Pictured from left to right: Silverio Villegas González, Renée Nicole Good, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero
by Jeremy Busby with Deborah Zalesne
(Note: This article was written around February 2026)
My first exposure to real police violence in prison came one morning while I was working on an outside field detail crew chopping grass. Ernest Perry, a fellow incarcerated worker at the Coffield Unit in Texas, got into a heated argument with a female guard assigned to supervise us. After enduring her berating him for several minutes, he tossed aside his gardening tool and said he was done working.
The guard radioed for her supervisor, who arrived heavily armed and on horseback. After being briefed, the supervisor did not attempt to calm the situation or de-escalate. Instead, he pulled out his government-issued revolver and shot Perry twice at point-blank range.
Prison administrators later misled the public. They claimed Perry had tried to escape, that the supervisor acted within agency “training and procedures,” and that an investigation was underway.
Perry survived the shooting, but so did the guard’s career. He kept his supervisory position and did not miss a single day of work.
This was not an anomaly. It was my first lesson in a system that treats violence by uniformed authorities, especially inside prisons, as an administrative matter rather than a crime. Long before body cameras, cell phones, or social media, correctional staff were shooting, beating, and killing incarcerated people, and then rewriting the story of what “happened.” The same tactics we now see used to shield federal agents and police officers were perfected behind prison walls, where there is rarely video and the victims are presumed liars by default.
There is an ancient proverb that says, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.” If that is true, then the public must be willing to name what is happening in this country. In the aftermath of ICE’s controversial fatal shooting of Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, Vice President J.D. Vance held a press conference and declared that “ICE agents have absolute immunity.”
Anyone familiar with the basic laws of this country knows that no federal or state law enforcement officer is literally immune from criminal prosecution, because in a functioning democracy, no one is above the law. But Vance’s statement carried a deeper truth: in practice, violence committed by law enforcement in the United States has become functionally decriminalized, followinga model long normalized in carceral spaces.
Over the past two decades, the world has witnessed relentless police violence in the United States, including killings in which the perpetrators faced no meaningful consequences. In many cases, these acts were never even documented by law enforcement agencies as crimes. Instead, the public is presented with a polished narrative, crafted to close the case before it opens: false characterization of the facts, character assassination of the victim, and the suppression or disappearance of evidence.
That is precisely what unfolded after the shooting of Good. Federal officials rushed to frame the killing as justified “self-defense,” while Vice President Vance, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and President Trump publicly advanced a storyline suggesting that no crime had taken place. But their confidence was not rooted in facts. It was rooted in the assumption that no accountability would ever come.
Despite Vice President Vance’s insistence that Good’s killing was justified, video footage and eyewitness accounts have suggested otherwise. Federal officials have also spread a suspicious narrative that Good was connected to left-wing domestic extremists. This allegation is offered without transparency and with obvious political benefit.
Video and witness accounts also undercut initial government claims about any threat posed by 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a U.S. citizen known in his community for his career in health care and activism, who was fatally shot by United States Customs and Border Protection agents during an immigration enforcement operation. Video and multiple eyewitness accounts indicate he was unarmed and holding only a phone when agents tackled him to the ground and fired multiple rounds, contradicting earlier DHS claims about his threat. The justice department has finally opened a civil rights investigation into the incident, yet no federal officer has been criminally charged, further demonstrating how lethal force by federal agents is often framed as justified before any full accounting of the facts.
The shootings of Good and Pretti have drawn renewed scrutiny to ICE’s use of force and the widening scope of federal violence under Trump’s immigration crackdown. Investigations and reporting have documented multiple recent shootings by immigration agents, including other fatal shootings, according to The Marshall Project.
In September, Silverio González, a 38-year-old undocumented father of two, was killed by ICE agents. As in Good’s case, DHS officials claimed González had weaponized his vehicle against federal agents. Later, video footage surfaced showing González trying to back up and drive away, undercutting the government’s account.
In Chicago, ICE officials shot Marimar Martinez, claiming she attempted to ram their vehicles and threatened them with a semiautomatic weapon. Those claims collapsed when body camera footage surfaced showing Martinez did not possess a weapon and did not attempt to harm the agents with her vehicle. The footage reportedly captured an agent shouting, “Do something, bitch,” seconds before opening fire.
