders against him. Researchers who study officers who move between departments this fast have a name for the pattern: a red flag, someone likelier to be fired and to draw complaints. ICE hired him anyway, handed him a badge and a firearm, and he shot a man who was not even the person they had come for.[11]

None of that is bad luck. You do not hire that fast, cut that much training, and skip that many background checks, and then get to act surprised by the killings that follow. They are the arithmetic.

That is the excuse dismantled, the act named, and the machine that makes it starting to come into view. Now pull the camera back, because the excuse is the oldest part of all of this.

The oldest part

“They brought it on themselves. They’re dangerous. They’re not really us.” That is not a new sentence. It is the load-bearing wall of every government that has ever done this, and we have done this before, here, more than once.

In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act deputized ordinary Northern citizens into the machinery of slavery. It made helping a person a crime and looking away a duty. The commissioners who heard the cases were paid more to send a person into bondage than to let them go free, and the accused got no jury and no testimony of their own. It was legal. It was “just the law.” Everyone doing it had a receipt.

In 1919 and 1920, the Palmer Raids rounded up thousands of immigrants and leftists in warrantless sweeps, and deported hundreds, on the say-so of an attorney general and a young functionary named J. Edgar Hoover. In 1954, a mass-deportation drive swept up U.S. citizens along with everyone else, and people died in the heat of the transport. And in 1942 we put our own Japanese American neighbors behind wire on the theory of “military necessity,” a theory the Supreme Court blessed in Korematsu and the country spent the next fifty years being ashamed of, until Congress formally apologized and paid reparations in 1988.

Every one of these had the same math. The targets were dangerous. The law was on our side. The neighbors who noticed mostly decided it wasn’t their business. And in each case, history did not end up remembering the excuse-makers kindly. It remembered them as the ones who looked away. That is the company the sentence keeps. When you say “well, don’t run at officers,” you are not being reasonable and above the fray. You are standing exactly where a lot of people have stood before, saying exactly what they said, and it went exactly where it always goes.

Why this is on a food blog

Some of you followed me here for biscuits and Hatch chiles, and you’re wondering what this is doing in the same place as Meemaw’s cornbread recipe. Here’s the honest answer, and it’s the whole reason I write the way I do.

You cannot eat in this country without eating someone’s labor, and in this country that labor is overwhelmingly immigrant. Roughly forty percent of the people who pick our crops are undocumented, by the USDA’s own data, and immigrants are the majority of the hands in the fields and on the meatpacking lines besides.[8] The strawberries, the chile, the chicken, the milk: those come to your table through the exact population being hunted in these videos. The hands that grow it and pick it and pack it and cook it are the hands in the crosshairs.

I say all the time that this blog is about giving credit; that Southern food is Black and immigrant food, built in no small part on labor that was coerced, and that telling the truth about whose work you’re eating is not a side quest, it’s the whole meal. Well, this is what giving credit costs when the bill comes due. It’s easy to credit the dead and the safely historical. It is the living I’m talking about now. A food blog that will thank an enslaved cook two centuries later but won’t say a word while a farmworker’s family buries him today is just decoration. I would rather this place not be decoration.

What history will ask you

I’m not going to hand you cheap hope. I wrote a whole post about baking cookies the day Alex Pretti was killed, and the honest thing I said then is the honest thing now: it won’t fix anything, and you do it anyway. You act because acting is how you stay a person, not because it guarantees a result.

So, concretely. Learn your rights and learn your neighbors’ rights, and keep the number for a local rapid-response network where you can find it. Support the legal observers and the neighbors watching out for neighbors, the people doing exactly what Renee Good was doing when an agent decided a witness was a threat. Here in Georgia, that work has names. GLAHR, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, runs an “ICE Free Zone” campaign, builds community safety networks, and keeps helplines to document and report local ICE activity; the very kind of neighbor-protecting-neighbor work people in Minneapolis were doing when Renee Good stopped to watch. We Are CASA in Georgia carries the legal fight, including against the laws that force local cooperation with ICE. And more broadly, the ACLU of Georgia. Put money and hands where they already are. Show up. Give your name.

Because the sentence I started with, “well, don’t run at officers,” is a bet that history isn’t watching and won’t ask. It is. It will. It always asks the same question of ordinary people in times like this, and the question is not “were you afraid” or “was it complicated.” The question is: what did you do. Answer it now, while it still counts, so you don’t have to lie about it later.

We are, in fact, here again. The least we can do is not be the people who looked away again.

P.S. Every factual claim about a named person here comes from documented, dated reporting, not from vibes. I collected every source in a companion post, “The Receipts”, so you can check my work line by line; I would genuinely rather you trust the reporting than trust me. I use the word “murder” deliberately, and I stand on the definition: intentionally killing someone who is not a threat to you, without lawful justification, is murder, and a badge does not change what the word means. The facts underneath all of it are not opinions.

P.P.S. If this post made you angry; if you’re winding up to tell me to stay in my lane, stick to the recipes, shut up and post a casserole, let me save you the typing. I said this out loud a long time ago, on my Where I Stand page: “Sometimes I’ll write explicitly political posts. They’ll be clearly labeled so folks who want to skip them can.” This one was labeled. The category and the title both told you exactly what it was, and you clicked in anyway. If you decide you’d rather not read me after this, I understand, and I mean this with no sarcasm at all: I wish you well. But this is the lane. It always was.

Notes & sources

Full sourcing, grouped by claim, lives in the companion reference post, The Receipts (Sources for “Here We Still Are”); deliberately unlisted, because it’s an appendix, not a pitch. The key citations:

1. Renee Good’s wounds: the independent autopsy her family commissioned (KOMO News; NBC News).
2. Federal deadly-force policy, and the break with accepted best practices: The New York Times (Jan. 7 and Jan. 9, 2026).
3. The “domestic terrorist” label from Secretary Noem and President Trump, and Noem’s refusal to retract it at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: ABC News; CNN.
4. An officer had already removed Alex Pretti’s handgun before he was shot: CNN.
5. The DHS account of the Ruben Ray Martinez shooting against the Texas body-camera footage: NPR.
6. Charges and dismissals (“thirteen charged, seven dismissed”): The New York Times; Government Executive.
7. Silverio Villegas González and the Illinois State Police investigation: WTTW; Chicago Sun-Times; DHS.
8. Farm and meatpacking labor figures: USDA data (via Snopes).
9. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, Biddeford, Maine, not the intended target; DHS’s “fearing for public safety” account: ABC News; NBC Boston; Portland Press Herald.
10. ICE’s hiring surge, the training cut (72 to 42 days, use-of-force included), and officers hired before background checks cleared: The Marshall Project; Washington Post; Associated Press.
11. David Brouillette’s employment history, the two protection orders, and the “wandering officer” red flag: Portland Press Herald; The Boston Globe; The Marshall Project.
12. Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, and Christian Castro, the ICE agent charged with assault and with falsely reporting that he was beaten; DHS’s own January 15, 2026 statement making the “violently attacked” claim is still posted, unretracted: Hennepin County Attorney; The Marshall Project; The Guardian; DHS.
13. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the Houston father and construction contractor ICE killed July 7; the Harris County District Attorney’s lab found the “methamphetamine” from the FBI warrant “tested negative for narcotics/illicit drugs,” and the three passengers swore in court that the “weaponized vehicle” account is false (the van was in park, with no agent in front of it): PBS NewsHour; NBC News; El País; Houston Public Media; Rep. Joaquin Castro and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus hearing; Wikipedia.