Every last American should agree the death in Minneapolis of a 37-year-old American mother of three at the hands of a gun wielded by an agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is an abomination, an indicator of domestic crisis and, we fear, a harbinger of yet worse to come.

When armed, hardened, stressed and poorly trained ICE and Border Patrol agents descended on our city, accompanied by infuriated and thus unpredictable protesters and impeders who do not support either their mission or even their existence, we said that someone is going to get badly hurt and our concern extended to the agents themselves as well as to those who oppose them.

Badly hurt has proved to be an understatement. Killed would have been a better word.

To our minds, Wednesday’s horror, those kids who lost a mother, should supplant the inevitable circling of the ideological wagons and the parsing of the different angles of pictures taken at the scene. This fraught situation on the streets of American cities has to stop. It is profoundly unsafe.

Those on the right, determined to make the case that this was an officer killing in self-defense, should instead be beginning with this utter failure to protect the life of a civilian protester and de-escalate the situation through some means other than shooting a fellow American in the head. This is true even if one allows that the agent genuinely believed he was in harm’s way, as our police officers do with frequency.

We don’t doubt for a moment that Trump administration officials now defending the ICE agent’s action also know this to be true, but they refuse to express it because they see that as a retreat of their determination to conduct deportations as part of an immigration policy Donald Trump made clear before he was elected.

Not the point, say we. Someone died on a Midwestern street. Changes must be made.

You can find video-driven parsings of what happened at the time of the shooting in thousands of places, mostly slanted to your preferred side. We’d prefer to draw your attention to the beginning of the encounter, as another agent walks aggressively up to the car and tries to grab the door handle, panicking the car’s occupant. Prior to that point, no ICE agent was fearing for his life: There simply was a vehicular obstruction to solve with many different options available. The good ones all required at least the taking of a breath.

The vast majority of immigration enforcement actions are not emergencies. Unless a protester — or even someone suspected of being in the U.S. illegally — is an imminent threat to human life, they should not be the target of gunfire from an officer sworn to protect. The Trump administration is treating those who oppose them as enemies in a civil war, demonstrably all the way up to death.

For God’s sake, will they tell us that they understand the clear and present danger to the union and change what they are doing?

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