Minneapolis Execution

Another person dead at the hands of ICE

The video of ICE killing a man today is the worst thing I've ever seen.

There is no blood. It is not graphic in a traditional sense. The video is taken from a distance, you have to turn the sound on to understand what you are seeing. Or at least, I did. Sight alone wasn't enough for me to comprehend what I was witnessing: something I have never seen anywhere except for movies. That makes it worse. The killer saw movies. Life imitates art.

The man is subdued. He is on the ground, surrounded by agents. They are beating him, kicking him. An agent appears to take out his gun and pistol whip the man in the face. The man is kneeling, hunched over, an ICE agent behind him is holding him down. The man straightens his back and the agent who was pistol-whipping him shoots him in the head. The man jerks. The agent shoots twice more. As the man falls to the ground, likely already dead, the officer next to him unholsters his gun and empties his clip into the man's motionless body.

This is not a shooting, or even a murder. This is a street execution.

(EDIT: Here is a video from the woman in the pink jacket, which provides context that makes what happened even more clear)

DHS says the executed man had a gun. I don't believe them because all they do is lie, and also I don't care. The man was subdued. Surrounded by officers. If those officers were unable to subdue him with the grip they had on him, it speaks to a total lack of training, an absolute failure of even the most basic knowledge of police work that renders them unworthy of carrying guns in the first place. The way that second agent empties his magazine into the man, like some victorious 12-year-old in Call of Duty, will haunt me until I die. I can't get it out of my head.

I am sitting at a truck stop in the middle of goddamn nowhere, halfway through Pennsylvania on I-80. 16 hours and about a thousand miles to Minneapolis. I was about a third of the way through this state when I got news of the execution. Stopped at Wal-Mart to stock up on supplies, watched the video. That was maybe an hour ago.

Whatever I'm feeling, I've never felt it before. I don't know what to do, but I know this is the right direction to drive, and that I can hardly bear to be still. So I'd better wrap this up, for my sanity and to maximize my chances of outrunning Winter Storm Fern.

These bastards. These motherfuckers. This is war. The Trump administration declared war weeks ago; it is unfolding before our eyes. This isn't the kind of war that involves armies on a battlefield, it's not conventional warfare. This is the goddamn Global War on Terror coming home to roost. It's a counterinsurgency against the American people, and we are all enemy combatants until proven otherwise.

The cruelty of it. Cold-blooded. Never in my life. What are we to do in the face of such evil?

I close my eyes, here at the truck stop, and think about the tens of thousands of people who protested in subzero temperatures in Minneapolis yesterday. I think about the thousands ICE could not frighten into silence and paralysis, who became MORE involved, more committed to opposition in the wake of Renee Good’s murder. These are the people who make me proud to be an American. Pride and rage. It has to be enough.

In the trunk of this rented Jeep Compass sits a suitcase full of gear from Portland in 2020. Military grade gas mask. Level 4 plate and a plate carrier that says PRESS. A kevlar helmet. These are things I hoped to never need again. I said at the time that the summer of 2020 in Portland and beyond was our modern Bleeding Kansas, a harbinger of worse things to come. I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to be right.

These bastards do not understand the country they are trying to take over. They believe that we are all as cowardly as they are. They believe we will hide in our homes, that we will cease doing the many things we can do and are doing to fight back. They are wrong.

Fuck these people. Fuck their cruelty and their hubris. We cannot, will not stand for it. This is our country: an imperfect, fucked-up place with a beautiful dream and brilliant aspirations. They cannot kill that dream, not with all the bullets in the world; they cannot crush these aspirations to true greatness: equality, tolerance, a level playing field, a good and prosperous life for all. Liberty. Every single one of our amendments, our inalienable human rights. That dream will never expire, can never be snuffed out; it will continue, onward onward onward, and we will fight for that dream here and now and by God we will win.