ICE Kills Fast; Heat Kills Slow
We Fear Rapid Murders by ICE While Awaiting Languishing Deaths by Climate (Vol. 6; Issue 8)
Given the recent killings of American citizens by masked unidentifiable law enforcement officers, few would disagree with Masha Gessen’s (2026) identifying a police state right here in America. An award-winning journalist reared in Soviet Russia, Gessen should know. In just the past two months, ICE agents entered hundreds of private homes without judicial warrants, detained US citizens (including a 5-year-old), sprayed tear gas over innocent bystanders, demanded to see persons’ “papers,” smashed windows of cars to detain their occupants, and committed extrajudicial killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Good was a 37-year-old mother protesting ICE activities. While turning her car to avoid an ICE agent approaching her, ICE agent Jonathan Ross fired three shots, killing her as the vehicle passed him. Pretti, another 37-year-old similarly protesting ICE, was killed by 10 shots fired at close range. He had worked as an ICU nurse. These actions, committed by ICE officials illegally wearing face masks without observable badge numbers, resemble brutal repression by the Soviet police, the Gestapo, and the Revolutionary Guard in Iran.
Lest you think the phrase “police state” an exaggeration, consider that ICE’s annual budget is $35 billion. The ICE budget exceeds the combined annual budgets of the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the US Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).
The largest law enforcement agency in the US is ICE.
It is an institution tasked with deporting illegal immigrants, not fighting crime. Despite its immense budget, new whistleblower documents indicate that practical exams, and use-of-force and legal training courses, have been eliminated from ICE teaching curriculums.
Typical of the shock-and-awe tactics of the Trump administration, these police state horrors overshadow the equally alarming reversal of the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, a legal and scientific determination that greenhouse gases (GHGs) threaten public health. Under the related Clean Air Act, it established the legal basis for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.
The deregulation eliminates dozens of climate change-reducing policies, such as setting vehicle, power plant, and oil/gas refinery emission standards. These boost the profits of the fossil fuel industry; they also invite the return and even increased production of coal.
Such policy reversals leave one to wonder:
What happened to the foundational assumption that governments protect the safety of their citizens?
As noted in the headline, ICE kills fast, global warming kills slow. ICE actions are as deplorable as they are terrifying. Meanwhile, ending government control of greedy petrochemical companies that care naught about the health of future generations will kill or displace millions of people in the next few decades.
Throughout the world, people already witness the unstable, severe weather patterns typical of global warming. Tornados, hurricanes, and droughts, followed by excessive rainfall, are already commonplace. A major snowstorm heads towards the East Coast of the US as I prepare this essay. Absent any meaningful controls on pollutants, we can now expect other threatening events, like derechos (fast-moving lines of thunderstorms) and firenados (which occur when swirling wind gusts combine with scorching air from wildfires).
These are not visions or fantasies arising in the minds of anxiety-prone individuals. On the contrary, they represent completely plausible and predictable climate disasters heading our way. Some studies predict the entire Southern California area will be uninhabitable by 2050. Cities like Miami, home to 12 million people, will become so flooded by rising tides that half the population will need to relocate.
Why have an institution called the Environmental Protection Agency when it fails to protect? Just what services does it provide now that the Endangerment Finding has been erased?
Climate change will affect all of our emotional lives, but consider its effect on the mental health of younger people. Britt Wray (2023) calls them “generation dread” because of the distress they feel about the tenuous future of human civilization. Clayton (2021), reporting the results of a survey of 10,000 individuals aged 16-25 in ten countries, found that 70 percent were “very or extremely worried” and 85 percent felt “at least moderately worried” about the climate. More than half the respondents reported reacting to the climate situation with sadness, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, helplessness, and guilt.
If readers feel insufficient anxiety thus far, consider what Jern Bendell and Rupert Read describe in their 2021 book, Deep Adaptation. They anticipate growing levels of anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders as people around the world face what they call “climate-influenced societal collapses.”
Trump’s reversal of basic EPA policies rejects what had been accepted for decades by presidents of both parties, including Richard Nixon, whose top adviser warned of the dangers of climate change. President Barack Obama first signed the Paris Climate Accords in 2016. Trump withdrew from the treaty at the start of each of his presidencies. We are one of the few of the 198 nation signatories to the treaty to depart from it.
The takeaway is simple:
Short-term financial gains for massive corporations and personal enrichment of the Trump family matter more than the basic security of Americans.* Trump’s legitimate concern over immigration morphed into an overreaction reaching overtly racist and xenophobic levels. ICE stormtroopers continue to kill, maim, and illegally detain thousands; EPA regulations rendered meaningless will kill and displace millions.
Under the Paris Agreement, nations agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. That goal was considered crucial to avoiding the worst effects of climate change. Scientists now expect the Earth to warm by an average of 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. As we watch for more immediate murders by ICE, we should be cognizant of slower killings coming our way due to reckless deregulation.
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*Trump’s 2024 campaign received nearly $500 million from the oil and gas industry. As a result, his administration makes it cheaper and easier to keep burning fossil fuels while throttling efforts to build cleaner energy sources like solar and wind.
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References
Bendell, J. and Read, R. (Eds.) (2021). Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos. New York: Polity.
Clayton, S. (2021) Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about
government responses to climate change: a global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5-12: e863-e87.
Gessen, M. (2026). State Terror Has Arrived. New York Times. (Published January 24, 2026).
Wray, B. (2023) Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety. New York: The Experiment.