Minneapolis Responds to ICE Committing Murder

From CrimethInc.

An Account from the Streets

On January 7, 2026, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed our comrade Renee Good in cold blood. The following is an account of the events that immediately followed her murder from the perspective of an anarchist in Minneapolis. These words are dedicated to her memory.

Renee Good was murdered a mere six blocks from where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020. This feels significant in two ways. First, South Minneapolis has a history and memory of resistance. Thousands of people here still remember fighting the police in 2020. Secondly, a similar dynamic could play out today, just as in the fiery summer of 2020, when the unrest in Minneapolis acted as the spark that ignited a national uprising.

For 38 days now, the Department of Homeland Security has been occupying the Twin Cities to terrorize our immigrant neighbors. This Monday, they deployed 2000 more ICE agents to dramatically increase the number of abductions. This is an unprecedented escalation. No other city has yet experienced an ICE occupation at this scale.

This escalation is a reaction to the groundswell of resistance against ICE that our communities have carried out over the past several weeks. More than 4000 people have participated in at least 81 rapid response groups—patrolling, tailing, and boxing in ICE vehicles, warning our neighbors, protesting at hotels hosting ICE agents, and confronting them as they attempt to go about their evil business. The current surge in ICE attacks has not driven us to despair; we believe that it indicates that ICE is like a wild animal backed into a corner. Its erratic and violent behavior is beginning to suggest desperation. It is an agency in crisis, an agency that can be defeated.

People stand vigil for Renee Good after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered her.


Yesterday, on January 7, I went to the Bishop Henry Whipple building at 8 am with a friend. The Whipple building is the ICE headquarters for the entire Upper Midwest; it is where they stage before carrying out their raids. I took pictures of their license plates for about an hour. A third friend planned to join us. Then she texted me that she couldn’t make it because ICE had shot someone.

My friend and I left Whipple and sped towards Portland and 34th, where the shooting had just taken place. When we arrived, Signal stopped working for both of us, as if our phones were being jammed. There was yellow crime scene tape up and dozens of MPD officers were protecting ICE officers in full tactical gear. The cops had a Bearcat with an LRAD on top. Greg Bovino himself, the “commander at large” of Border Patrol, was standing there in tactical gear. A crowd was forming—not just recognizable activists, but also ordinary neighbors who lived on that block coming out to cuss at them. We started a chant: “Cops! Pigs! Murderers!”

Things heated up when an agent tackled a protester about a block away. He grabbed them by their clothing and tried to force their hands behind their back in a snowbank. Somebody else body-checked the agent, knocking him down. A few people from the crowd ran over to see what was happening. A middle-aged local demanded to know why they were arresting the person.

“She was slashing tires,” the ICE agent answered.

The man yelled back, “I’m gonna do that too, motherfucker!”

There was a standoff for a couple minutes until the agent let the person go and retreated to the larger group of ICE agents.

The crowd started to gain confidence, getting in the faces of the ICE agents and chanting more aggressively. MPD cleared an exit for ICE to leave by heading south on Portland Avenue; they began to drive their vehicles out. Some people started shouting for people to get into the street to block them. The crowd hesitated at first, but a few people got into the street and blocked an ICE vehicle. Seeing this, more people began to get into the street. MPD officers shoved them out of the way. People kicked the ICE vehicles as they sped off. One person almost got hit.

As more of the crowd blocked Portland Avenue, the cops tried to clear a different exit for them, aiming to enable them to head west on 34th. People started chanting “Fists up, feds down, get the fuck out of town!” ICE guys with less-lethal launchers and shotguns were guarding an SUV as it tried to leave. People started throwing snowballs. The crowd surged forward and I came face to face with an ICE agent sticking the barrel of his launcher in my face.

“What are you gonna do,” I demanded, “shoot me too?”

