Silent No More

The Official U.S. Senate website states, “[the constitutions’] first three words – “We The People” – affirm that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens.” From the start of America as a sovereign state, we sought out to form ‘a more perfect union’, a union that would represent the people’s interests and exist to solely serve the citizens of our nation. So why now does it feel like the government no longer cares about the very people it was created to protect? 

America has always been divided—the world is divided, there isn’t much that can be done to change that. However, the division being faced in America has become so stark that there is barely a united definition of patriotism anymore. I want to break that definition down so we are all on the same page. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines patriotism as “love for or devotion to one’s country”. Many people take this to be blind loyalty and commitment to America no matter how corrupt it falls. However, if we look at the Declaration of Independence, it clearly states,“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive…it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government” (Archives.gov)  this doesn’t align with the idea that patriotism is blind loyalty. In fact, this shows that true patriotism is a love so strong for your country that you want the best for it, and if the current administration is putting the country into a bad position, it is the duty of the people (out of patriotism) to fight for the good of their country even against those who claim to be serving it. 

Patriotism is not serving a president who hates the American people; It is not supporting Federal agents when they kill citizens; it is not one political party over the other; patriotism is the unification of citizens with the common goal of reforming our country. There are many topics to be covered about today’s government and political climate, but I want to talk about the people. Saturday, January 25th, 2026 at 9am, Alex Pretti was shot to death by a Federal Officer a part of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was a 37 year old white man, shot while completely unable to defend himself as 5 agents were piled on top of him. This is not the first murder at the hands of ICE, and it, unfortunately, will most likely not be the last. Protests broke out just weeks before over the murder of Renee Nichole Good, a 37 year-old white woman also in Minnesota. These two victims have a lot in common from age, race, and where they lived, as well as the reason the government claims they were killed: they were aggressors, endangering ICE agents. Good was in her car when she was killed, trying to step in the way of ICE detaining another person. They claimed she was going to run an agent over. Her case is less clear when it comes to if she was intentionally trying to harm the agents or not, but that shouldn’t matter. We can clearly see in the tragic case of Alex Pretti that he was not trying to harm any ICE agents. AP News has many different videos showing multiple angles of the incident in their article “Videos of deadly Minneapolis shooting contradict government statements” by Hannah Fingerhut. Even though anyone can clearly see that no agent was endangered, my claim is that it shouldn’t have mattered either way. 

As we established earlier, the role of the government is to serve the people. Federal officers are tasked with upholding this role to the highest degree. What has been going on with ICE and the continued brutality and inhumane treatment of US citizens goes against American values. Government agents’ first reactions to ‘hostile situations’ should never be to shoot the citizen. If you are working in government and you are in danger from a US citizen, your goal should be to disarm the citizen and safely take them down, because whether they are dangerous or not doesn’t matter; it is your job to ensure their safety over your own. In both of these instances, there was no question that the victims might be endangering other citizens—in fact, they were both trying to help protect others from the ICE agents—so there was absolutely no reason for shots to have been fired and American lives to have been taken. 

People can argue all day about immigration laws and how enforced they should be, but that is not my concern. My concern is that the government is no longer looking out for its citizens’ best interests. The people in government have made us their puppets for power, giving us the illusion of freedom and pretending to care about us. Not one ICE agent or federal worker under the current administration is a patriot. They want power and control, and we are giving it to them. They keep us so divided we are arguing over if someone’s death at the hand of a federal officer was justified or not. They laugh when we tear each other to pieces because it means they can keep getting away with atrocities. Right or left, it doesn’t matter. American lives are being taken away by those who swore to protect us. If this isn’t unconstitutional, I don’t know what is.