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In this dystopian hellscape created by the MAGA-movement and nutless Republicans, armed gang members ride through neighborhoods looking for people to kidnap. In Minneapolis on Wednesday, they killed a woman, Renee Nicole Good, 37, a mother of three. A gentle soul, which I can say without pause, because she was a poet. All poets have gentle souls. She was trying to get away from the armed gang harassing her when they opened fire on her. The gang’s OGs have already started spinning a tale about cars being used as weapons and factions of people learning to drive recklessly to take them out. It’s a story as old as time, this war between gangs and the communities that they terrorize, but this is different. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federally funded gang that slides into communities and tears families apart, and they do so with impunity. It is worse than the Crips or Gangster Disciples because ICE is backed by America’s lifeblood, racism, and a racist White House that implored them to make their bones. Racism drives this administration. It’s the spine of Project 2025, the playbook of Trump’s White House. It’s the foundational tenet for ICE’s harassment, kidnapping, and capture of working immigrants who are simply trying to make a way for themselves and their families while navigating an increasingly hostile U.S. immigration system. The U.S. Supreme Court is in on it, too. They allow ICE to racially profile those whom they decide to stop and question. Racism is the sole reason that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) went from a terror-fighting faction of the Department of Homeland Security to those that create said terror. ICE was created in the post-9/11 haze and sold to the public as a necessary evil to protect us from shadowy threats. Two decades later, its actual résumé reads like a rap sheet: family separations, warrantless arrests, deaths in custody, medical neglect, sexual abuse allegations, and now—yet again—gun violence. Remember, most gangs start with good intentions. The Crips were formed to protect neighborhood youth against other, more violent gangs. See what the Crips are on now. Details of the tragedy are still being sorted, but the pattern is familiar: a heavily armed law-enforcement presence, escalating force, and yet another civilian harmed in the name of “public safety.” The script never changes—only the zip code does. “Federal agents have shot people 14 times since last January, killing at least four; on multiple occasions, officers shot at people observing ICE raids and people attempting to drive away,” the Trace notes. At what point do we admit that the people claiming to stop crime are, in fact, committing it? Because let’s be clear: snatching people off the street in unmarked vehicles is not “enforcement.” That’s kidnapping with a PR team. Detaining people indefinitely without charges isn’t “border security.” That’s incarceration without due process. Shooting civilians during routine operations isn’t “keeping the peace.” That’s state violence, full stop. Because ICE isn’t preventing harm; they’re creating it. They are rolling up on unsuspecting people masked up, carrying large weapons, and shouting demands. That’s gang behavior. And to be frank, all of this is a show of force that isn’t even warranted, as crossing a border without papers is a civil violation, not a violent crime. If ICE were a person, they would be locked up, considering they would’ve been charged with unlawful detention, excessive force, obstruction of legal counsel, and gross negligence that has resulted in death. If anyone did even a portion of that, we wouldn’t be debating semantics—we’d be calling a lawyer. ICE doesn’t get to be both the perpetrator and the victim. They don’t get to hop out of tinted-windowed vehicles, guns at the ready, and then claim that the person fleeing this lawless gang endangered their lives by trying to get to safety. But that’s America at work, where the brown face can be charged for hurting the white fist. These agents are not de-escalators. They are not community protectors. They are trained to treat human beings as threats first and ask questions later. When that mindset collides with real neighborhoods and real people, they get hurt. And this is the quiet part that never gets said out loud: all gang structure is to feed an ecosystem of terrorism that thrives off fear and, more importantly, money. Everyone has to kick up to the big homies when they hit a lick, and so does ICE. This anarchic band of hoods kidnapping people is to feed a private prison system that profits off those in custody. There are bed mandates. Quotas. Contracts. When your budget depends on keeping cages full, you stop caring whether the people inside them pose any danger. You just need them compliant—or gone. Which brings us back to the central scam: ICE does not make communities safer. Immigrants—documented or undocumented—are statistically less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born citizens. ICE knows this. Politicians know this. But fear is more useful than facts, especially