ICE killed the American Dream

Another day in America and another person killed by ICE. Today in Maine, a 26-year-old Colombian man who reportedly had work authorization and a young family was on his way to work when he encountered federal agents and was fatally shot."We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us" is a saying I heard all the time growing up in New Mexico. I love it because it puts me in my place. I'm a white American. My family wasn't here first. We tend to talk about immigrants as though they're interrupting our story, when in reality, this country has always been made of people living here long before it was America. Somewhere along the way we started acting as we had always been here, and the decision of who deserved to stay was ours.The ICE killing in Maine happened just days after Lorenzo Salgado-Araujo's fatal shooting by an ICE agent in Houston. Whatever investigators conclude about the Maine encounter, two fatal shootings involving ICE agents within days of each other should force a national reckoning over the growing use of deadly force in immigration enforcement. They join at least 21 people who have already died in ICE custody this year, the latest in a growing series of tragedies that are becoming frighteningly familiar: another family trying to understand how an encounter with the federal government became a death sentence.This is who we are now. When Renee Nicole Good was killed by a federal immigration agent earlier this year, the public was told that an investigation would follow. Months later, the agent who shot her remains employed by ICE, reportedly reassigned rather than removed, while her family continues living with that loss. Accountability that is endlessly deferred becomes accountability denied.For generations, this country marketed itself as a promise more than a place, asking people to overcome oceans, deserts, dictatorships, wars, famine, and impossible odds because we are a nation where hard work could become dignity, where children could succeed,