#iceoutforgood

Kent Nerburn 

REPORT FROM THE FRONT -- MINNEAPOLIS, JANUARY 10

South Minneapolis is a typical working class residential area in a typical American city: block after block of single-family homes on small lots on tree-lined streets, with alleys and single car garages and trash cans out in back.

When I was a kid it was considered the boring part of town. It was where the Swedes and Norwegians had settled, and it had a clean quiet orderliness reflective of its Scandinavian character. Schools were good, lawns were mowed, there were little corner stores where the proprietors gave you credit and knew their customers by name. It was almost totally white. There was a Black area on its perimeter, but in its own way it reflected the same homes and families character of the whiter streets a few blocks over. In spite of the racism of the time, anyone who lived there would tell you that south Minneapolis was a good and safe place to grow up, and the old timers look upon it with fondness.

But south Minneapolis changed, and in a most interesting way. Its small well-maintained houses drew the attention of young people looking for their first homes, so, as the population aged and turned over, it became the go-to area for young people who did not want to become part of what they considered to be the soul-deadening experience of suburban America. Without changing its external character, south Minneapolis quietly became the stealth area of progressivism and radicalism in the city. LGBTQ, Black, vegan, urban farmers -- granola radicals of all stripes -- took ownership of the psychic reality of the area, and, since 'like' attracts 'like', this character has only grown and solidified in the last few years.

Enter George Floyd and his senseless murder outside the Cup Market in the very heart of the south Minneapolis community. Suddenly, all the latent progressivism and radicalism that had been channeled into radical neighborhood development rushed out from behind its quiet residential veneer and coalesced in outrage at this cavalier murder by an authority figure in an area that valued order but did not like authority.

In the five years since that murder, the neighborhood has quieted. But the anti-authoritarian character has not diminished. It is neither surprising nor coincidental that the murder of Renee Good by ICE agents took place just a few blocks from the site of the murder of George Floyd. This is a neighborhood that does not accept authorities graciously, no matter who they are. When ICE showed up, resistance was inevitable.

As an old 60's radical who was part of the Minneapolis 60's resistance scene, I was heartened by the protests that erupted after Renee Good's murder. I've mellowed in my old age, and I was never fully on board with either the beatification of George Floyd or the vilification of the Minneapolis police after George Floyd's murder. But I am fully behind the outrage at the Mad King and his murderous Brownshirts, and was prepared to add my body to the numbers who were gathering to make their feelings known about ICE's deadly gestapo tactics on Minneapolis' south side.

But what I was not prepared for was the organization and coordination I encountered when I arrived at the park where the rally was taking place. The crowds were massive, but orderly. People in lime green vests with walkie talkies were offering directions; folks were handing out hand warmers and bottles of water; street monitors with Ipads were communicating about areas where various demonstration activities were taking place, energy bars and empanadas were there for the taking. One house had a sign making its bathroom available to any demonstrator who had need to use one.

I expressed my amazement to my son, who lives in the neighborhood. He responded with a wry smile and a simple comment. "We learned after George Floyd that no one was going to protect us," he said. "So we had to organize ourselves." He showed me an app on his phone that had the entire neighborhood mapped out. "This alerts us to where ICE is. People log in and contribute. We have eyes everywhere."

I realized that this is how the thousands of people gathered to demonstrate were being organized. It wasn't one single protest. There were people as far as the eye could see in the park where we were standing. There were parades on adjoining streets, a vigil at the site of the shooting, speakers and bands playing at various places, flash mobs gathering and dispersing at different corners. This is why the media had crowd estimates ranging from 3000 to 40000: the crowd was amorphous, moving and changing like a cloud. This event was not being organized, it was being managed.

Blessedly, the rocks and bottle folks were nowhere to be seen. People seemed to understand that violence and destruction played right into Trump's hands. People were angry, but they had, at least for the moment, transformed their anger into confidence, and there was a quiet sense of strength and resolve in every group on every street. It was the kind of gathering that made you understand the meaning of the word "solidarity".

As we headed back to our car, I could not help but marvel at the maturity of the event. As my son said, "We've been here before". And it showed.

Somewhere, Trump was eating hamburgers and nursing his bone spurs and dreaming the fever dreams of the petty tyrant. But here in south Minneapolis people were gathering, helping each other, listening to bands and speakers and feeling the quiet confidence of like-minded folks who truly understand the meaning of strength in numbers.

Trump, in his tiny vicious rage, hoped his oafish Brownshirts would create chaos. Instead, in this corner of America, on this particular day, they were creating community.

