On Lynchings in America
Typically when we think about lynching, we rightfully connect the killings to the tremendous numbers of Black men, women and children killed during the Jim Crow Era. They were shot, beaten, and/or hung from trees throughout the Southern United States. Many of their deaths were simply disappearances, uninvestigated save by brave journalists like Ida B Wells-Barnett.
Though this encompasses most of the killings, lynching as a term is not defined by race and ethnicity. Rather, it refers to the denial of due process to its victim and the extrajudicial nature of deciding on the spot to execute a human being. That's all.
Now, how lynching has been utilized and categorized is, of course, very much filtered through this country's racist historical roots. In recent years, the killings at the heart of police brutality demonstrations of the 2010s and 2020s' Black Lives Matter movement are lynchings, where purportedly frightened armed officers identified a threat in Black people that justified lethal force. The retroactive justification of violence against the victims and against protestors of police brutality sends a clear message: only state violence is able to proceed unchecked and unmonitored.
At this point in time in the United States, Minnesota is still mourning Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, two white empathizers of immigrants targeted by U.S. immigration and border patrol agents. On New Year's Eve of 2025, Keith Porter, Jr. was also executed by ICE in retaliation to actions that were far from warranting instantaneous capital punishment (Porter was shooting a rifle as part of a New Year's party).
White Americans may feel discomfort at the idea of classifying the murder of two of their own as lynchings, but the factors of Good and Pretti's deaths are that they were both cases of ICE agents taking matters into their own hands. These agents bypassed warrants, prosecution, indictment and conviction. They simply aimed and pulled the trigger again and again. Vehement, vicious violent behavior such as this has earned praise, with Border patrol Chief Bovino comping beers after one of his underlings shot Chicago woman Marimar Martinez five times in October of 2025. To this day, ICE and CBP agents are simply grabbing minorities off the street with no due process or warrants, taking them away in vehicles to unmonitored prison camps.
Black reporters, activists, and community members have also been at the forefront of dangerous law enforcement attention during immigration purges. In Minnesota, video journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon were taken off the streets after reporting on the congregation of an ICE serviceman pastor. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a local activist, had her image altered by generative AI and splashed onto White House Social media pages. Speaking to the public recently, she said:
"This is not only an immigration fight, this is a fight for police accountability. This is a fight for racial justice. This is a fight for our constitutional rights, and we must not forget that."
Georgia Fort, writing in Newsweek, summarizes the problems of keeping track of police violence:
Each incident is treated as isolated. Each investigation is dragged out. Each officer stays on the job. Each newsroom moves on to the next story. Until attacking journalists feels normal. We’ve seen it happen in real time.
When officers face no consequences for attacking reporters, the next officer goes further. And the next. And the next. And that tolerance becomes our culture, normalizing the attacks on our press.
In the shadows of these incidents of tear gas and ideologically driven indictments, the shadow of lynching looms large. Both Levy-Armstrong and Fort aptly point to the central defining factor of lynching in history: that it occurs without due process and a consistent application of the law. It escalates and emboldens neoconservative perpetrators to aim for broader groups of Americans and immigrants that appear deserving of violence and death.
The more time passes from each death of neglect, of live ammunition, and of brutality, the more the xenophobic narratives of lynching can solidify. Immigrants and minorities are increasingly classified as secondary residents of this country unworthy of human rights or human treatment. They are seen by Trump, Vance, Bovino and the other perpetrators of this violence as problems to solve, rather than lives that are being ruined or cut short.
Call each of these deaths a lynching. Identify what lines get crossed. At this point in time, it's still a powerful message to communicate. Do it while you can, and keep yourselves safe and well.