He shot the launcher at my face at point-blank range. My first thought was “I just lost an eye.” That’s how it felt. Street medics pulled me back and started flushing my eyes. Off to my right, I could see people chasing some ICE agents into an alley behind some houses. I saw the same middle-aged man who had intervened on behalf of the other protester also take a pepper ball to the face at very close range. The agents shot tear gas and tackled somebody else.

Two comrades who were helping to give me medical treatment assisted me in moving to a house two blocks away to get cleaned up. I showered and put gauze on the wound on my face. When I got out of the shower, I saw more commotion down on the sidewalk. It was hard to tell whether ICE was chasing people or people were chasing them.

Some people erected a barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered. The barricade remains there today, with protesters camping out there—including some familiar faces who held down the George Floyd Square autonomous zone half a mile away for over a year.

The barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered.

I went home to nurse my wounds and wash the pepper spray out of my clothes. A couple hours later, I heard reports that ICE was raiding Roosevelt high school and had rammed an observer’s car with one of their cars, weaponizing their vehicle as we’ve frequently seen them do. A fight broke out outside the main entrance. They arrested a protester, but they failed to catch the student they were trying to kidnap. This should remind everyone that they aren’t invincible: when we commit ourselves to our actions, we can beat them.

At about 4:30 pm, a group of 30 or 40 protesters breached the doors of the Federal Courthouse downtown. As security guards pushed back against the revolving doors to keep them out, someone smashed out a window. No one was arrested there. The spontaneity of the moment and the sheer number of little protests flaring up around the Twin Cities made it impossible for the authorities to react to all of them.

That night, there was a mass vigil to mourn Renee’s death. Some ten thousand people came out, crowding around burn barrels as they flooded Portland Avenue as far as the eye could see. It felt like everyone on the Southside was there.

People stand vigil for Renee Good after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered her.

Since the beginning of the invasion of the Twin Cities, messy contradictions have abounded in the network of rapid response groups that has sprung up. In the early days, there were major clashes with ICE at the Bro-Tex paper factory and on the eastside of St Paul. Some weeks later, there was a clash at 29th and Pillsbury, where they tackled a pregnant woman. Following these, there was a lot of peace policing and debating about nonviolence. Liberal elements have gained ground, and things that we could take for granted in 2020 are no longer established.

A lot of the people in the rapid response groups come out of 50501 and the No Kings protests and are very green and inexperienced. This can be a blessing and a curse. There is a huge wellspring of creative energy; various neighborhoods are trying all sorts of different strategies for alert systems and mutual aid. At times, the liberals running dispatch have been doing de facto counter-insurgency by telling people not to go to the scene of an abduction. Well-attended patrol trainings have instructed people to stay at least 30 feet away from ICE at all times. There is a culture of referring to ourselves as “observers,” an insidious brainworm for those of us who want to do everything we can to disrupt and interfere with ICE operations. There is a heavy emphasis on collecting ICE license plates, which has proven less and less useful as agents switch out their plates and 2000 new vehicles infest our streets. We have found foot patrols around hotspots like Lake and Bloomington to be increasingly effective since the surge began on Monday. It doesn’t take long to find an ICE agent skulking around.

In my opinion, we will have to fight on two levels to defeat the ICE invasion. We have to become more agile and more courageous at stopping abductions promptly and forcefully, and we also have to defeat them on a political level by popularizing the idea that ICE represents an attack on society as a whole. The conditions for another uprising like 2020 are bubbling just below the surface. It is a subterranean fire and the feds cannot put it out.

We owe it to our fallen sister Renee Good to push on these tensions until we break through to the other side.


The barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered.

The barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered.

Fuck ICE.

 

Comments

Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/13/2026 - 11:50

Yesterday's episode of Native America Calling is one of the most disturbing and concerning I've heard.
https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/monday-january-12-2026-native-amer…
ICE is rounding up Native peoples in the Little Earth community because they look "Latino." 4 out of 5 Indigenous people are missing - they don't know where they are or where they went but they were abducted by ICE. The Native community there is shutting themselves in and not going out as much as possible (not good for the kiddos! to say the least). If they do go out they are carrying as much ID as they can -- sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't. They are called derogatory names by agents.