Marc Murphy

* * *

It's a Lovely Life by Heather Delaney Reese 

There’s a stretch of highway in South Orange County, CA, where everyone suddenly starts driving differently. You feel it as soon as you cross an invisible line in the road. The cars slow to exactly the speed limit. Not a mile over. It’s not a coincidence. Everyone who grew up here, or lived nearby, knows why. The highway patrol waits there every day, especially at the end of the month. Not because anything dangerous is happening, but because they’re trying to hit their numbers. I used to drive that road back and forth between San Diego and Orange County, and it was always strange to bring friends who didn’t know the drill. As soon as we crossed into that stretch, they’d look around, confused by how the energy on the road shifted without anyone saying a word.

That feeling, of being watched, targeted, hunted, is now the baseline in this country. On the freeway, it was predictable. It made sense. But what ICE is doing now is something else entirely. This isn’t about immigration enforcement. It’s about hitting quotas at any cost. They’ve turned this country into a police state. Not with trained, accountable law enforcement, but with hastily coached, unqualified thugs wearing hidden badges, with no accountability and no regard for human life. They’ve become Trump’s personal enforcers, the modern version of the Gestapo or the SS. They don’t answer to the law. They answer to the regime.

Their job isn’t to protect our country from outside threats. It’s to intimidate, punish, and disappear. That’s what they’re being paid for. That’s what the quotas are really about. Wreak as much damage as possible. Kidnap as many people as they can, and test how far they can push it. Today, they’re targeting immigrants, black and brown folks, people with accents, people who don’t “look American.” Citizens or not, it doesn’t matter. Some they release. Some they don’t. But tomorrow it will be you and me. It’ll be anyone who speaks out. Anyone who questions the regime. Anyone who doesn’t conform to their vision of the world. That means people who aren’t far-right Christian nationalists, who aren’t their version of white, who are disabled, neurodivergent, gender nonconforming, or politically disloyal.

We know how this story ends. Because we’ve seen it before, in the 1930s and 1940s. They always start with the “others.” And they never stop until every undesirable is gone. Nobody is safe.

What ICE is doing isn’t unique. It reflects the same model authoritarian regimes have used around the world: incentivize cruelty, reward compliance, and let fear do the work. In Argentina between 1976 and 1983, the government was run by a military dictatorship that carried out a campaign of state terrorism now known as the “Dirty War.” During that period, a military junta seized control of the country, dissolved democratic institutions, and unleashed security forces and secret death squads against anyone they labeled a threat. Tens of thousands of people were “disappeared,” kidnapped by masked men, held without charges, tortured, and never seen again. Many of those taken were ordinary citizens, students, activists, workers, journalists, and even people with no political affiliation at all. People lived in uncertainty and fear because no one knew who would vanish next.

That’s where we’re heading. You don’t hand out signing bonuses and set detention quotas if your goal is justice. You do it if your goal is fear. You do it to test how far you can go. This is a trial run to see what the public will tolerate. To see who stays quiet and to see how much cruelty can be normalized before the next step is taken.

This isn’t a warning about what might happen someday. It’s already happening. And even if someone argues that ICE is following internal policy, that misses the point. Just because something is ordered doesn’t make it just. At the Nuremberg trials, the number one excuse given by those who carried out atrocities was: “I was just following orders.” But the court rejected that defense: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” Of course, this isn’t about international law applying to us right now. It’s about what history has already shown us. That was true then. It’s true now. No order justifies what ICE is doing.

Even if we assume the most generous version of events, that every ICE action is technically within the bounds of current policy. And that people were protesting, interfering, or present where they shouldn’t have been. The rule of law still does not allow execution without due process. It does not allow summary punishment. It does not allow masked men to act as judge, jury, and executioner in the street. In the United States, more than 99 percent of offenses do not carry the death penalty, and none of them are decided on the spot by armed agents with no warrants and no hearings. Once society accepts that the government can kill without due process, the law is no longer real. It becomes optional. And when that happens, it won’t stop with immigrants or protesters. It will eventually reach us all.

This is what regime justice looks like. The law still exists on paper, but it no longer protects people equally. In Nazi Germany, the 1941 “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog) decree allowed authorities to abduct anyone accused of threatening state security. No charges or trial necessary. People vanished overnight, pulled from their homes, never seen again, and the fear of that silence kept everyone else in line. That’s what happens when the law is no longer grounded in rights or fairness.

And it’s not just happening here. You can see it internationally as well. Donald Trump announced this week that the United States will “do something” about Greenland, “whether they like it or not,” openly threatening to seize territory belonging to Denmark, a NATO ally. He said he would prefer to make a deal “the easy way,” but that there was also a “hard way.”

