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THE INNOCENCE TRAP: SURVIVAL SHOULD NOT REQUIRE SAINTHOOD  
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Andrea Pitzer
January 26, 2026
Degenerate Art
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_ The answer is not just to get rid of an individual official. It's
to insist on human rights for everyone, and to create a system in
which punishment is not the central and defining feature of government
for whole sectors of the U.S. population. _

A detail from Peter Paul Rubens’ painting “Saint Sebastian.”,

 

This month, everyday Americans witnessed Renee Good and Alex Pretti
being martyred in a wave of terror unleashed against immigrants. The
country has clearly been moved by their deaths. And even the Trump
administration seems to have been shaken by the public’s reaction so
far, with Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino apparently being removed
from Minneapolis
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(or worse) by his superiors. Americans across the board are realizing
the significance of their murders, and it may well be a turning point
in the attempt to stop the purges now underway.

Their public executions on the street were shocking in and of
themselves, happening in a matter of minutes or even seconds. And the
Minnesotans whose lives were lost weren’t even the first to be shot
in recent weeks by ICE or Border Patrol. Keith Porter Jr, was killed
on New Year’s Eve
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in Los Angeles by an off-duty ICE officer.

Some reports suggest that Porter or those he was with that night had
fired shots in the air in celebration (an unfortunate but common New
Year’s Eve tradition). The agent claimed gunfire had been exchanged,
but a lawyer for the family said that no evidence of this had been
produced by the government.

While outrage did follow Porter’s death in Los Angeles, it didn’t
rise to the same level of national reaction seen in the wake of the
two officer killings in Minneapolis that have happened since. That
might be because Porter was Black, as well as the lack of any video
recording the officer shooting him.

His cousin, a Black Lives Matter activist, told the _Guardian_
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“As an organizer, I never thought I would be standing here for one
of my family members.” The family has asked for help to force
accountability from the officer and deliver justice.

Porter, like Renee Good, was a parent. And stories about his death
mentioned his help with kids in the foster system, and his work for a
time as a aide to kids with special needs. When someone is killed by
law enforcement of any kind, there’s often a rush to try to show
that they were good enough people that they deserved not to be shot.

Tonight I want to address how these murders of those seen as
“good” tend to galvanize the public against state violence in
helpful ways, while also looking at why emphasizing the victims’
innocence can be a trap.

INNOCENT AND GUILTY ALIKE

When I wrote my global history of concentration camps, it was a heavy
lift to stay immersed in so much violence and sorrow for so long. A
key reason I decided to write that book, as unqualified as I felt, was
because in the course of writing my _prior_ book, I discovered that no
one had written a comprehensive history of how and when concentration
camps had come into the world and how the world had gotten to
Auschwitz, let alone what happened to this kind of detention after the
Nazis were defeated.

So in my introduction, I laid out some principles to define and make
it possible for readers to recognize what a concentration camp even
was. And I addressed the fact that there were edge cases that I
wouldn’t have enough pages to dive into beyond a brief mention. (And
the truth was that I was already far exceeding the word count my
publisher wanted from me.)

I referenced examples of detention that might not start out as
concentration camps but can wind up effectively becoming them. Refugee
camps can begin with a crisis but continue for years or even decades.
There are criminal justice systems in which law enforcement can be
done so disproportionately to one part of the population that being
born into a certain racial or ethnic group would mean facing a
significant risk of imprisonment not borne by other groups.

And sometimes in those systems, though _in theory_ detainees are
supposed to get a speedy and fair trial, they become mired in pretrial
waiting, with no idea when they’ll have their day in court or be
free.

When it comes to the U.S. criminal justice system, other parallels
exist as well. One common aspect is that questions of innocence and
guilt become very warped. Here’s how I wrote about it in terms of
concentration camps a decade ago:

“Concentration camps house civilians rather than combatants—though
at many points from World War I to Guantanamo, camp administrators
have not always made an effort to distinguish between the two.
Detainees are typically held because of their racial, political,
religious, or cultural identity, not because of any prosecutable
offense—though some states have remedied this flaw by making legal
existence next to impossible. Which is not to say that all detainees
are innocent of criminal actions against the government in any given
system; rather, the innocent and the guilty alike may be swept up
without distinction or recourse.”

NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE

What does the phrase in that paragraph mean about legal existence
being “next to impossible”? Concentration camp regimes and
authoritarian states alike use existing legal systems to make it
impossible to have any kind of a normal life as members of the
targeted population.

