The horror of watching a U.S. citizen die at the hands of federal or state officials transcends ordinary politics. Such a ruthless deployment of power not only evokes deep and widespread human emotion but also collides directly with fundamental U.S. values rooted in the Constitution, especially the commitment to protecting individual liberties from government abuse.

This is certainly how many Americans felt watching an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shoot and kill 37-year-old Renee Good on the streets of Minneapolis. The widely viewed videos of the encounter triggered national outrage and deep concern about the Trump administration’s broader anti-immigrant policies, which have involved thousands of federal agents, including masked officers in cities across the United States with little apparent accountability.

The horror of watching a U.S. citizen die at the hands of federal or state officials transcends ordinary politics. Such a ruthless deployment of power not only evokes deep and widespread human emotion but also collides directly with fundamental U.S. values rooted in the Constitution, especially the commitment to protecting individual liberties from government abuse.

This is certainly how many Americans felt watching an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shoot and kill 37-year-old Renee Good on the streets of Minneapolis. The widely viewed videos of the encounter triggered national outrage and deep concern about the Trump administration’s broader anti-immigrant policies, which have involved thousands of federal agents, including masked officers in cities across the United States with little apparent accountability.

The protests have expanded after federal agents then shot and killed 37-year old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affair hospital, during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. His death, which was recorded on video, has intensified public outrage. Official statements about what happened, including claims by the Department of Homeland Security that he posed a threat, have been challenged by multiple video angles and eyewitness accounts showing contradictory details, such as footage of him holding a phone at the time he was shot. As a result, many Americans have been galvanized to protest, and Senate Democrats are vowing to oppose funding for ICE and related DHS funding in response to what has been taking place. “This has to stop,” President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama wrote in a statement released on social media.

This is not the first time that Americans have confronted these issues. And history shows us how quickly violence can spiral out of control when government authorities escalate, rather than defuse, fraught situations.

The killings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, were intertwined with the controversial war in Vietnam. For more than a decade, Americans had been exposed to pervasive violence both abroad and at home. Throughout the 1960s, journalists captured unsettling images of police attacking peaceful protesters demanding integration, voting rights, jobs, fair housing, and freedom from police harassment. As the decade progressed, Americans also read about and watched the extent to which U.S. troops were killing the Vietnamese in what increasingly appeared to be a senseless and brutal war. Coverage of massacres such as My Lai revealed that individuals vested with military and policing........

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