Federal thugs are deterring protest with violence

I remember vividly the moment three Las Cruces police officers on motorcycles approached my spouse, Sarah Silva, and a dozen other people who stood across Main Street, holding hands and blocking traffic near rush hour.

It was February of 2017. The Trump Administration’s agents had raided a neighborhood earlier in the day. In protest, Sarah led an act of civil disobedience.

The local police officers revved their engines at the protesters. I was afraid.

Three months later, my friend Bill McCamley was among a group of folks who blocked access to the U.S. Border Patrol’s local headquarters to protest mass deportation.

An angry man the protesters blocked from leaving the facility threatened to run them over. He grabbed a large wooden rod from his vehicle and approached them.

I filmed the scene and was, again, scared.

The killing of Good, and maybe our government

Acts of civil disobedience like these are the most American thing imaginable. Their tradition goes back to the members of the Sons of Liberty boarding the Dartmouth, throwing hundreds of chests of tea into Boston Harbor, and effectively launching the greatest democratic experiment in the history of civilization.

I imagine those protesters being scared, too — but also grounded in their convictions, which became the bedrock of our society.

Local police ultimately de-escalated tensions during both of the protests I witnessed in Las Cruces eight years ago. Sarah, Bill and others made their points without anyone being harmed.

But the events of the first days of 2026, especially the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, have me more afraid than ever that folks who engage in acts of resistance, including people I care about, will be harmed or killed.

I worry that Good’s execution may also be remembered as the death of the government patriots created by tossing tea into the harbor 252 years ago.

Filming yourself executing a citizen

ICE agent Jonathan Ross was filming on Jan. 7 while other officers tried to pull Good from her vehicle. She must have been afraid. She began to slowly drive away.

Ross didn’t dive out of the way of the moving vehicle, or drop his phone and aim his weapon with both hands. Instead, in a stunning act of reckless disregard, the thug kept filming with his left hand while he drew his handgun with his right and fired at Good’s windshield.

As Good’s vehicle slowly moved past him, Ross kept filming while he fired two more shots through the driver’s side window. He was in absolutely no danger from the moving vehicle when he fired the second and third shots.

At least one of Ross’ bullets hit Good in the head. He kept filming as the vehicle crashed into another car down the street. On his own recording, you can hear him say, “fucking bitch.”

Then, as if to put an exclamation point at the end of things, his video leaked. The Trump team made sure it went viral and disingenuously used it to vilify Good. That ensures agents will continue their violent escalation.

Before he shot Good, Ross’ video captures her smiling while speaking with civility to the federal agents. Then one of them demands that Good get out of her vehicle. He tries to open her door.

Good’s only sin was trying to slowly drive away, with her tires clearly turned away from the agents. To the extent that she may have committed a crime, it was likely a misdemeanor — one for local police to enforce, not ICE.

Civil disobedience in Las Cruces

I can’t get this out of my head: Our government killed Good for less than Sarah, Bill and other protesters did to voice their disapproval of the Trump Administration’s actions almost nine years ago in Las Cruces.

In February of 2017, dozens of people gathered in front of the federal courthouse in downtown Las Cruces in response to an immigration raid.

Sarah, a community organizer, led the group to march north along Church Street, which effectively shut the street down. Then she and others stood, and later sat, in a line across Main Street, blocking traffic. Their goal was to bring attention to the raid and push local police to distance themselves from federal immigration agents.

After kneeling in the street to talk with Sarah, then-Las Cruces Police Chief Jaime Montoya told local journalists, “I think it’s commendable, what they’re doing. They’re speaking up for the rights of people who can’t speak for themselves.”

That bolstered Las Cruces’ reputation as a safe city for immigrants.

De-escalating a tense encounter

But the first Trump Administration didn’t stop, so protesters didn’t, either. In May of 2017, 150 people showed up outside the Border Patrol building in Las Cruces. Many, including Bill, blocked vehicles from entering or leaving the parking lot.

