The federal killing of a Minnesota ICU nurse should worry every American.
as rumors swirled about an impending ICE surge that would target the Somali population in Maine, where I live, I called my barbershop to schedule a last-minute appointment. I didn’t want a haircut, but I worried that I needed one. I am a light-skinned Black American: My hair and beard are thick and curly. On Thursday, I had both cut extra short in an effort to look less like someone ICE might find interesting. That is to say, for the first time in my life, I tried to look a little whiter.
I had seen video after video of federal agents occupying Minneapolis, flagrantly racially profiling innocent people on the street—demanding that American citizens, including police officers and Native Americans, show their papers, and even detaining some—and it seemed that the same chaos was coming to southern Maine.
I also made another change in advance of ICE’s arrival: I stopped carrying the 9-mm compact handgun—a Glock 19 equipped with a Holosun red dot—that I keep underneath my shirt most days, in full compliance with Maine’s concealed-carry laws. Although it is completely within my rights to carry concealed in my state (a practice I began a little over a year ago, after having gotten several death threats for my political writing), the past few weeks have made it apparent that ICE and Border Patrol don’t put much store in the law or Constitution.
When I heard news that Maine was about to get the Minneapolis treatment, a fear gnawed at me: What happens if I’m harassed or grabbed by an ICE agent for walking down the street without my passport, and an agent feels the pistol beneath my sweatshirt? What happens, God forbid, if my Glock dislodges from my appendix holster while I’m being roughly detained? I worried that, in such an event, ICE officers—poorly trained, trigger-happy—might panic and shoot me out of fear, even if I was doing nothing illegal or threatening. I worried, too, that they might not even bother to learn Maine’s gun laws before descending on my state.
Today, Border Patrol’s killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti—a 37-year-old ICU nurse who the Minneapolis Police Department believes possessed a legal-carry permit, and was armed in the lead-up to his death—made it clear that my paranoia was justified. It also made it clear that it is not only minorities who are having their First, Fourth, and now Second Amendment rights trampled by the federal government: Pretti, like Renee Nicole Good before him, was white.
