Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, when he’s sent armed, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into cities, locals have tried to resist by organizing neighborhood watches, both to warn people that agents are coming and to document arrests. Minneapolis, where this week ICE launched what its acting director called the “largest immigration operation ever,” was no different.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.” And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in the neighborhood. … They’ve been out there trying to protect their neighbors.”
Many of these people probably believed that citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ … They could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”
The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. Bystander footage from several different angles shows the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her SUV when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.”