ICE Changed My Mind on the Death Penalty

How ICE forced me to abandon my lifelong opposition to the death penalty.

I was against the death penalty.

Not in some performative, half-hearted way. I meant it. Deeply.

I’ve spent most of my life in the United States. I’ve seen what this system claims to stand for — redemption, second chances, the idea that people can rebuild themselves and come back better. I’ve seen the opportunities for growth and civility that are possible here.

I don’t pretend to speak for all cultures or all governments everywhere. That kind of arrogance — thinking you can judge every society by your own yardstick — is the same poison that leads us to drop bombs on children in the name of “freedom,” to justify hundreds of thousands of deaths so we can sleep at night believing we “spread democracy.”

So, when I say I was against the death penalty, I mean here, today. In this system. In this country I know.

I carried that belief like a shield. A line I swore never to cross.

Until now.

Why I Opposed It

It wasn’t just a moral stance. It was a practical, historical, human stance.

I opposed the death penalty because our system is built by humans — flawed, biased, corruptible. Because power loves to masquerade as justice, and vengeance loves to dress up as righteousness.

I opposed it because the risk of executing even one innocent person is too great a stain to bear. You can’t un-kill someone. You can’t say “my bad” and roll back the tombstone.

I opposed it because when the state claims the power to kill, it almost always wields that power against the most vulnerable — the poor, the marginalized, the unwanted.

I opposed it because I believed in the possibility of redemption. The power of mercy. The idea that moral strength is not shown through mirrored cruelty but through rising above it.

But there was a time in our history — the time of Jim Crow — when I might have felt differently.

A time when white mobs would lynch children for no reason other than the color of their skin. When entire Black communities were burned to ash, not as some random act of rage but as a public celebration of white supremacy. A time when that evil was not hidden or disguised, but proudly paraded through town squares.

In that era, I can see how one might argue there was no moral ground left for rehabilitation. That some people had so fully embraced a raw, gleeful inhumanity that the only justice was to remove them entirely from society.

Yet I believed — truly believed — that we had moved far enough from those days. That despite every setback in the arc of justice since then, we no longer lived in a country where people so openly and enthusiastically embodied that kind of pure, unredeemable evil.

I believed that here, today, there was no one whose moral decay so perfectly mirrored that of the lynch mobs, that of the Nazis — I do not make these comparisons lightly, and we will get into the distinction in terms of scale, machinery, and scope between the Nazis and lynch mobs of Jim Crow and what we see today — no one for whom I would have argued the death penalty was the only moral option.

But alas, here we are.

The Moment Everything Changed

Then I saw what ICE has become.

I saw the quotas — not to target actual threats to society, not to prioritize dangerous criminals, but to “hit the numbers.” Quotas set at 1,875 per day, confirmed publicly by Stephen Miller himself on national television, with the chilling clarification that this number was a "floor, not a ceiling." And now, according to further reports, increased to 3,000 per day — no longer focusing on criminals at all.

I saw people being rendered to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison — a place explicitly designed for torture and humiliation, known for indefinite detention and inhuman conditions. In the Abrego Garcia case, a Maryland resident with no criminal record was abducted and sent to CECOT despite a direct court order prohibiting it. In the JGG case, evidence shows at least 238 people shipped to CECOT without any due process, stripped of every legal protection we claim to hold sacred.

No charges. No hearings. No appeals. Just abducted and dumped into a human abattoir that only has one exit: a body bag.

I saw Alligator Alcatraz —a new immigration detention facility buried deep inside the Florida Everglades at the old Dade-Collier airport. A site once used for emergency training, seized under a "state of emergency," and rebuilt in just days into a massive compound surrounded by alligator- and python-infested swamps — what officials proudly called a “natural perimeter.” This camp already cages hundreds — on its way to its 5,000 detainee capacity — in tents and trailers, lit 24/7 to induce sleep deprivation, flooded with insects, denied basic hygiene, legal access, and medical care. A place designed not for containment, but for fear — a symbol meant to terrify anyone who dared simply exist without the "right papers."

I saw the casual sadism among the public — people laughing as agents drag people into buses, swapping stories about “the good old days” before oversight. I saw viral TikToks and live streams celebrating raids like they were halftime shows. I saw those yarning for the alligators to feed on 65 million people, the “merch” celebrating the cruelty.

Here’s the critical difference from past atrocities:
Even in the eras of Jim Crow and the Nazis, there might have been some sliver of plausible deniability for the individual soldier or officer who could say they didn’t know the full extent of the horror. There were no viral videos. No cellphone footage. No livestreams.

