I was born in France during WWII. I was just a few months old when my father was sent to a labor camp in Poland and my mother became a refugee in the Norman countryside. My father came back when the war was over, emaciated but alive. When the truck that brought him and other men stopped in front of our home, my excited mother grabbed me and shouted, “It’s your dad!” and I casually answered, “Which one?”
This is the kind of story the adults passed around later while keeping the pain and the terror they had endured away from the children. I would overhear one thing or another when people did not pay attention, and I can still remember the loathing my parents had especially for the militia. As dreadful as they were, the SS and the Gestapo were German, the enemy, but the militia was French, and they collaborated with the Gestapo, sending relatives of resistants to execution grounds and concentration camps. It is not something one can easily forget or forgive.
ICE is the American militia. Same ugliness, same cowardice, same lack of concern for either immigrants or their own, same sadistic pleasure in enforcing their power on people who can’t do much to defend themselves, even when they were born here. The case of Renee Good is particularly distressing because she was the mother of three children, and she only had a whistle to defend herself. On the other hand, the killer had a gun and a big ego. He could not stand to see a woman unafraid of him, he had to show her, and she was called a “fucking bitch” as he shot her in the face. Our “compassionate” MAGA followed suit in calling her “lunatic” and “domestic terrorist.” MAGA and ICE make a “beautiful” marriage.
There is no place for groups like ICE in any civilized country. A government that needs such people is a failed government. It deserves to fall, and it will fall when those who voted for Trump realize they have been manipulated and have lost whatever help they were previously getting. ICE costs tens of billions of dollars annually. Just think of the health care we could receive with this money, the children we could feed, the veterans we could help, and the peace we could maintain. Instead, we are terrorizing our own and turning the entire world against us, all of this because of a disturbed felon who believes he is Caesar. Wake up, America, please wake up! It is 1941 again, but this time, the enemy is within.
Odile Ayral
San Luis Obispo
This article appears in Jan 15-22, 2026.
Are you aware the federal government is composed of three coequal branches? Not once have you addressed Congress or SCOTUS. You vilify one man, President Trump, but ignore 535 members of Congress. It’s a pity your party is a minority. Perhaps if your side of the aisle offered the American people something other than transgendered bathrooms and boutique identity politics, your side may have been able to have a majority and block (or at least impede) the actions of the man you have managed to personify all that is evil in this world. Your party is a joke and if ever back in power will do nothing. Why? Because they are just as beholden to their corporate campaign contributors as the other side. Your push to allow illegal immigration is push for your own country’s destruction.
For decades, I have endured listening to those who worship guns and weaponize the Bible say that schoolchildren killed in mass shootings are acceptable losses in order to prevent tyranny. Now they embrace a tyrant. All those children died for nothing. They weren’t manipulated into voting for Trump, their bigotry allowed him to take power.
In 2024, voters were pretty clear that they wanted our immigration laws enforced, especially after Biden had admitted millions of illegals. Now liberal states like Minnesota are trying to block enforcement through rioting, and as often is the case with riots, people have died. It was sadly predictable that the calls to rise up and resist coming out of Walz, Frey and others would draw out people who would act foolishly, and sometimes violently. The deaths, injuries and damage are on those who incited them in a cynical political gambit to regain power. For shame.
Thank you Odile Ayral for this important warning about what maga and their fuhrer are doing to America, and to all of our NATO Allies. It is terrible, and shows that Trump is Putin’s puppet, and “useful idiot.”
What we have here is Trump’s and Steven Miller’s ICE/DHS gestapo terrorizing our communities, creating chaos in our streets, and breaking our State, County and City Laws.
Every day America is looking more and more like a Putin style authoritarian dictatorship. This is not the America any of us, and the World, recognizes.
Today, President Trump has said he is also the new president of Venezuela, on Wikipedia. It appears dementia likely is taking hold with the Angry Man in Chief.
And the maga are still following their orange idol of reality tv.
With all of the false statements by this regime about the ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good, they are now threatening every protester in America, with warnings that any of the protesters in SLO County could be next; if ICE feels like shooting us because we exercise our rights to Free Speech and the Right of Assembly.
Protest like our rights, our freedoms, and our lives depend on it, because they do.
Thank you, Scott Jenkins and Steve Felton, for understanding my point. For the others, you should have noticed that I never said a word about religion (I only believe in kindness and courage), and that I focused on ICE and all the damage it is doing, although Trump and his sycophants are certainly responsible for this. Some day, we will all wonder how this could have happened here, but as Lyndon Johnson once may have said ” “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Renee Good was nothing more than a casualty and pawn of a certain, global church based in Rome whose ultimate desire is to turn the US into nothing more than a theocracy and an outpost of a ressurected Holy Roman Empire. These illegals, the ones Ms.Good’s defenders profess to love, aren’t “immigrants,”as religious adherents, they’re this church’s foot soldiers. Further, this church owns the souls of the majority of the members of SCOTUS and its pontiff is American. This does not bode well for America’s diminishing Protestant base.
Let’s not pretend Renee Good was anything other than a useful idiot, just as most liberals are. Through their desire for unmitigated and out of control illegal immigration, they sow the seeds of our nation and culture’s destruction.
Early American colonists were Protestant and America is a Protestant nation. Look at every country south of our border, they are all dominated from their inception by a particular, Roman faith and they are all failed states. Is that what America wants? The Protestant work ethic and the Protestant belief of salvation through faith alone and the Bible, not mediated by sacraments or a ridiculous bureaucracy of pedophiles masquerading as celibate clergy, is what has made America what it is. Let’s never forget that. America for Americans and America first.
Is there an intervention in Mr. Fly’s future? I sure hope so. I also pray that he does not own a gun or have easy access to one, or to materials that can produce a bomb.