A Constitutional Crisis is Brewing

Special Edition of All Things Justice

Dear Friends,

Today Minneapolis and communities across the country are grieving. And we are mobilizing.

Yesterday, ICE gunned down Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a U.S. citizen and ICU nurse who was killed while protecting a woman who had been pushed to the floor by federal agents. Earlier in the month, ICE shot Renee Nicole Good, also a U.S. citizen, as she was peacefully observing ICE actions from her car.

Both Pretti and Good were killed by agents, funded by taxpayer dollars, while they were peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights to assemble and protest. Pretti was lawfully carrying a weapon, which he never removed, a right protected by the Second Amendment, when he was killed

As they have been in recent weeks and months, ICE agents acted with complete impunity, disregarding and sometimes blatantly violating 4th Amendment protections from illegal search and seizures, and 5th Amendment due process protections, to capture, harass, and yes, kill, people in support of their so-called immigration enforcement policies. Silverio Villegas Gonzalez (Chicago) and Keith Porter, Jr. (LA), two men of color, were also among those shot and killed by ICE last year.

We are lurching toward a constitutional crisis. Or perhaps we are already there.

Let us not lose sight of what is happening here.

Pretti and Good were only in the streets in the first place because ICE was engaged in an aggressive federal immigration enforcement strategy. ICE continues to target people they claim might be illegally in the country, often without any proof to support that intuition. Much of their enforcement is against people of color, of any age and any immigration status, including small children ripped from their frantic parents and taken into federal custody.

When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution, they feared governmental excess. That’s why the 1st Amendment is first in the Bill of Rights because it was viewed as the most important right of citizens, and most essential to our democracy.

Whether these ICE officials will ever be held legally accountable is a complex question. Given the current leadership of the Department of Justice and statements they have already made about the shootings, we are unlikley to see federal prosecutions. While Minnesota could bring state criminal charges, there are jurisdictional issues that may prevent them from successfully proceeding with the cases.

For now, we can honor the memories of Renee Nicole Goode and Alex Pretti, and the many citizens and non-citizens targeted by ICE actions, by standing with the people of Minneapolis. They keep showing up in the bitter cold to stand together, and they need our support. If you want to stand with the people of Minnesota in these challenging times, you can find some great action ideas on the “Stand With Minnesota” website. You can also call your elected officials and demand that they stop funding ICE and start fighting to restore sanity and safety to our increasingly fragile democracy.

Watching people organize and take risks for one another is a reminder that justice only, and always, starts with us. You know the poem, “first they came for”… If you do, then you know how it ends.

We need to stand up now and write our own ending that rests in democracy and freedom.

Thanks for all you do.

In grief and solidarity,

Jessica