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.

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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.

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.

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.

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