This is the language of a man who no longer believes rules apply to him. Not here. Not abroad. And if a U.S. president feels entitled to threaten allies and claim foreign territory as his own, imagine what else he’s willing to do behind closed doors.

For international readers watching this unfold, I try to imagine what it must look like from the outside. Most Americans were never under the illusion that the country was perfect. But there was pride in what it aspired to be. A nation built by immigrants. A flawed experiment grounded in freedom, opportunity, and the rule of law. That experiment is now nearly 250 years old, and it is being openly dismantled. Anyone who has taken a basic history course can see the pattern and know where we are headed.

And I can only imagine how heartbreaking and terrifying it must be to witness from another country. This isn’t just affecting Americans. It’s disrupting the entire global order. It’s putting the whole world at risk of another world war. Many are saying this is the closest we’ve been to the brink of World War III in a generation. And it’s all because of one man.

It’s hard to look at this and fully grasp that the American people voted for it. He was elected the first time and did a catastrophic job. He botched the pandemic response. He undermined science. He gutted public health, environmental protections, and education. He separated families, encouraged hate, and built a cult around cruelty. And now, we’ve done it again. That’s not something the rest of the world can fix. Only we can.

I can only imagine how powerless it must feel to watch this unfold in a country with outsized influence over everything from trade to climate to global security. You’re trying to live your own life. Take care of your own people. And yet you’re forced to watch as one man destabilizes entire continents. I know it must be infuriating and exhausting. Like one man has a grip, both emotional and physical, on the entire planet. And it probably feels like we aren’t doing enough to stop it.

I feel that too. I started writing these daily posts because I felt that same frustration. What were we doing to stop this, and who can we look to for a path out of this? And unlike most countries facing authoritarian collapse, we don’t even have an opposition leader. We don’t have a figurehead people can rally around. And that makes the isolation worse.

I see the comments. “You need to rise up.” And I agree. I do. And I also feel like this is all I do. Thanks to the support of this community, I’ve been able to dedicate nearly all my time to this work. I don’t clock out. I’m reading news, watching press briefings, writing posts, making videos, and helping people understand what’s happening, at least 16 hours a day, every single day. And I’m still a mom. I still have a child at home. This has taken over five years of her childhood. And I carry that with me, too. And yet I still want to do more.

But I want you to know this: there are more of us than you think who don’t support this and are doing everything we can to resist. And more people are joining the resistance every single day. I know it might not look like it from the outside, but it’s happening. We see the danger. We feel the shame. We know what’s been lost, and what’s still at stake. We are not giving up on our country or on you. Americans were built on resolve. We’ve survived every dark chapter we’ve faced before. And we will again. For those of you outside the U.S, and those of you inside, don’t think for a second that this will last. It won’t. We will rise like we always do. And that is why I still have hope for America. I hope you do too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 10, 2026 (Saturday)

Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone.

The video shows Ross getting out of a vehicle and walking toward a red SUV where Good sits in the driver’s seat. Sirens blare as he walks toward her. She smiles at him and says: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” As Ross walks alongside the car, she repeats: “I’m not mad at you.” As he reaches the back of the vehicle, another person, presumably Good’s wife, Becca, says: “Show your face.” As he begins to record the vehicle’s license plate, the same person says: “That’s okay, we don’t change our plates every morning,” referring to stories that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) switch out plates to make their vehicles hard to track. “Just so you know, it’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.” Ross’s camera pans up to show the person recording him on her cell phone.

She continues: “That’s fine. U.S. citizen. Former f*cking veteran.” As she walks to the passenger-side door, she looks at him and says: “You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.”

Another officer approaches the driver’s side of the vehicle and says to Renee Good: “Out of the car. Get out of the f*cking car.”

As the passenger calmly reaches for the passenger-side door handle, the police officer on the driver’s side again says: “Get out of the car!” Other videos indicate that he had then put his hand into the car and was trying to open the door. Good quite clearly turns the wheel hard away from the police officers to head down the street as the passenger yells: “Drive, baby! Drive! Drive!”

Someone says “Whoa!” as the car moves down the street. Ross’s camera shows his face and then sways—remember, he has been filming all this on his phone. There are three shots and the houses on the side of the street swing back into view on Ross’s camera, indicating he did not drop it. As the car rolls up the street, Ross says, “F*cking bitch!” just before there is the sound of a smash.

What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration's insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.