when elections need winning, and dog whistles need blowing. So the world’s most dangerous crew is ICE. They are neighborhood police with crack strength. And they don’t care. They will show up at courthouses, hospitals, graduations, and birthday parties just to rip families apart because they pledged allegiance to their gang and got jumped in. And they’re the criminals they claim to be looking for. And that’s the uncomfortable truth America keeps dodging: the most dangerous criminals in this country don’t always come from the hood. Sometimes they come with badges, guns, and a talking point about “law and order,” leaving blood, trauma, and broken families in their wake—and daring us to pretend that’s justice. SEE ALSO: Woman Shot And Killed By ICE During Crackdown In Minneapolis ICE Agents Invade Minneapolis Hospital With No Warrant  

At a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, Vice President JD Vance, the self-appointed “hillbilly” who made it out the mud, told white Americans they no longer have to “apologize for being white.” After Vance’s remarks, much of the media coverage fixated on crowd reaction, viral outrage, and whether the comment was provocative or racist, with outlets describing applause and backlash. The coverage treats the remark like a culture-war skirmish or a spicy soundbite meant to rile liberals and thrill conservatives. Was it divisive? Was it provocative? Was it just red-meat rhetoric for the base? But we need to be interrogating the deeper political calculus behind the message. The one real question we should be asking has been politely avoided: why was this man chosen to say it, on that stage, at this moment? Because the power of the line, which is not new, doesn’t come from its originality, but from its messenger. Those words could never have carried the same weight coming from Donald Trump. He is too rich, too cartoonishly gilded, and too insulated from the daily humiliations of working-class life. He smells like inheritance, bankruptcy lawyers, and gold-plated toilets. White Americans already know Trump doesn’t apologize to anyone for anything because that’s his brand. Coming from him, the remark would have sounded like exactly what it was: a billionaire dismissing accountability from the safety of unearned power. But coming from JD Vance, those words hit different. Vance is the perfect vessel because he is not supposed to be the villain in this story about American decline. He’s supposed to be the proof that the American story still works. He’s the poor white kid who survived Appalachia and clawed his way out of generational precarity. He escaped addiction and instability and sits among elite power without fully shedding the aesthetic of struggle or indicting the system that chewed up everyone he left behind. Appalachia was gutted by corporations, poisoned by industry, abandoned by policy, and exploited by capital. If anyone has standing to name the real villains, it is him. But instead, he stood on that stage and offered absolution to angry white folks. He doesn’t look like a robber baron. He doesn’t sound like a hedge fund vampire. He doesn’t wear his privilege in gold leaf. He arrives coded as earned, not inherited. And that’s precisely why he can say things Donald Trump can’t say without exposing the scam. Vance is the walking proof-of-concept for the lie at the heart of white grievance politics. His biography does the dirty work for him. His mere presence tells struggling white Americans: See? The system isn’t broken. I made it. And if you didn’t, that failure isn’t about class warfare, corporate theft, union busting, or billionaires hollowing out your town. Nope, it’s about culture. It’s about values. It’s about them. ‘Them’ being all those immigrants who “cut the line.” The Black folks who “won’t stop complaining” and “hate white people.” The DEI programs that supposedly stole your job. The leftists and “Democrats” who “hate America.” The queer folks who make you uncomfortable by existing out loud. The problem is anybody but the corporations that poisoned your water. That shipped your labor overseas and cashed the checks while your community collapsed. It’s not the hedge funds that strip-mined your hospitals and nursing homes. Nor the pharmaceutical giants that flooded your towns with opioids and called it pain management. It ain’t the private-equity vultures that bought your trailer parks and jacked up the rent. Not the agribusiness monopolies that crushed family farms, the telecoms that took public money and still left you without broadband. Not the coal and chemical companies that took the land and left the cancer clusters, or the banks that redlined you on the way in and foreclosed on you on the way out. And it’s certainly not the lawmakers who gutted unions, and the billionaires who wrote the tax code so your paycheck shrank while their fortunes ballooned. According to our “hillbilly” Vice President, it’s anybody but the people who actually pulled the levers. That’s the magic trick. Vance stands there as living proof that the ladder still works as long as you redirect your anger at structural violence in the right