by Jacob G. Hornberger

January 13, 2026

People across America are lamenting the killing of a nice woman in Minneapolis named Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE agent named Jonathan E Ross. Ross was standing on the side of the car Good was driving when he fired three shots at her and killed her. After the killing, someone exclaimed, “Fucking bitch.”

Predictably, federal officials have labeled Good a “terrorist” and have immediately rallied to the defense of the ICE killer. Make no mistake about it: No matter the facts of the case, there will be no criminal prosecution of Ross. Under the immigration police state under which we live, ICE agents, Border Patrol agents, military personnel, and other immigration-enforcement goons wield omnipotent authority to kill anyone they want. That’s the type of country in which we all live. Everyone just needs to get used to it.

When a killing such as this takes place, you can bet your bottom dollar that the entire executive branch of the federal government will immediately come to the killer’s defense, take over the “investigation” of the matter, and destroy or cover up all incriminating evidence in order to make it virtually impossible to successfully prosecute the malefactor for murder in state court.

Recall the federal massacre of the Branch Davidians, including children, at Waco. The feds attacked the compound with military tanks and knowingly and intentionally injected flammable gas into the facility. After the resulting conflagration that left dozens of innocent people dead, the feds took control over the property and immediately bulldozed the site to hide any incriminating evidence of their criminal conduct. Not surprisingly, none of the killers was ever prosecuted for murder.

But there is an important point about Good’s killing that people are ignoring: It comes as part and parcel of the federal immigration-control system, which, unfortunately, most Americans continue to support. As I have long pointed out, a brutal and deadly immigration police state necessarily comes with America’s socialist (i.e., central planning) immigration-control system.

In other words, immigration police-state thunder comes with border-control lightning. If one doesn’t want thunder, then one has to oppose lightning.

Yet, what we have long seen in the immigration debate is people essentially saying, “Jacob, I want the border to be secure but, at the same time, I want a gentle, kind, and benign immigration-enforcement system, one that succeeds in ‘securing the border.’” In other words, they want lightning but not thunder.

Thanks to President Trump’s expansion of the immigration police state from the borderlands to other parts of the country, Americans are finally seeing and experiencing what life has been like in the borderlands for decades. I grew up on the border. I lived almost half my life there. People in the borderlands have lived under an immigration police state (and also a drug-war police state) their entire lives.

President Trump, ICE, the Border Patrol, the FBI, and the Pentagon are showing people what has to be done to win the war on illegal immigration. Clearly, the police state along the border, including Trump’s infamous Berlin Wall, have not been not sufficient to “secure the border.” Trump is showing us that to “secure the border,” the immigration police state necessarily had to be expanded nationwide, much as it has been in North Korea, which now has a well-fortified and secure border with South Korea.

As I document in my newest book (which is now available in print format as well as Kindle and Audible formats) The Case for Open Borders: A Primer, death and suffering are part and parcel of America’s immigration controls and America’s immigration police state.

Recall, for example, the periodic deaths of illegal immigrants in the backs of tractor-trailers from dehydration or asphyxiation. Whenever that happens, people express lamentations and federal prosecutors and federal judges issue moral condemnations of — and long prison sentences to — the people trafficking those victims.

But what everyone ignores is that it is the immigration-control system that they themselves support that is responsible for these horrific deaths. If America had an open-border system, foreigners would be traveling into America like human beings, not like animals.

What do immigration-control advocates say after these types of deaths? They say the same thing they are saying today about Good’s death: “Jacob, it’s true that we favor the immigration-control system that produces these deaths. But we are not responsible for them because we didn’t want the deaths to happen. We oppose these deaths. They are horrible. Judge us by our good intentions, not by the actual consequences of the system that we support.”

In other words, “Jacob, we strongly support lightning but we want to make it perfectly clear that we ardently oppose thunder.” But to rid our nation of immigration police-state thunder, it is necessary to rid our nation of immigration-control lightning.

As we have maintained for 36 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, there is one — and only one — solution to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending immigration control crisis and the death, suffering, mayhem, violence, and destruction of liberty that comes with it. That solution is open borders— that is, the immediate abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol, and all restrictions on the free movements of people across borders. As I show in my book The Case for Open Borders: A Primer, it is also the only system that is consistent with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, free-market principles, and the tenets of Christianity.