During its October 2024 session, Senate Democrats and Republicans fashioned a smart, sensible, and compassionate bipartisan immigration bill that had enough support in both the Senate and House to pass.

The bill, which took four months to produce, collapsed in fewer than four days because House Republicans yielded to pressure from Donald Trump to keep the bill from reaching the Senate. The first comprehensive immigration reform bill in nearly 40 years (since the Reagan administration) was killed because Trump wanted immigration to be a problem he could take credit for solving when he again ran for president.

Trump’s intention toward immigration was evident from the beginning of his second term when he immediately announced an Immigration and Nationality Act titled, “Protecting American People Against Invasion,” invasion being a term normally used to identify a hostile military occupation. But the invasion we needed most to fear turned out to be from within, as Donald Trump and Stephen Miller turned an effective police force into an ICE army of masked marauders. Miller has gone so far as to falsely claim ICE has “absolute authority,” a power he afforded Trump during a Meet the Press interview one week into Trump’s first term, suggesting early on that Trump need not answer to the courts (as he is continuing not to do in his refusal to turn over documents known to incriminate him in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation).

Today, for many seeking refuge on our shores, the American dream has become a nightmare as federal agents aggressively pursue immigrants (and virtually any person of color) on streets and in neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and even homes. Trump and Miller claim, without reliable documentation, that among the suspected illegals are hundreds of thousands of “murderers, rapists, and pedophiles.” Disproven claims such as these are evidence of how the public conversation around immigration often gets tangled in abstractions: policy debates, budget line items, political talking points, and broad innuendos and attacks without proof. The weight of such xenophobia crushes human beings whose lives are shaped, and too often shattered, by the conduct of the very institutions meant to process and protect them.

Refugees who once accepted the promise and took hope in the truths of the American Dream are discovering it has been replaced by a version of government thuggery not dissimilar from those they are escaping. The treatment of undocumented immigrants and those merely suspected by federal agents (most often due to the color of their skin) has become one of the most troubling moral failures in modern American governance.

What makes this especially disturbing is how often the people targeted are among the most vulnerable: asylum seekers fleeing violence, longtime residents with deep community ties, or individuals who simply fit a profile. The presumption of guilt–based on appearance, accent, or neighborhood–undermines the basic principles of fairness and dignity that the country claims to uphold.

Critics of such practices aren’t arguing against border management or legal processes. We’re arguing against brutality masquerading as policy. A civilized society does not need to choose between security and humanity. We can enforce our laws without degrading our neighbors and ourselves in the process.

Whatever the historical departures from the dream of American equality and opportunity have been in the past, the United States has long imagined itself as a beacon of hope. That image rings hollow when the machinery of immigration enforcement operates with the lack of transparency typical of totalitarian regimes and the disregard for life typical of tyrants.

The tragic irony in all of this is that recent events in Minneapolis have provided stark and alarming evidence of disregard for humanity with the slaughter by federal agents of two people who do not fit the profile normally used to justify indiscriminate persecution: Renée Good and Alex Pretti both appear to have been unjustly killed, and both were white American citizens, neither had criminal histories, nor are either’s deaths being investigated by ICE or the offending officers disciplined.

The videos of their deaths (recorded by their fellow citizens) are so alarming that the outrage of the American people has finally reached a crescendo so resounding that even the federal government cannot pretend it is not sounding. Evidence that the government only pretends to be deaf is that so virulent a voice as Steven Miller’s has now admitted that “the proper protocol” may not have been followed.

If we want our country to be true to the ideals we have too often taken for granted, we must confront the inhumane practices carried out in its name by our government and demand accountability, compassion, and respect for human rights. If the values of the American Dream are to be protected, we must not permit murder in their defense.

Clifton Jolley is a writer, producer, and educator living in Ogden, Utah. Robert Rees has taught Humanities at UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, and as a Fulbright Professor in the Baltics. He is President of FastForward for the Planet, a Utah non-profit focused on saving Great Salt Lake.