The second half of the program is also disturbing: it's about the theft of water that sustains lives and lifeways in so-called Virginia.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 01/15/2026 - 03:38

North Minneapolis Chases Out ICE

A Firsthand Account of the Response to Another ICE Shooting
From CrimethInc. - 2026-01-15

After Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot at least one person in north Minneapolis on the night of January 14, a crowd gathered and faced them down, confronting them and tearing down the yellow tape they put up around the area. Police reinforced the federal mercenaries, joining them in shooting a tremendous amount of tear gas and flash-bang grenades at demonstrators as well as at passing cars and houses in the residential district. Nonetheless, the officers lost control of the area and retreated, ceding the streets to those who had defied them.

In the process, ICE agents abandoned several vehicles in the area. Demonstrators opened up the vehicles and found identity cards, paperwork, license plates, operational plans, tactical gear, and other items. Footage of demonstrators looking through these materials was broadcast live on the internet.

Over the past month and a half, the Trump regime has sent more and more troops to the Twin Cities because they know that what happens there has implications for the whole country—and because they are losing. If the battle of Minneapolis in winter 2026 turns out the way that the battle of Portland turned out in summer 2020, it will bode ill for Trump’s ability to retain control by brute force.

It is important to note the role that local Minneapolis police played in assaulting demonstrators tonight, despite their nominally answering to a Democratic city government that has paid lip service to opposing ICE. Police across the country have played an essential role in enabling ICE to terrorize communities. Without the continuous assistance and support of local police departments, federal agencies would already have been outmaneuvered by protest movements. When Democrat politicians claim that they need to “maintain order,” they are attempting to position themselves as junior partners in the consolidation of fascism. It may be in their interests to “maintain order” as mercenaries kidnap and murder people, but it is not in ours.

We offer here an account from the protests following the shooting in North Minneapolis, sent to us anonymously.

Demonstrators investigating the abandoned ICE vehicles apparently retrieved these “challenge coins” that ICE mercenaries receive when they kidnap people. This “coin” is decorated with a skull wearing a crown. ICE mercenaries serve king death.


I had two hours left at my work shift when my phone started blowing up. Several comrades didn’t know where I was and thought I might be out in the street.

“Where are you?”

“You OK????”

“Shots fired at 24th and Lyndale”

“They just shot another person”

Every rapid response group chat was talking about the same thing. All kinds of rumors were flying around. Did they shoot one person or two? Were the victims alive or dead? Somebody said ICE had shot a 12-year-old Venezuelan boy in the leg. Somebody else said the victim was hiding in his house for fear of arrest and desperately needed medical attention. I didn’t know what to believe.

It’s always like that when a new emergency is going down. In the course of the past 45 days of federal occupation, scrambling through a fog of war to find out what just happened has become a familiar sensation. Somebody sent me a livestream of a crowd running away as ICE agents shot tear gas grenades and flashbangs at them.

Time slowed to a crawl. I hurried to finish up the drudgery I was working on as fast as I could. When I felt like I could get away with it, I told my coworkers I had a family emergency and I had to leave early. I jumped in my car and ran every stop sign on the way to 24th and North Lyndale.

I ran into a crew of street medics two blocks north of the crowd. They told me about what they’d seen before I got there. ICE had snatched two kids suspected of throwing a firework at them—20 masked thugs charging up to grab the kids, only to release them half an hour later under intense pressure from the rest of the crowd. The medics warned me that they were going to get out before the cops started mass-arresting people. In their opinion, I was walking into a kettle. The air already stank of tear gas.

