The Brooklyn Rail

Having witnessed the killings two weeks apart by the US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents in the Twin Cities of our two decent and productive fellow American citizens Renee Nicole Good, a poet and mother of three children, on January 7, 2026 and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care nurse for the United States Department of Veteran Affairs, on January 24, 2026 both were thirty-seven years of age (b. 1988), the chill caused by this explicit act of violence was shared to millions of viewers across the nation and abroad, while at the same time, we were haunted by similar past tragedies, for example, the images of Kent State shootings by several National Guard soldiers on May 4, 1970 re-emerges to the forefront of our collective consciousness with great urgency. Even though the former was a protest of ICE’s aggressive actions deployed upon various immigrant communities, and the latter took place during a student demonstration of the escalation of the war in Vietnam, they both share the First Amendment rights, which is lawfully our constitutional right, basic human rights, including the right to express opinions, the right to gather peacefully for protests, and the right to petition for policy changes.

When the former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem refused offering her apologies for having labeled both Good and Pretti as domestic terrorists at Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3, it is apparent that the politics of nativism has been aggressively coordinated. While this situation has given the opportunity to regain its own response against globalism, nativist ideology at the expense of casting blames upon immigrants and refugees as political pawns is in fact un-American. As we, offsprings and products of immigrants and refugees in the past who helped building the infrastructure of our United States of America, for they aspire towards freedom and opportunity, hence self-sacrifice through hard work is a conscious act so their children can be Americans, we will undoubtedly continue to make significant contributions at the present as well as in the future.

With full disclosure, as a member of the board of directors of SSS (Second Shift Studio Space) of Saint Paul—a nonprofit residency program, art space, and artist-led effort to provide better resources to working artists, including women, gender-nonconforming individuals, and others who are marginalized as a results of their gender identity through one-full year free studios—I was reminded at once that while building various communities of art appreciators across the Twin Cities, sharing these following reflections by our cultural worker friends and colleagues on ICE's unlawful raids on homes, pulling our fellow Americans from their cars, and other acts of aggression against peaceful protesters in the Twin Cities, is essential to our collective solidarity.