direction. And once that story takes hold, class solidarity becomes impossible. Because why punch up at the capital when you’ve been trained to punch sideways and down at the people who were never holding the knife in the first damn place? That sleight of hand is exactly why a Turning Point USA stage was the perfect place for Vance to perform this routine. Turning Point USA isn’t some scrappy youth movement. It is a grievance factory bankrolled by wealthy donors who benefit directly from keeping white Americans angry, confused, and misdirected. The same corporate interests that busted unions, suppressed wages, deregulated industries, and strip-mined rural communities now underwrite conferences where white resentment is packaged as “freedom.” Vance’s job is to make sure no one in the audience ever connects those dots. So instead of asking why private equity gutted their hospitals, why pharmaceutical companies flooded their towns with opioids, or why billionaires keep getting tax cuts while their schools crumble, the crowd is trained to seethe at safer targets. Everyone except the corporations in the room and the donors signing the checks. That’s the scammy business model. Vance doesn’t challenge that model; he completes it. He reassures white Americans that their suffering has nothing to do with capitalism run amok and everything to do with moral decline and cultural invasion. He turns class betrayal into racial discipline. He sells the lie that dignity comes not from solidarity or justice, but from refusing to interrogate who’s actually profiting off your pain. And because he comes wrapped in a hillbilly origin story, the absolution feels authentic and trustworthy. When he tells white Americans they don’t have to apologize, it doesn’t sound like a billionaire sneering at accountability. It sounds like a neighbor who understands, a man who’s been

Mercedes Wells, a Black woman in Indiana, went viral earlier this month after releasing a video showing herself being sent home from a hospital despite being in active labor. Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Ill.) introduced a bill in Congress that aims to prevent hospitals from turning away women while they’re in labor. According to NBC News, the Women Expansion for Learning and Labor Safety Act, or WELLS Act, would require hospitals to implement a “Safe Discharge Labor Plan before discharging a patient who presents with signs or symptoms of labor.” The Safe Discharge Labor Plan would see hospitals providing clinical justification for the discharge, assessing travel distance and time before approving the discharge, and receiving a written understanding from the patient. The WELLS Act would also require health care professionals to undergo racial bias training. “My bill aims to address systematic issues around maternal care, racial disparities, and hospital accountability,” Kelly said. “It’s clear that what happened to Mercedes isn’t an isolated incident, nor is it the first time a Black woman’s pain has been ignored.” “Until all women are heard and listened to in our hospitals and health centers, I’ll be their voice in Congress fighting for change,” Kelly added. On Nov. 16, Mercedes Wells’ husband rushed her to Franciscan Health Crown Point hospital when her contractions were 10 minutes apart. After six hours, Wells only received a checkup from a nurse before being discharged from the hospital. She never saw a doctor and wound up giving birth to her fourth child in the backseat of her car, only 8 minutes after leaving the hospital. “It was really a horrific situation to be treated like a dog, or not even like a dog, like less than,” Wells told NBC News. “It says that they don’t care at all for Black women in health, and it’s hurtful. We thought that, you know, things have changed at this point in our country, and I don’t see a change.” Franciscan Health President and CEO Raymond Grady told NBC News that the nurse and doctor who declined to provide Mercedes Wells proper care no longer work for the hospital. Grady also issued a formal apology to the Wells family. “We failed to listen to Mrs. Wells’ concerns,” CEO Raymond Grady said in the statement. “We must fix what failed in our hospital so that no one experiences what happened to Mercedes Wells.” Sadly, Mercedes Wells’ experience isn’t abnormal for Black women. Black women disproportionately represent maternal mortality rates and are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications. These rates have only skyrocketed in states like Texas and Georgia, where stringent abortion bans have led to unnecessary deaths of Black women, like in the case of Amber Thurman. Black people already have a heightened distrust of medical professionals due to historical mistreatment and racial bias in health care. The experiences of Mercedes Wells do little to dispel the notion that the American health care system is designed to work against Black people. Hopefully, this bill passes, so no more women will have to endure what Mercedes Wells went through. SEE ALSO: White Women In Medicine Have Always Neglected Pregnant Black Women 7 Ways Racism Harms Pregnant Black Women