Today, there is no such ignorance. Everyone knows exactly what they are doing. The images are everywhere. The screams echo online, replayed in a thousand TikToks and YouTube shorts. ICE agents cannot claim they don’t know. They see it. They participate in it. They record it. They revel in it.

And evidence suggests the vast majority of these aren’t violent criminals. These are people whose only “crime” might be crossing an invisible line on a map. Many didn't even break that law — they arrived at ports of entry, requested asylum, followed every rule we claim to honor. These have committed no crimes whatsoever.

People seeking survival, not conquest. People ripped from their families and thrown into torture prisons to satisfy quotas and appease a bloodthirsty political base.

And it is not just immoral — it is illegal.

Longstanding Supreme Court precedent makes this explicit:

• Yamataya v. Fisher (1903): Undocumented immigrants physically present in the U.S. are entitled to due process under the Fifth Amendment before deportation. These quotas and mass round-ups bypass that entirely.

• Landon v. Plasencia (1982): Due process requires considering individual ties to community. There is no room for that in a 3,000-a-day dragnet.

• Plyler v. Doe (1982): Even undocumented immigrants are "persons" under the Fourteenth Amendment, entitled to basic constitutional protections.

• INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca (1987) and INS v. Yueh-Shaio Yang (1996): Length of residence and community ties must be considered, even if not constitutionally required, which these policies explicitly ignore.

• Zadvydas v. Davis (2001): Indefinite detention is unconstitutional if removal is not reasonably foreseeable — yet these people are dumped in torture facilities without any path to resolution.

This is not justice. This is not enforcement.

This is the industrial-scale annihilation of human dignity.

Yes — ICE has not killed millions like the Nazis. They do not have extermination camps running 24/7. The scale of the atrocity is different. The machinery is different.

But let us not confuse the scale of the atrocity with the scale of the immorality.

The level of absolute moral rot required to design, execute, and celebrate these acts is precisely the same as the rot that drove the Nazis. The same as the lynch mobs who strung children from trees as public entertainment.

The moral architecture — the gleeful, public annihilation of the "other" as a spectacle of power — is exactly the same.

It is here, at this precise moment, that my old conviction died.

No More Innocence. No More Excuses.

There is no innocence left to claim here.

We are not talking about someone making a tragic error in a moment of chaos. We are not talking about a scared young conscript forced onto a battlefield they didn’t understand.

We are talking about people who wake up each morning, drink their coffee, put on their uniform, and march out into the world to destroy human lives. Not because they must — but because they choose to.

These ICE agents, these administrators, these paper-pushers and planners — every single one of them knows exactly what they are part of. The footage is everywhere. The stories are everywhere. The atrocities are not whispered secrets; they are proudly broadcast, monetized, and memed.

They are not soldiers forced by conscription. They are not civilians under threat of execution if they refuse. They are employees with options. They could resign today and get a different job tomorrow. But they don’t. Because they want to be there. Because they believe in the mission of cruelty. Because they see other human beings as insects to be crushed.

And then there’s another group — the propagandists.

The modern-day Goebbels disciples. The ones who sit comfortably behind microphones, on cable panels, or in viral Twitter threads, manufacturing moral cover for these horrors.

They lie, day after day, telling the public that these people being hunted down are violent criminals, terrorists, murderers — when in reality, most have committed no crime at all beyond crossing an invisible line on a map, or, in many cases, not even that — simply asking for asylum as they are legally allowed to do.

These media mercenaries know the truth. They know exactly who is being targeted and why. And yet they pour gasoline on the fire, stoking fear and rage, wrapping terror in the language of “law and order.”

They are not “just commentators.” They are not innocent bystanders. They are ideological arsonists, fanning the flames of cruelty, recruiting more executioners to the cause.

We settled this question at Nuremberg. “I was just following orders” is not a defense. And “I was just providing propaganda” is no defense either.

A crime against humanity is still a crime against humanity whether committed by a jackbooted Nazi in 1942 under the cover of Goebbels’ propaganda, or by an ICE agent in 2025 under the cover of bigoted influencers and news hosts selling hatred for clicks and ad dollars.

To those who say, "But they didn’t kill millions" — understand this: the scale of slaughter is not what absolves or damns a person. It is the willingness to partake in actions driven by absolute moral rot and cruelty and designed to enthusiastically annihilate the “other.” The moment you decide that your job, your comfort, your ideology are worth more than another person’s right to exist — that is the moment you step fully into the abyss. The body count is merely a matter of means and opportunity.

What we are witnessing is not law enforcement; it is the deliberate construction of a system of terror. A system designed to annihilate dignity, shred families, and publicly showcase power through suffering.