At 24th Street, I found a crowd of about a hundred people facing off against a skirmish line of Minneapolis Police Department pigs in riot gear. The feds had already left and handed over the situation to the local cops. Somebody was slowly beating a drum. To my right, kids stood up on an elevated front lawn, screaming “Fuck ICE!” and “Fuck 12!” down at MPD. Somebody was brandishing a tear gas canister that had been fired at them, showing it off to their friends. A TV news crew was there. They tried to talk to me. I pushed my way through the crowd to get away from the cameras. Beyond the skirmish line, a block south on Lyndale near 23rd, I heard the sound of shattering glass.

I doubled back and went around the block. I came out on the other side of the skirmish line. There was a crowd of young people on this side, too. They were smashing up two SUVs that I recognized immediately as ICE vehicles by their blacked-out windows and out-of-state plates. Guys were trading kicks at the glass. Somebody was proudly displaying a big Mexican flag. One young person jumped up on the hood and stomped her foot through the windshield. Somebody with a can of red spray-paint tagged “HANG KRISTI NOEM” on the side of the other car.

A graffiti artist identified the ICE mercenaries for what they are: Nazis.

A few people pulled a locked gun safe out of the trunk of one of the cars. Somebody dumped a fingerprinting kit on the ground. Someone else was rifling through a folder of documents at a frantic pace, snapping pictures of each one with a cell phone. There was an ICE face mask in the driver-side door of the nearest SUV. Appropriately enough, there was an ice scraper on the floor of the vehicle.

Suddenly, I heard a loud bang behind me. The familiar acrid taste of tear gas filled my nostrils. I started running south with the rest of the crowd. When we got to the next intersection, however, I turned around and saw that the cops were pulling back, shooting projectiles at the crowd as they moved east on 24th. The crowd got its bearings and we turned around and ran back up to 24th. There were such huge clouds of tear gas to the east of us that I couldn’t see the cops anymore.

“This is one! This is ICE!” I heard somebody yelling excitedly. She was pointing at another silver SUV parked on 24th. I checked the plates against the database of ICE vehicles that activists keep, saw that she was correct, and instantly felt silly for doing clerical work in the middle of a riot. Someone started whacking one of the side windows with the ice scraper that had been in the previous vehicle, striking it as hard as possible. After a few swings, there was a satisfying crunch as the window gave in. People around me began kicking in these windows, too. Somebody got the driver’s side door open and threw a firecracker inside.

Some overzealous cameraman—I couldn’t tell if it was the same guy from before—muscled his way through the crowd to get a shot of the ICE vehicle receiving this treatment. “No video!” someone roared at him. “If you let him take pictures of this shit, somebody is going to jail!” A few people forcefully encouraged the cameraman to turn around and leave the area.

When the tear gas cleared, I saw that the cops were gone. It seemed too good to be true. I ran up a couple blocks to scout the perimeter. They were nowhere to be seen.

I went back to where the two smashed-up ICE vehicles were. A festive block party mood had set in. People were setting off fireworks. Somebody was trying to pry open the gun case. Someone was dancing on top of a vehicle again while someone else blasted “I Don’t Fuck With You” by Big Sean. Young folks passed around a bottle of Hennessy. A lane of traffic had opened up. Some passing motorists raised their fists out the window and shouted “FUCK ICE!”

“I’m so proud of my city,” I found myself murmuring out loud. After seven weeks of atrocities at the hands of these fascists, people were finally fighting back. I thought about the liberals who were at home wringing their hands about how we were supposedly giving the feds an excuse for a crackdown (what the fuck did they think was already happening?) and posting on Facebook about the “language of the unheard.” The newfound comrades I was partying with around the looted vehicles seemed perfectly eloquent to me.

The George Floyd uprising of 2020 was never very far away. Its specter has haunted Minneapolis throughout everything that has happened for the last month and a half. Tonight, January 14, it finally assumed corporeal form again. People will remember tonight as the opening salvo of the people’s counterattack against a fascist invasion.

When history is written the way it ought to be written, it will not be our ferocity, but rather, the moderation and long patience of the Twin Cities that will make people shake their heads in wonder.

 

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