We stand in solidarity with comrades in the Twin Cities and around the country who demand that ICE be abolished and cruel immigration policies be reformed. We continue to demand that our local and state government bodies cut all ties and coordination with federal “law enforcement” gangs that seek to enforce white supremacy and terrorize the working class. It should not take murders in broad daylight for us to stand up and say: ICE MUST BE ABOLISHED.

Innocent people continue to die in ICE custody. Families in our country – which claims to be a beacon of justice – are targeted every day by racist stormtroopers breaking into schools, hospitals, and other spaces that should be safe for all. Those who are injured, abducted, and killed in these illegal and unnecessary confrontations are afforded no justice. The ripple effects of this violence shatter families and shake entire communities. This is all by design.

Armed thugs wearing masks do not keep us safe; they keep people scared. Fascists encourage violence and fear because they are scared themselves. They are scared of what we can accomplish when we stand together. They are terrified of losing their grip on power. They want us to lay down and give up our resistance to their racist agendas, but we refuse to cower in fear in the face of authoritarianism. ICE represents a horror that a caring society will not allow, and we in Madison join our comrades in Minneapolis and around the country in standing up and fighting back.

We call upon everyone to stand together in this moment against fascism. We must fight all further funding of ICE and similar carceral spending. Democratic politicians are running scared, worried about the optics of “abolishing ICE” or “defunding”, but we know that the vast majority of humans want our resources invested in actually helping people, not on building cages and propping up an engine of cruelty. 

Defund ICE, build real housing! 

Defund ICE, invest in education! 

Defund ICE, fund the resources that allow us all to thrive! 

We refuse to let the fascist Trump regime and their gestapo rip us apart, and we refuse to be silenced. A better world is possible: a world without ICE.

What does it mean that so much of the discussion around Renee Good emphasizes her vaunted status as a mother and a citizen, and tends to elide the fact and significance of her queerness? Which characteristics does this focus tacitly endorse as meriting protection and which are prone to fall out of our analysis? We are right to identify that these ticks in the boxes of ‘moral goodnesses’ did not and could not protect her – her whiteness, her status as a mother, her smile. But we also need to understand which characteristics endangered her and which are, further, responsible for the propagandistic effect of the snuff film DHS produced of her.

Renee Good was a non-conforming, unsubmissive, queer woman. This is enough for a Nazi to advance on her vehicle and shoot multiple rounds in her face as he calls her a “fucking bitch”. Good’s queerness, both in her choice of partner and her practice of solidarity politics, is material to her targeting and execution. To queer is precisely to intervene into and resist hegemonic structures of power; to queer is to bend the arc of normativity’s force. To queer is to insist on the dignity of a life that the supremacist state wishes to eliminate: to legislate or incarcerate or convert away. Renee Good’s queerness is thus manifestly relevant to her resistance, and to the state’s justification for her targeting and murder.

I argue here that we must also pay attention to the racialized violence that, as I discuss in an earlier piece, accompanies gendered violence and which tends to be even less articulated in mainstream discussion. Renee Good is not the first person to be killed by the secret police, or even shot at in their cars. And in the wake of her murder, DHS and ICE moved to occupy Minneapolis, adding to their terror-from-a-distance of threatening food stamps and childcare money. The occupation has made a beeline to the most vulnerable communities, among them Somali and Native communities, attacking and abducting people with a speed and volume that prevents the same depth of articulation of each resister’s life. Yet we see the same principle acting in all cases: the targeting of what white supremacist domestic policy has identified as threats to this oppressive order.

The inability to countenance the violence ICE is enacting as a matter of course on black and brown people and communities– or our susceptibility to the normalization of the agency’s charter to target these populations since its inception in 2003– has a meaningful impact on the kind of carceral abolition we can imagine and demand. We understand the history of police in america as a history of slave catchers: an agency devoted to the perpetuation of the legal status of Black people as owned property, as chattelized beings without bodily autonomy and without rights and protections. In this way the police as they exist now continue to be agents of the United States’ white supremacist project, the very same project that ICE and their terror tactics pursue. That is why, to every call to abolish ICE, we add the call to abolish the police: the existence of armed groups tasked with the ideological order of the country is a threat to everyone, even to those who have footholds within that order. 

Above, I call the video released by DHS of Renee’s execution a “snuff film”. I am not the only one to identify this as a propaganda tactic, as a call to the misogynists and gaybashers: ‘see, if you join ICE, you can execute “lesbian bitches” with impunity’. We can imagine the quickening of the fascist’s pulse as they take in this de facto recruitment video, even as all of our hearts sank watching (or avoiding watching) the same. I write this piece in an attempt to make plain the logic of ICE’s operation, so that we do not see Good’s execution as an exception insofar as she was white, a mother, and a citizen, but that we rather understand her queerness as dissent, understand queerness itself as a target for elimination, and understand how this is continuous with ICE’s genocidal plans against Black, Native, Latin@, and other racialized people. In my opinion this understanding is crucial to forging and enacting solidarities that are critical in this moment, and in the moments which develop from it. 

Bodily autonomy means: freedom from police, from incarceration, from state violence. 

Bodily autonomy means: choosing our communities and relations, and the forms of those relations. 

Bodily autonomy means: a right to migration, to assembly, to resistance. 

The struggle against ICE is fought precisely for these freedoms and autonomies, and this makes critical analysis of gender and race– and particularly their joint analysis– indispensable. 

Caitlin Murphy

Avelo Airlines announced it will cease its Department of Homeland Security (DHS) charter service that transports detainees for the Trump administration, closing its Mesa, Arizona base on January 27. The budget carrier said the program had delivered only “short‑term benefits” but failed to provide enough predictable revenue to offset the operational complexity and costs involved. Avelo’s spokesperson, Courtney Goff, confirmed the move in an email to the New Haven Independent, noting that the airline began running deportation flights from Arizona last May amid growing backlash.

The decision follows months of protests and a boycott movement led by groups such as Connecticut Students for a Dream (C4D), the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, Unidad Latina en Acción, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Activists condemned the airline’s participation in what they described as “sloppy, dangerous” deportation flights, citing an American Prospect report that highlighted safety lapses. Pastor Jack Perkins Davidson warned that “human suffering is not profitable,” while Tabitha Sookdeo emphasized how community organizing and refusal to patronize harmful practices can force corporations to change. CEO Andrew Levy had previously defended the contracts on financial grounds, arguing they were essential to keep Avelo’s New Haven operations running.

https://www.newhavenindependent.org/2026/01/07/avelo-to-exit-deportation-biz/