It’s been a week since Renee Nicole Good was killed, shot multiple times in the face by an ICE agent. It’s been a week of escalating violence and roving patrols, protests nationwide and crippling inaction or hollow talk from many elected officials.
Since that shooting, ICE and other Department of Homeland Security agencies have expanded their operations in Minneapolis. They have been filmed going door to door with no pretext other than to scare local residents. They’ve shown up at stores, random suburban streets, slipping on frozen sidewalks and showing no sign of backing off or easing their tactics in the days since Good was shot for no reason.
And let’s be clear, she was killed for no reason. She was shot several times in the face, by an ICE agent while she was turning her steering wheel away from him. Despite what some of the people in the highest offices of government have tried to smear her with, she was not trying to ram the agent, she was not some kind of domestic terrorist. There are several videos showing the shooting from different angles — including the cell phone footage by the shooter, since identified as a military veteran with years as an agent in the department. Some of the photos of the car after she died have been particularly hard to look at. A glove box full of kids toys. A blood-soaked headrest. It’s bad. And despite that she has been smeared because a killing had to be justified.
And now the president is talking about invoking the Insurrection Act in response to people protesting Good’s death and the continued actions in the Twin Cities.
In the last week, Homeland Security agents have been filmed asking protesters if they had learned their lesson.” Border Czar Tom Homan went on a Sunday talk show to warn protesters to cut the rhetoric or there will “be more bloodshed.” And right now, as it has been every day since Good was killed, DHS and its agents have been waging a bluff. It’s the same bluff they’ve relied on over the last year. Their apparent impunity relies on the potential of violence coupled with an acquiescence by the government.
These people crumble at any pushback. Whether it’s top level officials in the department or their bosses, they flop sweat when questioned. The last year has been filled with videos of DHS agents panicking, calling in backup or running at community resistance. In Minneapolis, people have stepped up to chase away agents, demand legal authorization and more. It hasn’t been universal but it’s been there. An organized, power-backed rebuttal to their actions could potentially bring a halt to the attacks. And some officials are beating the drum of action. People are starting to talk about holding back funding votes (even with the weak caveat of demanding better training or something). But despite that, there hasn’t been real, meaningful action from people in power.
Actual resistance and they break. All they have after that is their guns. Which is a terrifying prospect, given how willing they have shown to draw or aim them so far. A few days ago Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, speaking with the Bullwark, stated the situation pretty clearly.
“From a practical perspective, to state the reality, it does get kind of hard when they drastically outnumber us and they have bigger guns than we do,” he said. “We don't want to create warfare in the street.”
Outright running gun battles with a paramilitary would be extremely bad, obviously. But Frey also gives up the game, the agents are relying on the threat or outright use force for impunity. They’ve also relied on local cops to back them up, whether in Illinois or Los Angeles. In L.A. in particular, these past six months have been filled with video of police tear gassing and attacking anti-ICE protesters, even when they are peacefully gathered by City Hall.
And these are the actual limits of control. Can a civil society rein in a roving paramilitary that thrives on anonymity and its ability to show up at random to abduct people? And can that same paramilitary count on this lack of pushback and presumed impunity to last indefinitely?
It has been heartening to see people come together against this, and rally at how brittle these roving squads can be. Videos from Minneapolis, as in Chicago and Los Angeles, show people banding together and fighting for people they don’t know. But I have been troubled by one recently reoccurring idea that I keep hearing: That DHS simply doesn’t have enough manpower or power overall to encompass the nation and keep people down. DHS has had to pull agents from other cities to help with the surge of roughly 2,000 people into the Twin Cities. We’ve seen it before, large numbers left Los Angeles to go to Chicago. And people from Chicago left to go to other cities.
But not all. And they don’t need to be an occupying force and they know it. They thrive on being a specter.
This past Friday here in Los Angeles, federal immigration agents raided at least eight locations in Echo Park and Silverlake. The locations, listed here from the Echo Park Tenants Union. Even though the large force left, it took a few cars full of agents to do this. The large shows of force serve a purpose and DHS does seem to like them, but in cities where surges ended, operations continue. It’s bleak out there. This newsletter doesn’t have some clear-cut, easy solution. But it’s clear that the inaction is fueling the impunity.
I wasn’t able to get to the scenes in Los Angeles right away due to work, but when I visited the first one, in the heart of Echo Park, banners were up. Two women stood on the corner where the man was grabbed, protesting. It was a few hours later and they stood there vigilant.
"Do what you can protest where you can," one says (she declined to give her name).
"I'm going to sit here with my sign,” she added. “What else can I do?"