Say Their Names
Say all of them--there are so many
It’s been forty years (!) since the Challenger exploded just moments after taking off. Rich and I were at home, watching the coverage. We saw the explosion and fragments falling back to Earth. It was a profound shock, very similar to the shock I felt watching Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald and to watch insurrectionists storm the Capitol on January 6th. It’s similar to watching footage of the World Trade Center collapsing. These are memories imprinted into my brain. The details are returned to me on those anniversaries.
I tried to create a video blog entry on Sunday. I was infuriated to have vented for almost 20 minutes, only to learn that technical difficulties prevented it from being processed thoroughly. It might have been a good thing because I was furious.
We celebrated my daughter’s birthday on Saturday, January 24th. We were disconnected from the internet. When I did get around to checking my messages, I was horrified and outraged to learn that ICE/Border Patrol had flat-out murdered Alex Jeffrey Pritti, an ICU nurse working with veterans.
Clearly, it was murder. I watched the videos. ICE/BP agents were terrorizing protesters. They went after a woman, shoving her to the ground. Pritti stepped between the woman and the rogue agents, trying to help her to her feet. He wasn’t threatening the agents. His focus was on the woman. I saw agents rush Pritti, knocking him down. They proceeded to beat him with fists and kicks. He was down, unable to fight back, and I saw an agent pull a gun from his leg holster. The agent shot Pritti in the back.
Pritti was shot 10 times. News reports say that the rogue agent was the one who shot Pritti, but I saw one or two other agents circling Pritti. They fired their guns too. Pritti was already dead, and the agents joked about it.
Almost at once, DHS and ICE (Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Dan Bogino) began spreading lies. They claimed that Pritti had a gun in hand and was threatening the rogue agents. Well, Pritti had a gun; it was legally registered, and he was allowed to carry it holstered. Remember the 2nd Amendment? Pritti never pulled the gun out. Another agent removed it, so Pritti was completely unarmed as well as helpless.
He was murdered in public, in broad daylight.
The same thing happened to Renee Good earlier this month. She was executed by an ICE agent. Immediately, the convicted felon and the maladministration tried to paint her as a domestic terrorist. In reality, her last words to the agent who killed her were reassuring: she was not mad at him. Then he shot and killed her.
The message is clear: if we exercise our 1st Amendment rights to protest this evil fascist maladministration, we can expect to be beaten up or killed. Who does that? Think: the Nazi Gestapo, East Germany’s Stasi, and other “secret” police in dictatorships around the world.
We are not on the road to fascist dictatorship. We are there.
We can still stop this, and people have been taking to the streets everywhere to protest. The convicted felon’s approval ratings are circling the toilet.
Former MAGA supporters in Congress are starting to break away. Yet a majority of hard-core representatives and senators still support the maladministration’s actions.
Over and over, the Democrats in Congress have rolled over and played dead. Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House have been totally ineffective.
With the murders of Pritti and Renee Good, people in this country have become active. I hate to say this, but could it be because ICE is now killing white people? They’ve been snatching up and assaulting people of color for months. Pritti and Good were not the first to die because of ICE/BPD.
It’s a hard pill to swallow, but we have to deal with the fact that too many are racist. You can see it in the comments of posts or newsletters. I have stopped reading them because they make me sick. I know now that the soul of our country has too much rot.
So far, in 2026, ICE was responsible for 8 deaths. ICE was involved in the deaths of detainees in 2025.
Skin color doesn’t matter. We are all human beings and deserve to be treated decently and with respect.
What do we do now?
We keep exposing maladministration and convicted felon lies. Leadership isn’t doing such a great job with messaging, so it’s going to take posting and reposting government atrocities. It can be done by sharing newsletters or posts in our own words. We have to pressure our representatives and senators to vote against funding ICE. We can go out and protest, even if it’s just a sign in the window or planted in the front yard.
Most of all, we need to keep saying their names and sharing their stories.
