“Truly terrifying.” That was how National Nurses United executive director Puneet Maharaj described this week in a group text exchange in the aftermath of the brazen murder of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Custom Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis on January 7. A day later there was another shooting, some 1,700 miles away in Portland, Oregon, of Luis David Nico Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras by border patrol agents. And just a week after Keith Porter was shot and killed while celebrating on New Year’s Eve by an off-duty ICE agent in Northridge, California, a Los Angeles suburb.

All three acts of violence capped a year in which the draconian anti-immigrant drive launched by President Donald Trump and campaign architect Stephen Miller has terrorized immigrant communities and sparked protests across the nation. A year in which at least 32 people have also died in ICE custody, the agency’s most deadly year in decades, according to the Detention Watch Network. Some were long-time residents, some recent abductees in ICE raids. “They died of seizure and heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, tuberculosis or suicide,” or reported neglect, notes the Guardian.

The shootings reflect the broad portrait of US residents–Good, a white, 37-year old mother of three; Porter, a Black 43-year-old father of two; Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras, Venezuelan. And, in familiar tones, the Trump administration has been quick to demonize all four.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem rushed to defend shooter Ross insisting it was an “act of domestic terrorism” by Good. Vice President JD Vance called Ross a “deranged leftist.” Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras were immediately labeled as affiliated with the Tren De Aragua gang, though Portland officials voiced distrust in ICE characterizations. A DHS spokesperson claimed Porter was an “active shooter” and the off-duty agent was “protecting his community,” contentions that infuriated Porter’s friends.

It was a solemn beginning to the new year, an exclamation point on the past 12 months.

The administration wants to control the Good investigation even as Minnesota officials say the federal government is impeding a state investigation. Vance claims agent Ross has “absolute immunity,” a point refuted by Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Tribe on MSNow with Lawrence O’Donnell. “State laws of assault continue to apply, even to a federal officer,” he noted. Outraged Minnesotans are calling for state prosecution as was done, with a conviction, for the police officer who killed George Floyd a short distance from where Good was murdered. Gov. Tim Walz says he wants the state to do a “full investigation.”

Porter’s friends are pushing for justice for Porter. Los Angeles County is “reviewing Porter’s killing,” though, the Los Angeles Times adds, “it sometimes takes years for the agency to determine if a deadly use of force constitutes a crime.” While Los Angeles is a “sanctuary city,” the LA Police Department is notorious for supporting and defending ICE and other federal immigration agents and constraining community protesters instead.

Venezuela, of course, was the other high-profile calamity of the week. Trump’s January 3 military invasion of Venezuela, kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Up to 100 people, including civilians were killed, Venezuelan officials report. The US also bombed a medical warehouse, science labs, and an apartment complex, along with other sites in Caracas.

The long-planned assault followed months of extrajudicial bombings of boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that have executed at least 115 people since September—like the invasion, in violation of international and US law, and without congressional authorization.

It was a solemn beginning to the new year, an exclamation point on the past 12 months. The Trump administration has carried out the most sustained assault on constitutional norms, dispatching of troops to threaten Americans in numerous cities, weaponization of the Justice Department and programs to punish political enemies and entire Democratic-run states, shredding of decades of healthcare standards that have saved millions of lives, and so much more.

It’s hard to even get more appalled. But the convergence of the emergence of a new American colonial empire abroad with the deadly escalation of Trump’s cruel, racist anti-immigrant program, is what made the week “truly terrifying.”

Many people on social media searched for analogs in recent US history. For this aging lefty who lived through and participated in frequent protests against the Vietnam war, President Ronald Reagan’s sponsoring of military coups and mercenary armies in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and........

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