ICE Killed a U.S. Citizen

By LaDonna Raeh

Why This Story Hit Me as a Mother — and Why It Lit a Fire on Our Show

I want to step out from behind the keyboard for a moment — because this part of the story is personal.

I’m a mother of four sons.

And earlier this week, when we talked about this on The Afternoon Show, it wasn’t just another headline we were dissecting between breaks. It sat in the room with us. Heavy. Unavoidable. The kind of story that makes you look at your phone and then look at each other like, “Nah… this can’t just pass by.”

My co-host, Atiba Buchanan, and I both felt it immediately.

Because when you hear that a child has now lost both parents — their father in 2023 and their mother in this incident — your mind doesn’t go to policy first. It goes to bedtime. School drop-offs. Who’s going to show up to parent-teacher conferences. Who’s going to be there when the nightmares hit.

That’s where my heart went. Instantly.

The Phones Lit Up — Because the Fear Is Familiar

Our callers didn’t need convincing.

They called in angry.
They called in heartbroken.
They called in asking the same question in different ways:
“If this can happen to a U.S. citizen, what protection do any of us really have?”

This wasn’t abstract for them. It sounded like their cousin. Their neighbor. Their kid’s classmate’s parent. And for Black parents especially, the fear wasn’t hypothetical — it was inherited.

As a mother, I couldn’t shake one thought: What if that child grows up associating authority not with safety, but with loss?

That’s not a side effect.
That’s a consequence.

We’ve Seen This Pattern Before

On the show, we also talked about something that still doesn’t sit right with a lot of people: the WGN news producer who was dragged by ICE last year.

Different circumstances. Same chilling throughline.

A professional.
A working person.
Someone with a life, a job, a name — reduced in a moment to a spectacle of force before the facts were fully understood.

When these incidents stack up, they stop feeling like anomalies and start feeling like a pattern. And patterns demand intervention — not excuses.

This Is Why “Something Has to Be Done” Isn’t Just a Phrase

When Atiba and I said on air that something has to be done, we weren’t talking about empty outrage. We were talking about guardrails. Oversight. Humanity.

Because enforcement without accountability doesn’t just erode trust — it creates generational trauma.

And as a mother raising Black sons, I don’t have the luxury of treating this as distant news. Every story like this forces parents to have conversations too early, too heavy, too often.

How to comply.
How to survive encounters.
How to stay alive.

That’s not normal. And it shouldn’t be accepted.

Why WVON Holds Space for These Conversations

At WVON, we don’t just report stories — we let the community process them out loud. We let the fear, the anger, the confusion breathe, because silence doesn’t protect us. Dialogue does.

This story didn’t end when the microphones went off. It followed us home. And it’s why we’re saying clearly: this cannot be treated as routine.

When a child is left without parents…
When citizenship doesn’t shield someone from deadly force…
When callers recognize themselves in the headlines…

That’s the moment the system owes us more than statements.

It owes us change.

Because in order to change our narrative, we must learn, speak, and teach our greatness.