From Enforcement to Open Fire: Federal Immigration Agents Shoot Civilians as Violence Becomes Routine

So they’re just shooting people now? In Portland. Out in the open. Two more people gunned down by federal border agents in an American city nowhere near a border, just hours after ICE agents killed a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis — and we’re supposed to treat this as routine.
That’s where we are.
On Thursday, Customs and Border Protection agents opened fire in a Portland neighborhood, leaving a man and a woman with gunshot wounds and streets sealed off with police tape. Portland police weren’t involved. Local authorities didn’t pull the trigger. This was the federal government, armed and autonomous, operating inside a city that did not ask for them and does not control them.
And this didn’t happen in a vacuum. It came on the heels of a killing that has already shaken the country: ICE agents shooting and killing a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis. A woman with a family. A poet. Someone whose life ended not because of a conviction, not because of a trial, but because a federal agency decided force was easier than restraint.
Two cities. Two days. Multiple people shot. One through-line: federal immigration enforcement escalating from intimidation to lethal violence in public spaces.
These agencies are no longer just “enforcing immigration law.” They are operating like an occupying force, untethered from local oversight, empowered to use deadly force, and insulated by a federal system that almost never holds them accountable.
When something goes wrong, the same script rolls out: vague claims of “threats,” sealed investigations, and a demand that the public wait quietly while federal agencies investigate themselves.
Portland knows this playbook well. The city has already lived through the sight of federal agents pulling people into unmarked vans, firing crowd-control weapons into neighborhoods, and treating dissent as a security threat.
What’s different now is the brazenness. This isn’t crowd dispersal or protest suppression. This is live ammunition. This is people bleeding on city streets.
Supporters of these agencies will tell you this is about safety. About order. About protecting the public. But the public being protected never seems to include the people on the ground — the families, the bystanders, the communities that wake up to helicopters, sirens, and crime scene tape.
Safety for whom? Order imposed on whom?
What we’re witnessing is the normalization of federal violence against civilians, especially in places that push back. Sanctuary cities. Cities with immigrant communities.
Cities that refuse to quietly accept militarized enforcement as the cost of doing business. When force becomes the default response, accountability becomes the enemy.
This isn’t about one shooting or one city. It’s about a federal apparatus that’s been allowed to grow more violent, more secretive, and more detached from the people it claims to serve. If border agents can open fire in Portland and ICE can kill a mother in Minneapolis within the same week, the question isn’t whether this is a crisis.
The question is how many more people have to be shot before we say enough is enough.