Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. I was off last week but the first one is here.

The facts of Renee Good’s murder at the hands of ICE agent Jonathan Ross are indisputable. In a society led by people with a commitment to truth and human decency, we wouldn’t have to rehearse those facts. But we do not live in such a society.

That’s the opening of my friend Meagan Day’s article “ICE Has Become a Rogue Paramilitary.” In the following paragraphs, she gives the best breakdown I’ve seen of the uncontested facts of the case. The point-blank execution of an American mother as she tried to drive away in an SUV with her wife and the family dog, and the administration’s subsequent decision to relentlessly smear her as a “domestic terrorist,” is a particularly vivid illustration of what ICE has become in the second Trump administration. As Meagan goes on to document, it’s very far from the only one.

I’ve been on record as saying that the agency shouldn’t exist for as long as I’ve been regularly doing any sort of public political commentary. But the version of ICE that existed in 2024, as bad as it was, was nothing like what it’s become. Officers didn’t routinely wear masks, which meant that if one violated your rights, you might be able to identify which one did it. They didn’t go around telling U.S. citizens they were going on databases of “terrorists” for exercising their constitutional right to follow them around with cameras and document their abuses. This is something new. If you know a little Roman history, it’s hard not to think of the Praetorian Guard.

Meagan has always been a good writer, but I really feel like she’s hit her stride in the last year. In her best recent work, like this or her article Patriotism Against Authoritarianism (on why it’s a very bad idea to let the worst people in the country define Americanness) or The Zohran Mamdani Model of Exuberant Good Cheer (on why New York’s new mayor represents a shift for the better from the way many leftists have gotten used to communicating our ideas in the last few years), she’s really perfected a way of making sharp arguments in a direct, crisply written, and disarmingly earnest way. Not so coincidentally, the Jacobin article from last year I’m probably most proud of was one of the ones I co-wrote with her.

Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last two weeks, I wrote two articles for Jacobin:

Zohran Mamdani Is Right to Stand By Cea Weaver…and, on today’s topic:

It’s Easy to Imagine a World Without ICE

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