ICE Murderers: Impunity Under the Farce of Bourgeois Democracy

By Isabelino Montes

The anger now sweeping across the U.S. population in the wake of the latest atrocity of the Donald Trump regime could mark a turning point. In recent days, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE for its acronym in English, killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a protester in Minnesota who was demonstrating against the agency’s arrests and raids.

This crime has unleashed deep indignation that expresses an immediate need to take to the streets. It is not an isolated impulse, but a reaction born of the dignity of broad sectors of the U.S. working class, exhausted by repression and by the political decay of a bipartisan bourgeoisie, both Republican and Democratic, incapable of offering any solution other than violence.

That accumulated rage in the face of the decomposition of capital in the United States is a direct product of the ruling class’s inability to govern in any way other than by protecting the interests of a minority at the expense of the majority. Unable to contain the disorder it has itself generated, the bourgeoisie unloads the crisis onto those who already pay for everything: the working class, which today even loses its life for demanding a more just society.

In 2025, at least between 30 and 32 people died while in ICE custody or as a direct result of its detention operations. The killings of Renee Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minnesota are among the most recent cases of confrontations between ICE and protesters, but they are not isolated incidents.

Far from being limited to Minnesota, the lethal violence of the immigration enforcement apparatus has spread across the country. In September 2025, ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, in a Chicago suburb during a detention operation. In December of that same year, Isaías Sánchez Barboza was killed by gunfire from a Border Patrol agent in Rio Grande City, Texas, during an attempted arrest. Days later, on New Year’s Eve 2025, an off-duty ICE agent shot and killed Keith Porter in Los Angeles, in a case whose official version was immediately challenged by his family. These facts confirm that ICE violence is neither exceptional nor localized, but rather a national pattern of lethal repression.

Migration repression is not expressed only through killings, but also through the systematic separation of working-class families as a mechanism of collective punishment and social discipline. On January 20, 2026, in a Minneapolis suburb, Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old Ecuadorian child, was detained by ICE agents along with his father, an asylum seeker, after they were intercepted while returning from preschool. During the operation, Liam’s mother, pregnant and sheltering inside the home, was separated from the child after refusing to open the door out of fear of the agents. Despite knowing she was present, ICE did not facilitate immediate reunification and transferred the child and his father to the family detention center in Dilley, Texas, where a federal judge temporarily blocked their deportation. The case sparked national protests and denunciations that the state had used a child as an instrument of political coercion.

This repressive escalation responds to a desperate attempt by the capitalist state to guarantee high profit rates through the reduction of the labor force. It is immigrant workers who pay the price of capital’s need to recompose itself and resist its own decomposition.

This logic was evident from Trump’s own political project, when he promised the largest deportation in history, insisting there would be no cost and no alternative but to carry it out. He began by promoting the lie that he would expel criminal immigrants, but from the outset the falsity of that argument was exposed.

Who can seriously believe that there are exorbitant numbers of immigrant criminals in the United States?

Various productive sectors are affected by deportations, but these also function as a mechanism to accelerate the automation of production. It is in this terrain that the economic war against China is inscribed, a confrontation that has meant defeat after defeat for U.S. imperialism. Faced with this crisis, capital’s response has not been to reorganize the economy for social benefit, but to resort to higher levels of repression.

In the midst of this capitalist war, Trump now has blood on his hands. His response has been to deploy levels of violence that reveal the fascist face of capitalism in crisis. That face coexists with the other pole of imperialism, represented by the Democratic Party, which has not only operated within the same repressive structures, but has historically applied equally violent migration policies, as occurred under the administrations of Barack Obama.

This puts into perspective that the most visible bloodstains are carried by the Republican Party, but the traces of complicity also belong to the Democratic Party. The working masses are tired of this: of Republican executors and their Democratic accomplices, responsible for raids, deportations, and killings across the country.

Since the beginning of ICE raids, sectors of the labor movement began debating their incorporation into the protests. Although the balance of forces has been uneven, support has started to materialize from the grassroots, often displacing union bureaucracies aligned with the bipartisan order.

In May 2025, the AFL-CIO, together with unions such as United Auto Workers, SEIU, UNITE HERE, and UFCW, submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in a case related to the revocation of work permits for immigrants under humanitarian parole. Although presented as an economic defense, this gesture reflected the contradictions of a labor movement increasingly pressured from below by a working-class base battered by repression.

In 2025, Culinary Union Local 226 organized a May Day march in Las Vegas under the slogan “We Believe in Us.” That same year, local unions in Portland passed resolutions committing to defend immigrants against raids and racist groups. The labor struggle in the face of the government’s fascist offensive remains active, but fragmented.

Immigrant workers make up an essential part of the labor force. Repressing them is an attack on the entire working class. Reducing the labor force through terror can only translate into greater exploitation and forced productivity for the working class as a whole.

That is why solidarity began to take concrete form. The protests and general strike of January 23, 2026 in Minnesota, driven by the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation AFL-CIO, UAW Local 1005, SEIU Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, CWA Local 7250, the St. Paul Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Nurses Association, and community organizations such as MIRAC, Unidos MN, Faith in Minnesota, and the Center for Workers United in Struggle, demonstrated that the real power of the working class emerges when it organizes in a unified manner.

In response, the government replied with intimidation and repressive deployment. The message was clear: with fascism there is no dialogue, only obedience.

It must be remembered that the United States experienced democratic advances only within the limits of capitalist expansion. That democracy was always subordinated to the interests of the capitalist minority. Its prisons, police, and armies retained a repressive character, reserved for the moment when the social majority questions the existing order.

When the ruling class enters crisis, repression replaces dialogue. Fascism does not arise out of nowhere; it is cultivated by the reformist incapacity of bourgeois democracy. Trump accelerates this process, but he is not an anomaly; he is the expression of the panic of a capitalist class in decline.

Public debt exceeds 130 percent of GDP, U.S. hegemony erodes in the face of China, and capital abandons democratic façades to resort to direct control. ICE functions as a repressive guard against working-class strongholds, even in states governed by Democrats.

In this context, the working masses face a war between capitalists. The immediate danger is falling back under the Democratic Party, defender of a sterile democracy that led to this point. The real way out is to build independent political organization of the working class and advance toward a workers’ democracy.

The deaths caused by ICE cannot be settled with administrative dismissals. ICE is a criminal institution. Those who gave the orders must be held accountable, beginning with Donald Trump.

The immediacy of protests can open the path toward a permanent political organization of the working class. Without independent working-class political organization, there is no possible resistance. Demonstrations must become spaces of rupture with the bipartisan system.

Trade unions and community-based organizations face a historic challenge: breaking with union bureaucracy, with bipartisanship, and with all subordination to the capitalist state. Regrouping from the grassroots, strengthening workers’ committees in workplaces and neighborhoods, and linking them with immigrant, housing, student, and social defense organizations is an urgent task. Only in this way can a working-class program be built that unifies the struggles against repression, deportations, exploitation, and authoritarianism. This convergence of labor and popular organization is the only path to transform indignation into political power, break definitively with the dead end of bourgeois democracy, and advance toward a workers’ democracy capable of confronting and defeating the repressive state and the capital that sustains it.