In Nazi Germany, this meant restrictions on Jewish residents. They
were stripped of citizenship, of the right to hold a wide range of
jobs. They were forbidden to use basic facilities like main streets,
public buildings, national memorials, theatres, and more. Living as a
Jew in Nazi Germany, it became harder and harder to continue day to
day without breaking laws.

When I went to Myanmar a decade ago, this meant that the federal
government stripped the Rohingya Muslims of their identity cards,
rendering them unable to vote, tracking and limiting where they could
live and their movements, and even putting them in camps. In South
Africa under apartheid, and in Jim Crow America, how the government
classified your race determined where you could live, who you could
marry, whether you could vote, and what public facilities you could
use.

What the Trump administration is doing now is making life similarly
illegal for immigrants of all kinds, whether they’re undocumented,
documented, or even have become U.S. citizens. They’re
administratively fighting to keep citizenship from those in the
process of applying for it. They’re trying to take birthright
citizenship away, despite it being enshrined in the Constitution. And
they have unleashed tremendous and increasing violence toward the goal
of ethnic cleansing.

According to those caught up in the current raids, anyone perceived as
foreign is targeted, with a very broad emphasis on subjective
perception. Black and Asian people have also faced detention and
abuse, whether they were immigrants or not.

REJECTING THE RULES

One solution is for those who are less vulnerable—whose lives are
perceived by the dominant culture as more valuable or more
innocent—to stand up next to or in place of those targeted. In some
instances, they may belong to other vulnerable classes who are simply
less maligned at the moment. This was the case with the many American
Jews who joined Black Americans in the civil rights movement in the
U.S. (Married to a woman, Renee Good was the member of a targeted
group, too, but in theory, one statistically less vulnerable to state
violence than the people ICE or Border Patrol were hunting that day.)

In other instances, as with Alex Pretti, the life of the person who
allied himself with those the government has targeted for violence
should have mattered most of all to that government. An American-born
gun-toting white man who supported veterans and seemed to be
projecting his own strength and resolve is very much the model of what
Stephen Miller claims to want America to become. And yet Pretti did
the unthinkable—he made himself as vulnerable as the people that
Miller wants to ethnically cleanse from the country.

It’s a good reminder that in the eyes of the current government,
innocence can only be maintained by supporting their violence and
going along with their agenda. People are killed because they refused
to support that violence, or because they were in the middle of a road
that ICE wanted to drive down, or because they were celebrating with
friends on New Year’s Eve.

Every loss is such deep sorrow. So let me emphasize here that it’s
extremely important to talk about the beauty of their lives and how
they lived them, to share that loss and demand justice for it.

Yet when people use the language “he shouldn’t have been shot; he
was completely innocent” meaning that he was a generous person who
lived a wholesome life, it can be a dangerous step in another
direction.

Only being able to mourn or demand justice for the purely innocent
binds the public into a tighter and tighter trap that ultimately harms
everyone. If the government can bend the laws or the judicial
system’s interpretation of them, it is possible to make it so that
no one is innocent, and no one has the right to demand justice for
themselves or anyone else.

THE DEATH OF CAMPOS

Along with those three non-immigrants shot in the streets of our
country in the last month, we have also learned of deaths inside
detention facilities. One of them was Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban
immigrant who had been arrested in 2003 and convicted of sexual
contact with a minor, serving a year in prison before being released.

He’d since been convicted of attempting to sell a controlled
substance and spent five years in prison and three years under
supervised release, which ended almost a decade ago. According to the
medical examiner’s report and witnesses, Lunas Campos was choked to
death by guards at Camp East Montana in Texas.

Last summer, the Associated Press reported
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that the $1.2 billion contract to build and operate Camp East Montana
was awarded to a private contractor. This particular facility is, for
now, slated to become the largest detention facility in the U.S.

Yet the company running it, Acquisition Logistics LLC, had “no
listed experience running a correction facility and had never won a
federal contract worth more than $16 million. The company also lacks a
functioning website and lists as its address a modest home in suburban
Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer.”

According to the accounts of the medical examiner and the witnesses,
it was murder. That death should be getting the same kind of
outrage—or even more, because it was done secretly in a detention
camp, where accountability will be that much harder to get. If they
can break the law to kill Geraldo Lunas Campos, they can break the law
to kill you.

Of course some people will portray this statement as lacking common
sense, and ask, “Would you leave your children with a child
molester?” Of course not. But I would argue that the government,
having the ability to administer law, has a higher standard of justice
to uphold in terms of other peoples’ rights than individual
Americans personal decisions about who to let babysit their children.

HARD QUESTIONS

I’ve deliberately picked the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, because
it’s one that people may find harder to care about. But morality and
strategic thinking have to consider hard questions. Otherwise you’re
just living a life based on bias and whim.

