I write about named dissidents who are arrested, harassed, and sometimes murdered by authoritarian regimes. The names are given media attention in part because of the severity of the consequences they suffer for exercising rights we take for granted in the United States.

Americans enjoy the right to vote for politicians who promise to carry out certain policies. Every two years, we have elections for some portion of these leaders. We can judge their performance based on whatever we want. Did they carry out our desired policies? Did they achieve results?

Even leaders who pursue policies we want enacted can fail us by implementing them badly. As a political reporter, I knew that President Biden’s failure to crack down on migration over the Southern border was a political liability for him. That failure was one of the reasons Donald Trump won re-election. A CNN exit poll found that immigration was the most important issue to 89% of Republicans.

But Trump’s answer to the crisis that Biden failed to meet on the Southern border was a crackdown on the American duty to hold its government to high standards instead.

Do What I Say and How I Choose

When Christopher Hitchens defended his decision to support the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, he was simultaneously named in a lawsuit against the administration over its widespread use and sanction of torture.

He reminded his audiences that the American government must not only carry out the policies demanded of its people. The government must also conduct itself with the standards it has been ordered to.

Trump’s encouragement of aggressive ICE tactics, alongside the blessing of the Secretary of Homeland Security, has led to the murder of American citizens.

Renee Good was shot by an ICE agent as she was turning away from them as instructed by at least some of the agents surrounding her car. The agent who killed her was never in danger of being hit by her car.

Alex Pretti was helping a peaceful protester up from the ground before he was tackled by over half a dozen agents, then shot in the back.

In other Dissident Spotlight articles, there’s rarely video available of the abuses that dissidents endure. The United States is still free enough to not only have video, but even multiple angles so we can see the federal government betraying its service.

Dissent isn’t Opposition

Healthy democracies have multiple parties. It’s legal to oppose the party in power, even expected and encouraged in normal times.

But Trump has turned ordinary Americans, lining the streets of cities under siege, documenting ICE’s violations of the rights to protest and record public spaces, into dissidents, who incur risk during the normal course of exercising their inherent rights to freedom of speech and conscience.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti have suffered the greatest consequences for confronting ICE agents and their abuses in their communities. They are the named dissidents who represent the greater struggle for freedom under an administration that believes freedom comes with conditions.

It’s up to the rest of us to show our fellow Americans how ICE operates in our communities. Showing the world can come later. We still need to prove that our country is a haven for people who dare to see the world as it is and describe it publicly.

Applied Knowledge

Dissident Spotlight: Renee Good & Alex Pretti