As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”

The release of this damning video as an attempted exoneration reminds me overwhelmingly of the release of the video of the murder of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in February 2021 in an attempt of one of the murderers to prove they had acted in self-defense.

In that case, the district attorney for that circuit told police that the video showed self-defense and declined to prosecute. When the story wouldn’t go away, one of the murderers apparently thought that everyone else would agree that the video exonerated the killers. His lawyer gave the video to a local radio station. The station took the video down within two hours, but the public outcry over the horrific video meant the killers were arrested two days later. A jury convicted them, and they are now in prison, two for life without possibility of parole, one for life with the possibility of parole after 30 years, when he will be about 82.

In the case of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the murderers and their protectors were clearly so isolated in their own racist bubble they could not see how regular Americans would react to the video of them hunting down and shooting a jogger.

In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking bitch” after he killed her.

The thread that runs through both is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun.

This is the larger meaning of federal agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol in U.S. cities. While they are attacking primarily people of color, the message they carry is directed at all Americans: you must do what the Trump administration and its loyalists demand.

Another recording from the past few days shows a federal agent walking toward a woman recording him. She tells him: “Shame on you.” He answers: “Listen. Have you all not learned from the past couple of days? Have you not learned?” She responds: “Learned what? What’s our lesson here? What do you want us to learn?” He begins: “Following federal agents….” and he knocks the phone out of her hand. Hours after Good’s death, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem appeared in Manhattan behind a podium emblazoned with the words: “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS.”

After doubling down on their false narrative, the administration pulled 200 Customs and Border Patrol agents from a crackdown in Louisiana to send them to Minnesota, where administration officials already had deployed 2,000 federal agents—more than three times the number of police officers in Minneapolis. There they are cracking down, apparently indiscriminately. Yesterday, Gabe Whisnant of Newsweek reported that ICE has detained four members of the Oglala Lakota Nation, a federally recognized tribal nation of the Indigenous peoples who were in North America long before European settlers arrived.

In November, as Sarah Mehta of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted at the time, the administration replaced almost half of ICE leaders across the country with Border Patrol officers. Border Patrol, a subagency of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is the agency responsible for acting on President Donald J. Trump’s policy of taking children from their parents during his first term, and it remains at the center of complaints of cruelty, racism, and violation of civil rights. This is the agency led by Greg Bovino, and the one behind the attack on a Chicago apartment building led by agents who rappelled into the building from a Black Hawk helicopter.

Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.

On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radi0 shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim.

This afternoon, Kyle Cheney, Ben Johansen, and Gregory Svirnovskiy of Politico reported that the day after Good’s murder, Noem quietly restricted the ability of members of Congress to conduct oversight of ICE facilities. The policy came out in court today after ICE officers denied Democratic Minnesota Representatives Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig, and Kelly Morrison entry to a detention facility in Minneapolis. Last month, a federal judge rejected a similar policy.

Trump and his allies have singled out Minnesota in large part because of its large Somali-American population, represented in Congress by Omar, a lawmaker Trump has repeatedly attacked, from a population Trump has called “garbage.” As Chabeli Carrazana explained in 19th News, shortly after Christmas, right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video that he claimed showed day care centers run by Somali Americans were taking money from the government without providing services.

The video has been widely debunked. In 2019, a state investigation found fraud taking place in the child care system and charged a number of people for defrauding the state. After that, the state tightened oversight, and state investigators have conducted unannounced visits to the day cares Shirley hit in his videos, where they found normal operations. Shirley claimed fraud when the centers would not let him in, but child care centers lock their doors and obscure the windows for the safety of the children, and would not let a strange man inside the facility to videotape.

But Trump used the frenzy to justify cutting $10 billion in antipoverty funding to five states led by Democrats—California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York—only to have a federal judge block his order yesterday. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promptly announced she was withholding $129 billion in federal funding from Minnesota, alleging fraud. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison responded: “I will not allow you to take from Minnesotans in need. I’ll see you in court.”

When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they're crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it's being destroyed. It's got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he's a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you're driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They're very corrupt people. It's a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody's won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it's a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn't get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That's a crooked state. California's a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”

Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Protesters took to the streets today across the United States to lament the death of Renee Good and demand an end to ICE brutality. At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris reported that ICE’s approval rating has plummeted in the past year, from +16 to -14. The day ICE agent Ross shot Renee Good, 52% of Americans disapproved of ICE while just 39% approved. In February, 19% of Americans held a strongly unfavorable opinion of ICE, while today 40% do. There is, Morris notes, “a growing and intense, angry opposition to [ICE] across America.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

FUCK ICE