And this is not new. This is the latest mutation in a long, unbroken cycle of American moral rot, enabled by a lack of real reckoning:

After the Civil War, we chose reconciliation over true accountability. We allowed the first wave of the KKK to rise unpunished.
When Reconstruction faltered, we allowed a second, even more vicious wave of the KKK to flourish under Jim Crow, lynching and terrorizing with impunity.
When Jim Crow began to fall, we offered "healing" instead of justice — and the rot persisted, metastasizing quietly until it emerged now, openly, proudly, under the banner of ICE.
Each time, we chose leniency over deterrence. Each time, the evil returned stronger, more brazen, more sophisticated. Until now, when it finally reached the highest echelons of our federal government.

This time, we cannot make the same mistake.

We must approach this as we would a criminal enterprise — because that is exactly what it is. Under RICO, every member of an enterprise is held accountable for the actions of the whole. The planners, the architects, the field agents, the financiers, the propagandists — all share responsibility.

And just as in typical RICO prosecutions, and in international tribunals like Nuremberg, for those who played a smaller part in these atrocities, who choose to accept culpability and cooperate fully, there should be the possibility of a lesser sentence — perhaps life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But ultimately, there are no accidental bystanders. There are no pawns. There are willing executioners and willing propagandists in a regime of psychological and physical torture.
There are architects of a moral black hole.
And for them, there is no redemption. There is no rehabilitation.
There is only accountability.

The Logical Conclusion

And so, here I stand.

The person who once believed no one should ever be killed by the state. The person who believed redemption was always possible, even if only a flicker.

But what redemption is there for these people? What reformation?

If you think there is another path forward — that these people can somehow repay their debt to humanity — I challenge you: What could possibly balance the scale?

Would you sentence them to spend the rest of their lives in acts of charity? Imagine them forced into missions of service, rebuilding the communities they helped destroy, feeding the hungry, healing the sick. Do you really believe that would wash the blood off their hands? That their hearts would soften?

What punishment or atonement could ever account for the children whose lives are destroyed because their parents were dragged away in the night? The minds permanently scarred by seeing their families torn apart at gunpoint? The countless human beings thrown into CECOT or Alligator Alcatraz or whatever comes next to rot and die or sent to a broken country, denied even a moment of dignity?

And what of the children these perpetrators might raise in the future? Children almost guaranteed to be marinated in that same ideology of cruelty and domination. Are we to let that poison flow freely into the next generation, under the guise of “mercy”? How many more cycles of hatred and bigotry must we endure before we learn our lesson? Must we make the same mistake until they succeed in turning democracy into fascism?

And for those who might suggest that we should limit the punishment to life in prison, even for the worst among these perpetrators, I ask you to think about January 6^th and the pardons that followed.

Finally, to what purpose do we allow this level of absolute evil to continue to exist in our society?

Make no mistake: I am not calling for vigilante justice. They should be given the full measure of due process — the very thing they are happy to deny their victims. Let them make their case. Let every shred of evidence be examined in open court.

But if it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that their actions are in fact as they appear — and I fear that, with time, we will discover they are even worse — then the die is cast.

The death penalty must be sought.

I want to be clear: I still stand generally against the death penalty. I still believe we must guard fiercely against the slippery slope that allows it to become a tool of revenge or oppression. But today, I also see that the total abolishment of the death penalty carries its own risk — a risk of allowing evil so absolute and systematic that no other justice can match its magnitude. Our present has shown me that there exist at least some — those who would design and gleefully execute the systemic annihilation of entire communities — for whom there can be no true justice but the death penalty.

Not out of vengeance. Not out of bloodlust. But because if we are to draw any moral line at all, it must be here. That we shall no longer allow this absolute level of moral decay to survive.

It must also serve as a clear, final deterrent. We must make it known to anyone who dares consider taking up the mantle of terror in the future: if you commit these crimes, if you engineer or execute this level of inhuman cruelty, you will not be allowed to slip back into society, to retire comfortably, to quietly pass your disease on to your children. You will face the ultimate, immediate consequence.

This is not a conclusion I reach lightly, but one I cannot morally deny.

Because if we choose to be a society that allows this level of absolute, cancerous evil to continue to exist — if we allow it to fester under the banner of “mercy” or “rehabilitation” — then how are we not just as guilty as those who gave the orders?

How are we not just as guilty as the ones who facilitated it? The ones who justified it? The ones who carried it out?

If we choose to be the ones who enable this evil to persist into the future, we become the evil by complicity, co-conspirators in its perpetuation.

And if that is the society we choose to be, then we deserve neither justice nor mercy ourselves.

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American Manifesto — Phase Two: Civic Repossession