Despite the fact that technology and policy now allows for more of these killings to be captured on camera, incarcerated people rarely receive this privilege. Inside prisons, there is often no body camera footage to later expose these moments. A guard’s report frequently becomes the only official record, and that record is almost always accepted as truth. Prison administrators are notoriously skilled at obstruction: delaying records, suppressing video, intimidating witnesses, and rewriting narratives.
According to Mapping Police Violence, U.S. police kill more than 1,000 people per year, with members of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, poor, and immigrant communities historically representing the majority of victims of police violence. Yet only about 1% of those killings have resulted in officers being charged with a crime, and these numbers do not account for the undocumented assaults, torture, and killings carried out inside jails and prisons, where the victims are literally caged, discredited by design, and cut off from public view.
The same pattern playing out in high-profile federal shootings quietly repeats itself every day in jails and prisons across the country. For one example, Robert Miller was being held on a $300 fine in the Tarrant County, Texas jail when he suffered a mental health crisis. After being violently subdued by jail guards, Miller was placed in full-body metal restraints, pepper sprayed multiple times, and dragged face-down to a holding cell, where he died.
Miller’s wife fought government officials for over two years to obtain details about her husband’s death. During the stonewalling process, officials misrepresented Miller’s cause of death and circulated misleading medical conclusions. According to local reporting, the Tarrant County medical examiner classified his death as “natural,” attributing it to a “sickle cell crisis,” a conclusion later disputed by independent analysis as medically implausible.
No guards were criminally charged. And the civil lawsuit his family filed was dismissed after the statute of limitations expired, while officials delayed disclosure long enough to run out the clock.
In a broader pattern, investigations have documented dozens of cases in which deaths of Black people in custody were falsely attributed to sickle cell traits, an explanation repeatedly used to sanitize state violence and block accountability.
Police departments and prison administrations portray themselves as “social defenders,” especially when one of their own commits an act of violence so public that it cannot be fully denied. Their first move is predictable: degrade the victim. The victim becomes a “suspect,” a “criminal,” a “threat,” an “agitator.” In Good’s and Pretti’s cases, the smears escalated into claims of domestic terrorism. This labeling is not incidental. It is a strategy to teach the public that the victim deserved it.
If public outrage persists, the state pivots to its second lie: the act was the isolated work of one “bad apple.” But the truth is more terrifying. The system is not breaking down. It is functioning as designed. When federal agents can kill people like Renée Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti in high-profile incidents, with video, witnesses, and national outrage, and still face no immediate criminal consequences, and when guards can do the same thing to incarcerated people in total silence, it confirms that this design is working exactly as intended.
Finally comes the ritual that seals the outcome: promises of a full, fair, “objective” investigation—an investigation that almost never produces accountability, but reliably produces closure.
Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis has argued that the legal system often functions less like a neutral search for truth and more like a mechanism for “legitimizing” the violence of police and prosecutors after the fact. As he writes, when police violence becomes headline news, “the words ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’ are sprinkled into story after story and used as a substitute for informed discussion.”
Brutality by law enforcement is no longer rare. It is not isolated. It is routine. It is systemic. And it has become so unchecked that officers increasingly commit acts of violence even when they know they are being recorded, because they do not fear consequences.
Their willingness to take human life, in direct contradiction to the oath to protect and serve, is fueled by a belief that has been cultivated by every prosecutor who looks away, every internal investigator who sanitizes a report, every medical examiner who lies, and every politician who praises the shooter before the autopsy is complete.
When elected officials like Trump and Vance, and government leaders like Noem, are unburdened by decency, morality, shame, or humanity, we do not just have a political problem. We have a crisis of civilization.
Jeremy Busby is a writer and activist incarcerated in Texas. He is the founder of JoinJeremy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the works of incarcerated journalists and writers across the country. Deborah Zalesne is a tenured professor of law at the City University of New York School of Law and co-author of “Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement” (Pluto Press 2025).
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