US national freedom day while its agents kill its people by Markus Gibbons

On February 1, Americans observed National Freedom Day, a moment meant to honor the promise of liberty and the long hard struggle to secure civil rights in this country. It is supposed to be a quiet celebration of emancipation and inclusion, a collective exhale, a reminder of ideals enshrined in law and poetry. Yet this year’s observance came immediately on the heels of raw and harrowing reality, two U.S. citizens, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, were killed within weeks, both shot dead in Minneapolis by agents of the federal government’s immigration enforcement apparatus, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The irony here is not subtle. It is a wrenching paradox that should make anyone who claims to cherish freedom pause and perhaps feel a prickle of shame.

Good, a 37-year-old mother was shot multiple times by an ICE agent during an enforcement operation on January 7. Less than three weeks later, Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and father was killed in broad daylight while observing and filming ICE agents as they interacted with protesters and community members; body-cam and bystander footage show him attempting to help another person who had been shoved to the ground. Within hours, the federal administration rushed to label both deaths as justified, even as locals and lawmakers demanded independent investigations and condemned the actions.

It is hard to know where to begin when the rhetoric of state power and the reality of human bodies collide with such tragic regularity that one death barely cools before another blazes into view. But that collision, between the soaring language of “freedom” and the iron boot of enforcement is exactly the point. National Freedom Day commemorates the signing of the 13th Amendment, the constitutional end of slavery. It is a day meant to meditate on liberation. Yet this year, that meditation was ruptured by the sound of gunshots and the sight of grieving families. How ought a nation reconcile a celebration of liberty with the spectacle of federal agents killing people inside the country they serve?

Perhaps the most striking element here is the symbolic dissonance. Freedom, in its most idealized form, is the ability to live without fear of arbitrary violence. It is the power to speak and protest, to assemble and to document. And yet here we are, in Minneapolis, where hundreds have taken to the streets to protest what they perceive as unchecked federal violence, where state legislators and local officials alike are calling for accountability, and where the very citizens who exercise their First Amendment rights are being met not with dialogue but with force.

The deaths of Good and Pretti are not “incidents” that can be tucked away in a press release. They are warnings. They signal something profoundly unsettling about the state of American power, that those entrusted with upholding the nation’s laws can also wield lethal force against its own citizens with startling frequency, and then defend those actions with bureaucratic certainty. For many, including neighbors and lawmakers far beyond Minnesota, these are not isolated tragedies but the opening chapters of a grim narrative about the erosion of civil liberties in the name of security.

And yet, the official discourse unfolds with a disquieting detachment. Statements from the Department of Homeland Security have been quick to justify the shootings as self-defense, even as video evidence and eyewitness accounts diverge sharply from those narratives. The apparent eagerness to protect the agents involved, rather than the citizens who lost their lives, speaks volumes about priorities and about whose stories are believed and whose are dismissed.

One might have expected that National Freedom Day would prompt deep introspection about these very contradictions. Instead, the holiday passed with a stark reminder that freedom is not self-enacting; it is maintained only with vigilance. It is not a brand printed on calendars, but a set of practices, protections and crucially, limitations on the state’s reach. When those limitations are blurred by the language of enforcement and fear, the very meaning of freedom becomes contested terrain.

This is not a partisan lament. It is a call to memory. The promise of American freedom was never meant to be static. It was and must be, a living, breathing commitment to justice, accountability and the sanctity of life. That commitment is tested not in moments of universal agreement but in moments of profound disagreement, when the powerful and the powerless stand face to face in streets like those in Minneapolis.

If the United States truly honors freedom, then it must reckon with the uncomfortable truth that celebrating liberty in word while permitting lethal force in deed is not just ironic, it is corrosive. On a day set aside to reflect on emancipation, the deaths of Good and Pretti compel a deeper question, Who, precisely, is free in America, and at what cost?

The answer to that question will shape not only how we commemorate our history but how we live our future. For now that answer remains unresolved and that uncertainty is the real tragedy.