Call It What It Is: When the State Kills and Language Lies
We are told there are two sides. There are not.
A woman was killed by ICE in the open. What happened next is what always happens: the machinery of language started its work. Murder became "incident." Execution became "use of force." The killing was sanded down, word by word, until it sounded like policy.
This is the pattern. First the body. Then the language. Then the insistence that we did not see what we saw.
But we did see it.
We watched an armed agent of the state choose death when a thousand other choices existed. We watched power select the most permanent solution available and call it necessity. And now we are supposed to believe that nothing else was possible, that this was somehow inevitable, that a human being had to die in that moment for reasons that will be explained to us later in language designed to make us forget what we witnessed.
Nothing in that moment required a death. Not one thing. The tragedy is not just that a life was taken but that killing has become instinct. Authority does not pause. It does not imagine restraint. It does not consider that violence might not be the answer. It simply acts, and then it justifies.
A human life was weighed against the inconvenience of de-escalation and found expendable.
Then comes the second violence,the institutional reflex that is, in some ways, more obscene than the first.
The carefully written statements that obscure rather than explain. The calls for patience from officials who will never have to bury anyone, who will never live with this absence, who are asking us to wait while they decide which version of the killing is most defensible. We are told to wait for facts while those facts are being rearranged, softened, diluted, and quietly replaced with something more palatable.
Memory becomes the battlefield. If they can control the story, they can forgive the killing.
This is not incompetence. This is strategy. This is what institutions do when they kill: they create confusion, they demand patience, they exhaust our capacity for outrage, and then they move on. The investigation will take months. The findings will be internal. The accountability will be theoretical. And by the time any conclusion is reached, we will have been trained to accept that this is simply how things work.
ICE does not get to hide behind federal procedure and internal review. An agency that claims the authority to kill must be forced to answer for it,publicly, immediately, and without the protection of bureaucratic language. Anything less is not accountability. It is permission. It is the state telling every armed agent that the rules apply to everyone else but not to them, that violence will be defended, that killing will be justified, that no matter what they do, the institution will close ranks and protect them.
What makes this unbearable is not that it happened. What makes it unbearable is that it is not surprising.
This is not a failure of the system. This is the system working exactly as it was designed to work. Kill first. Justify later. Rely on bureaucracy and time and public exhaustion to absorb the shock. Count on the fact that most people will eventually accept that this is just how things are, that some deaths are simply the cost of enforcement, that we cannot expect agents of the state to operate under the same constraints as everyone else.
The cost of this killing will not be paid by anyone in a uniform or anyone writing press releases. It will be paid by a family who will live every single day with an absence that does not close, with a loss that does not heal, with the knowledge that their loved one was killed by people who will face no consequences and who are, at this moment, being told that what they did was justified.
This is what we are being conditioned to accept as normal. A country where life is conditional. Where mercy is optional. Where the state can kill with impunity as long as it uses the right words afterward. Where murder can be renamed and redefined until it disappears into policy, and we are left arguing about procedure while a woman is dead.
That is the real violence here. Not just one life taken, but the systematic destruction of our ability to call killing what it is. The slow, deliberate erosion of our willingness to say plainly what we saw and to demand that when the state kills in our name, someone must answer for it.
They are betting that we will forget. That we will accept the language they give us. That we will move on.
We cannot.
Very true we cannot let her death be in vain. There must be accountability not lies, justice not rhetoric.
You're right, Tom. Obscene. Unbearable. And utterly tragic.
And a continuance of a long held capacity for the right to ignore violence in service to money and power. Never an effort to try to curb mass shootings either on their part. Now, they're arming the likes of insurrectionists to act against a public that's expressing peaceful and justifiable resistance to their overtly transparent evils. And condoning an ever escalating use of excessive force to curb it.
But this? Their response? Given the facts, given the documented footage?
Terrifying. To protect and serve an authoritarian regime.
A country now run like a cartel. No one will save any of us if we can't get it together ourselves to act. A general strike should have been organized months ago, before the justification of killings began. Venezuelan innocents and now our own. In one week.
Whatever will we be facing next week? And all the weeks after that?
You have to wonder if maga will ever come to understand how insensitive they've been to asylum seekers fearing persecution in their own countries. If it will take them facing it here for them to get a clue, find their humanity. And realize what they've done. But of course, it'll be too late.
Not a pessimist by nature. But things are really looking pretty grim.
My heart aches for what and who we're becoming.
At the whim of madmen, for whom it's all just a game.