In addition, any country of 348 million is going to have tens of
millions who have committed crimes at some point. Though immigrants
consistently commit less crime than those born inside U.S. borders, as
a group, they will likewise include criminals. Some number of them
will have either been deported or have paid their debts to society
according to the law and released. They have rights, too. I would
argue that those imprisoned or currently detained also have rights.

There have long been laws in place to weigh criminal offenses and when
they should lead to deportation. Lunas Campos was released from prison
and lived in the US during all four years of the first Trump
administration. I have serious questions about why he was detained
now.

Those questions may have good answers, but in this administration,
it’s currently impossible to believe anything said by the
authorities. But even if we were to assume that the current effort to
deport Lunas Campos is justified, that deportation did not require the
building of a detention camp as part of an expanding concentration
camp regime. It did not require the creation of conditions in which
violence and abuse became standard fare in the facilities. It did not
require his murder, or the deaths of the many other detainees that
have happened in custody.

IMPLICATIONS

And if you are asking yourself, “Hey, this seems to have
implications for more than just the immigration terror currently
capturing everyone’s attention in Minneapolis,” I would say that
yes, it does. You can’t get to the state of horror we’re at today
without a long history of police violence in America being allowed and
even admired on both sides of the aisle.

A study a decade ago
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by a professor at the University of South Carolina found that half of
all black men had been arrested by the age of 23. Even with less
likely presumption of guilt, nearly forty percent of white men had
likewise been arrested by that age. Any system of real justice we
might build for the country has to account for the fact that we have
created a nation in which tens of millions have been raised into a
system geared to punish them.

This is just part of the reason why it’s critical to respond so
strongly to this expansion of ICE and Border Patrol abuse and
mistreatment into the general population. Without hard pushback now,
the government will secure the ability to punish anyone they want
whenever they want.

The answer is not just to get rid of an individual official. The
answer is not better training for ICE and Border Patrol. It isn’t to
somehow allow the mistreatment of immigrants but not citizens born in
the U.S. It isn’t to only respect the rights of immigrants who are
documented while allowing arbitrary mistreatment of the undocumented.
It’s to insist on human rights for everyone, and to create a system
in which punishment is not the central and defining feature of
government for whole sectors of the U.S. population.

WHAT DO DO ABOUT IT

If you’re still wondering how to take action, first and foremost, do
what so many are doing now. Show up. For those who can, be part of ICE
patrols and observer networks. Be present. Plug in to alert systems.
Make signs. Countless towns and cities already have concerned
residents organized. But if you find your community doesn’t have
much in place, it’s even more important to start now.

Harass your politicians. Work with them on the local level to make it
harder for ICE to get collaborative policing agreements, or to lease
space. Where ICE is using space it already controls, target the
vendors and contractors they work with, and call on local authorities
to block support for other contracts with the collaborating vendors.

On a state and national level, be quick to praise politicians who take
even baby steps—but be just as quick to demand they meet your next
goal. If your representative denounces ICE’s actions, then demand
that they stop funding DHS. IF they agree not to fund DHS, but ask for
simple reforms or training, thank them then press them to dismantle
the agency instead.

Get training as an observer. Find a community of people who are
already engaged on this front. And don’t let anyone tell you that
murder is only murder if the victim was a saint.

 

_My name is Andrea Pitzer. My reporting, reviews, opinion pieces,
comic essays, and poetry have appeared in The Washington Post, The New
York Review of Books, Outside, Nautilus, The Los Angeles Review of
Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Daily Beast, Haaretz, Slate, GQ, USA
Today, Longreads, McSweeney’s, and Poet Lore, among other outlets._

_I’ve written three nonfiction books and done research on four
continents in some unusual locations, from Guantanamo to multiple
expeditions in the High Arctic._

 

_WHY "DEGENERATE ART"? The name of this newsletter comes from the
Nazis’ derogatory label for creative work they condemned as warped,
modern, un-Aryan, or antifascist. Nazis gathered what they saw as the
most egregious examples and staged a national show in 1937, with
labels that denigrated the artwork and the artists. To their dismay,
the __Munich Degenerate Art exhibition_
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clocked attendance numbers in the millions and was several times more
popular than the nearby exhibition of Nazi-approved art._

_I hope to bring you ideas and images that might contain even a spark
of the spirit of those banned or disparaged works, and that what I
offer up might similarly disappoint metaphorical and literal Nazis
among us today._

* Renee Nicole Good
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* Alex Pretti
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* Keith Porter Jr
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* Border Patrol
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* ICE
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* immigrant rights
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* Human Rights
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INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

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