One angry man who was trying to leave, an apparent Border Patrol employee, got really angry. I filmed the encounter.

“You better let me the fuck out of here. I’m babysitting,” the man said while pointing his finger. When the protesters didn’t respond, he said, “Get the fuck out of here. I’ll run your goddamn ass over.”

At one point the man grabbed what appeared to be a large wooden rod from his truck. “God dammit!” he shouted.

A Las Cruces police officer told the man to get back in his truck, and he complied. Then the officer spoke to the protesters. After several minutes, most moved to let the man through.

The First Amendment is crumbling

Without local police acting as negotiators at that event, things could have gone much differently.

In 2026, we have every reason to believe they would go differently. The Trump Administration is regularly using violence to force compliance.

Videos are circulating from Minnesota this week of agents ramming a vehicle to push it through a stop light, grabbing a teen from his job at Target and leaving him bleeding in a Walmart parking lot miles away, and kneeling on a citizen’s neck after dragging him from his vehicle.

Then there’s this: “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?” That’s what a federal agent asks a woman in Minnesota who’s filming him as he grabs her phone out of her hand.

Yes, he does appear to be referring to Good’s killing as a lesson for others. He’s also committing battery by grabbing her phone.

Good’s murder is the latest in a string of shootings during Trump’s immigration raids. Agents have shot others while they were sitting in their vehicles.

Federal officials and agencies tend to quickly and forcefully follow such violence with defense of officers and vilification of those they’ve harmed.

That casts doubt on whether investigations into those shootings mean anything. What isn’t in doubt is that our First Amendment rights are crumbling.

Descent into authoritarianism

When Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, he dismantled democracy and made protest nearly impossible in a matter of weeks.

His government took control of the streets, shut down protests, and jailed tens of thousands of political opponents. It beat and sometimes murdered people. It removed oppositional local government officials. It outlawed all political parties except the Nazi Party.

We’re not there yet. But federal agencies are using Nazi slogans, and Trump’s agents are shooting protesters and observers. There’s growing evidence that systems designed to hold agents accountable have failed.

Protest has become much more dangerous. We must also acknowledge that we’ve been demonstrating for the last year in record numbers, but still losing ground.

I hope Democrats take control of Congress in a year, but the Trump Administration can do lots to demolish democracy in the meantime.

State government needs to act

We need state governments to step up now. On Monday, with the Trump Administration sending additional agents to Minnesota, that state and Illinois sued to try to stop immigration surges.

New Mexico needs to act, too. I’d like clear statements from our governor and attorney general that we will prosecute federal agents who abuse our state’s residents. I’d like to hear their plan for action when the Trump Administration turns its focus here.

We should act during the legislative session that begins next week to stop enabling immigrant detention in our state. It sounds like we may finally be on track to do that.

In addition, our state transportation department should install live webcams, similar to the traffic cams some states use, next to Border Patrol checkpoints along state highways.

Those checkpoints are where most people in the borderlands encounter immigration enforcement agents. Let’s point publicly-owned cameras at them so we can all see what happens there 24/7.

That would finally bring some transparency to the Border Patrol, an agency long known for overreach and cruelty.

There will be more victims

So many of us have stories about these checkpoints. A Border Patrol agent berated and intimidated Sarah at one in 2016 until she was in tears. I watched helplessly from the passenger seat.

Last year, at the same checkpoint, agents aggressively boarded a bus full of high-school students who were on an official sports trip.

If these incidents took place in 2026, either might have ended with physical violence.

Politicians in both parties have voted in the past to increase funding for the Border Patrol and lower the standards to become agents because it was politically expedient. In doing so, they created an extremist paramilitary organization.

That’s why the Trump Administration replaced ICE’s senior leaders with Border Patrol officials last year. Now our government will hire almost anyone to be an ICE agent. It wants the worst of the worst, because they’re more likely to hurt those who get in their way.

Good was the latest victim, but she won’t be the last. I am afraid for my friends, my family, and especially my daughter.