The killing of Renee Nicole Good by that ICE agent is bad enough, but the words of people in government, particularly J.D. Vance is what I am most troubled by.

Law Enforcement in the United States is vested by the state with the ability to take a life. The social contract between citizens and the state in this matter is that Law Enforcement is held to high standard.

What I see in the video is a man who got pissed off at the person in the car and reacted by shooting the person dead. The shot was to kill. J.D. Vance and others reinforce this accounting by stating this same person was injured in Chicago in an incident involving a vehicle and thus Vance is saying that justifies what was done. It does not. In fact, Vances statements is evidence this man should not have been in active duty. (By the way that angry ICE agent could have easily killed one of their other ICE agents on the scene, if I were one of the guys on the side of that vehicle I would have been pissed.)

The administration’s actions in response to this incident are not to hold ICE to the high standard of law enforcement and I think that is because no matter ICE’s placement within the administration or government ICE is not law enforcement instead it is military. The high standard of law enforcement is why some citizens are willing to provide officers with immunity. If ICE is not going to operate to the same high standard as law enforcement its offers do not deserve that same degree of immunity.

There is no real social contract between the citizens of the United States and the military of the United States because the military is not expected to deployed on U.S. soil. People in the military are trained to be killers, to defend themselves and their colleagues by killing the enemy. An important question in this matter is, how many ICE agents are ex military? How many of those might have PTSD from service in countries like Iraq?

The military kills “the enemy,” law enforcement arrests people who it charges have broken the law. Members of the military decide who is the enemy, law enforcement only makes a charge of a law being broken, the state provides evidence and a judge or jury decides whether that law was broken beyond a reasonable doubt. The military conceals their identity and hides their faces, law enforcement does not conceal their identities, does not hide their faces, wears a badge and clear identity markers.

There are clear and obvious differences between law enforcement and the military in the United States for the reasons above. The purpose and the training of its members are fundamentally different and that is why the military is not to be deployed on U.S. soil for law enforcement purposes.

Law enforcement exists to “serve and protect” citizens, the military exists to carry out the legal orders of its commanders. Citizens and the media need to be calling ICE a military organization. Congress needs to pass a law that classifies ICE by their action as military and determines whether it is lawful for them to be deployed on U.S. soil. If ICE is to be considered law enforcement it needs to act like law enforcement, and held to the same high standards.