Are some victims of the Trump Gestapo more sympathetic than others?

Naomi Bethune takes a look at the phenomenon we’vc seen with public reactions to the Trump Gestapo’s murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both white people, seems to be stronger and more widespread than the deaths of people of color at the hands of the ICE/CPB goons. (1)

She’s not the first to comment on this. Yes, it does reflect the functional racial hierarchies of American societies with all the racially discriminatory and antidemocratic implications that go with them.

But how should we understand this particular round of this familiar phenomenon?

The white-nationalist factor is real and very important in the politics of the Republican Party and the Trump cult, which at this point are two sides of the same coin. Our Opus Dei Vice President JD Vance’s attempt to give this attitude a quasi-respectable defense presumably fell flat with anyone not already devoted to the white-supremacist faith:

Vice President JD Vance has added a flatly segregationist twist to his broadly unlikable personality, arguing that it’s “totally reasonable and acceptable” for Americans to not want to live next to people who speak a different language or come from “a totally different culture.”

On a New York Post podcast released Oct. 29, Vance seemed to forget that people can hear what he’s saying when he speaks out loud and that America is, fundamentally, a nation of immigrants.

“It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next door neighbors and say, I want to live next to people who I have something in common with,” Vance said, granting me and other normal Americans permission to never, ever live next to someone as ghoulishly dreadful as JD Vance. (2)

This is indeed a segregationist position and attitude. And white racism is certainly not exclusively a problem of Trump cultists and Republicans. But it is key to the politics of today’s Republican Party.

The language of “different culture” is common to xenophobic politics in Europe and America – and other parts of the Western Hemisphere, as well – as a not-especially-subtitle synonym for race. In earlier times in the US, people from “different” cultures like Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans were not considered “white” in the normative sense of the majority “culture.” Vance himself has identified himself as a “Scots-Irish hillbilly” – one who just happens to be part of Tech Bro billionaire Peter Thiel’s stable of sponsored politicians.

Some white racists use “Scots-Irish” as a white-supremacist concept. But Scots-Irish is an legitimate historical identifier for many people, especially in the American South. When the English in the 18th century decided to try to push their colonial project west of the Appalachians, they imported large numbers of ethnic Scots from Ireland, where Britain used them as settlers to keep the Irish under control.

But, in retail politics, this sort of white-supremacist posturing is concentrated in the Republican Party in the United States. That particular alignment was largely solidified by the politics of St. Ronald Reagan and continues to this day.

That doesn’t mean the Democrats have no shortcomings when it comes to equal rights. The failure of the Democratic majority in the US Senate to pass a badly-needed strengthening of the Voting Rights Act in 2022 is an excellent example (of a bad practice). They arranged the vote so that technically voting it down was a matter of not suspending the reactionary and undemocratic Senate filibuster rule for the vote, with Arizona Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin casting the decisive vote for the anti-civil-rights position. But we had a Democratic-controlled House, Senate and Presidency – and they failed to pass that Voting Rights Act.

And then the Democrats professed to be surprised and chagrined when Trump in 2024 increased his voting support among African-Americans and Latinos. That’s what happen when your party talks a good game but just doesn’t deliver.

The Trumpified Republican Party, on the other hand, is delivering systematic state-terror actions by the Trump Gestapo targeted (for the moment) on Latinos. A significant number of Latino Trump voters seem to have recognized that reality by the end of 2025.

As a practical political and propaganda matter, the murders of Renne Good and Alex Pritti – two youngish, photogenic white people who seem to have been really decent people - will affect people who are open to supporting the Trump cult in a way that the murder of non-white victims will not. They will inevitably have a degree of identification with those victims that they do not have for Latino or Black victims. It shouldn’t be that way, but it unfortunately still is in the US of 2026.

Bethune leads off her argument in a surprising way:

For example, on New Year’s Eve, Brian Palacios, an off-duty ICE agent, shot and killed 43-year-old Keith Porter outside his apartment complex in Los Angeles. Porter’s family and advocates swear that he was firing an assault-style rifle into the air to celebrate the new year, not in an effort to hurt anyone. Tricia McLaughlin, chief spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claimed that Porter fired at Palacios, who in turn shot back in self-defense. According to Porter’s attorney, multiple neighbors said they did not hear the agent identify himself. Shortly after the arrival of the LAPD, Porter was declared dead.

This sounds like it could have been an unjustified killing and hopefully it will be properly investigated. But having lived in California for most of my life, I don’t recall it being common for city-dwellers to fire off assault weapons like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. The fact that the killer in this case was an off-duty ICE agent should certainly raise eyebrows, because ICE has such a lawless reputation.

But the murders of Good and Pritti not only had white people as the victims. (Pritti had a gun, legally, which he did not pull or fire into the air.) And those were extremely well-documented. When such murders are caught on film or photos, that lets the public form much more informed opinions. As in this famous example: (3)

Notes:

1) Bethune, Naomi (2026): Responses to ICE Violence Reveal a Racial Double Standard. The American Prospect 01/30/2026. <https://prospect.org/2026/01/30/ice-violence-racial-double-standard-black-latino-asian-immigrants/> (Accessed: 2026-01-02).

(2) Huppe, R. (2025): Vance seems to think segregation is 'acceptable' if neighbors don't speak English. USA Today 10/29/2025. <https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/10/29/jd-vance-immigrants-neighbors-language-racist/86966480007/> (Accessed: 2026-01-02).

(3) [Jack] Ruby shoots [Lee Harvey] Oswald (11/27/1963). Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ruby_shoots_Oswald.jpg> (Accessed: 2026-01-02).