Renee Good’s death is the consequence of unchecked presidential power | Opinion
The fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis is not an aberration or an unfortunate accident at the margins of an otherwise lawful system.
It is the logical and foreseeable consequence of an administration that has steadily corrupted the instruments of government, degraded constitutional restraints and transformed immigration enforcement into something dangerously resembling a presidentially directed security force: Answerable upward, insulated from accountability and unleashed downward upon the most vulnerable.
This is the moment when euphemism must end.
A federal law enforcement agency operating in American cities, masked, militarized and increasingly lethal — shielded by political loyalty rather than law — is not merely enforcing immigration policy. It is exercising raw state power absent democratic consent. When that power takes a civilian life, the question is no longer one of tactics or training; it is a question of legitimacy.
History is unambiguous; nations do not lose their freedoms all at once, they surrender them incrementally by normalizing excess, excusing abuse and deferring accountability in the name of order. What we are witnessing is the steady morphing of ICE from a civilian enforcement agency into a presidential security apparatus.. One that evokes uncomfortable parallels not with democratic allies, but with regimes that relied on internal forces to suppress dissent and protect the prerogatives of a single ruler.
What makes this moment more damning is that the alarm is not being raised solely by progressives or immigrant communities; it is being articulated by conservative thinkers who understand that constitutional democracy cannot survive executive lawlessness.
Washington Post commentator George Will has long warned that the corrosion of norms, contempt for institutional limits and elevation of loyalty over law are not policy disputes, but existential threats to the republic. A government that treats constraints as inconveniences and enforcement agencies as personal instruments is not conservative, it is reckless.
Will’s admonition that character and restraint are the invisible architecture of constitutional governance has never been more relevant.
Meanwhile, TIME foreign affairs columnist Ian Bremmer, writing from the vantage point of global political risk, has been even more blunt: Democracies do not announce their decline; they drift into it as ruling parties capture institutions, delegitimize oversight and condition the public to accept “emergency” powers as permanent. Bremmer has repeatedly placed the United States on lists once reserved for fragile democracies.
That the world now debates America’s stability in these terms is itself an indictment.
Perhaps the most devastating failure lies not in the Executive Branch alone, but in the studied silence of a Republican-led Congress that has abdicated its constitutional duty. Oversight has been replaced with obedience; separation of powers has yielded to partisan fear. When Congress refuses to investigate or restrain the expansion of executive force and when it tolerates civilian deaths without demanding transparent accountability, it becomes complicit.
The consequences are global. American leadership has never rested solely on military strength or economic weight; it rested on credibility and the belief that the United States was governed by law rather than impulse, and by institutions rather than vendettas. That belief is rapidly eroding.
Let us be unmistakably clear: This is not about immigration, it is about whether the American state remains accountable to the Constitution or becomes a tool of personal rule. It is inseparably connected to how this administration now views power beyond our borders, asserting dominion over Venezuela; threatening coercive intervention in Cuba and Colombia; and casually suggesting that sovereign territory, such as Greenland, is an asset to be acquired. This is not foreign policy, it is impulse elevated to doctrine.
The greater peril lies not solely in the conduct itself, but in our gradual habituation to it. We are witnessing the normalization of aberrant state behavior — not through consent, but through repetition and institutional acquiescence. History is unequivocal: Authoritarian systems are constructed incrementally, as actions once regarded as intolerable are folded into routine governance.
When a republic abandons the rule of law at home and restraint abroad, it forfeits not only trust, but purpose. We have reached such a moment.
Mark Apostolon is vice president of strategic innovation at and José R. Rodriguez is president and CEO of El Concilio California.
This story was originally published January 14, 2026 at 9:17 AM.