By The Eyeopener

On Jan. 7, the U.S. didn’t lose its innocence. It lost its cover. 

In Minneapolis, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fired into a woman’s car on a residential street and murdered her. 

Renee Good was 37, a mother, a community member and, according to locals, a legal observer. This shooting did not happen in a border town. It did not happen during a protest. It happened in a neighbourhood, in broad daylight, in front of bystanders, by a federal force under a government openly boasting about launching the largest immigration enforcement operation in modern U.S. history. 

The shock was not that it happened. The shock was that it wasn’t hidden. 

This is what the death of the American Dream looks like when the facade finally cracks. 

For centuries, the U.S. has sold the world a myth polished to a mirror shine—a land of freedom, opportunity, refuge. The brutality, the exclusion, the violence were always there, baked into policy and practice, but they were softened by rhetoric and obscured by distance. What has changed this month is not the nature of the country, but its willingness to broadcast what it’s always been. 

Immigration enforcement is no longer cloaked in euphemism. Under the second Trump administration, ICE has expanded its operations with militarized confidence. Tens of thousands of people are detained daily, many for civil immigration violations, with no serious criminal records. Many for no clear reason. Detention centres remain overcrowded and deadly. 2025 was the deadliest year in ICE custody in more than two decades. People died of medical neglect, suicide and untreated illness while the government framed it as law and order. 

In Minneapolis, the killing of Good was not an anomaly. In the same week, federal officers shot and wounded another man during a traffic stop. Governors and mayors sued the federal government, calling the deployment of armed Homeland Security agents an invasion. Polling shows a growing number of people in the U.S. believe ICE makes their communities less safe, instead of more. The state insists this is protection. Communities experience it as occupation. 

The American Dream was supposed to promise belonging. Instead it offers conditional tolerance enforced at gunpoint. 

Gun violence, meanwhile, remains the country’s most faithful export. Nearly 50,000 people died from firearm-related injuries in 2023. Children continue to be killed at rates unmatched by any other western nation. Schools still rehearse lockdowns as routine. Public spaces are navigated through fear. The political response remains frozen, manipulated by money and ideology that hold weapons higher than lives. 

The same logic governs reproductive rights. More than three years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, bodily autonomy has been carved into fragments. Nearly half the states ban or severely restrict abortion. Access now depends on geography, wealth and the ability to outrun the law. Pregnant people are investigated, charged and criminalized. Doctors face prosecution for providing care. States attempt to convict those who provide the service, weaponizing basic healthcare. 

The American Dream once insisted freedom was guaranteed. In 2026, freedom is transactional.

Economically, the promise is just as hollow. Wages stagnate while housing costs soar. Healthcare remains tethered to employment. Debt shadows entire generations. Upward mobility has slowed to a crawl. The idea that each generation would live better than the last has been replaced by a quieter truth that survival itself is an achievement. 

And the illusion collapses under its own weight. 

The U.S. has always punished the people it claimed to uplift. Indigenous communities were erased. Enslaved people built wealth they were never allowed to keep. Immigrants were welcomed with one hand and surveilled with the other. Black, brown, poor and marginalized people have always been systemically controlled. What the past several weeks have revealed is not a fall from grace but a removal of pretense. 

The American Dream was never universal. It was selectively distributed and aggressively defended. The violence unfolding now is not a departure from history—it is history, unfiltered and unapologetic.

What makes this all even more unbearable is the insistence that this is still freedom. That armed agents in neighbourhoods are “democracy.” That forced birth is moral clarity. That mass death by firearms is the price of liberty. The lie persists even as its consequences pile up in body counts, court cases and grieving families. 

Like authoritarian regimes elsewhere, the U.S. has perfected the art of moral branding. The repression wears patriotic language and is masked by rhetoric. The erosion of rights is framed as constitutional purity. Power insists it is protecting the nation even as it fractures it. 

To witness all this in a nation that has long made promises of a glorious life to millions of immigrants, is disgraceful. For families who moved to a foreign country with the notion that they were safer here in the West, witnessing this austerity happen in front of their eyes is particularly heartbreaking—to flee oppression only to just end up right back in the heart of it. 

The American Dream did not die because it was attacked from the outside. This wasn’t foreign intervention—that’s the U.S.’s specialty abroad. The American Dream died because it could not survive the truth of itself. It died because it never existed. 

January 2026 is not a turning point toward something new. It is a moment of exposure. The country is no longer pretending to be what it is not. It is broadcasting its priorities loudly and without apology—enforcement over empathy, control over care, dominance over dignity. 

The U.S. is no longer hiding its motives behind Cheshire cat smiles and bureaucratic bullshit. It is shoving them down your throat before you get a chance to object. 

A dream that requires silence to survive deserves to be dismantled. And a government that insists on myth over accountability cannot be shocked when the dream finally collapses in public view. 

The American Dream is dead not because it failed to evolve, but because it was never meant to hold everyone. What remains is a reckoning long overdue—one the country can no longer hide from, no matter how loudly it insists it’s still free.