Minneapolis Knows How to Resist This State Violence

Just over five years after the police murder of George Perry Floyd Jr., Minneapolis is again taking to the streets over an unjustified killing by law enforcement. This time, the victim is Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman who was shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross less than a mile from George Floyd Square. This echoing of traumatic recent history has the city on edge, but it is also revealing how the muscle memory of the summer of 2020 has better prepared everyday residents and city leaders to respond.

That memory includes neighborhood communication networks built during the unrest for residents to protect one another and the bravery needed to stand up, protest against injustice, and record the police. While these two flashpoints of violence share some similarities, including the public’s grief and rage, they’re also unfolding in two very different political moments, targeting distinct agencies, and (perhaps) leading to different results.

Over the past year, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents worked their way through Democrat-led cities, Minneapolis residents have been flooding legal observer trainings, handing out 3D-printed ICE whistles, and organizing neighborhood group chats to protect immigrant neighbors. Even staid businesses and schools have seemingly joined the resistance, sending out mass communications on “know your rights” trainings.

Across all of these efforts, there is connective tissue from the unrest of 2020, including demonstrations led by the same groups of clergy leaders and City Council members who supported the initiative to replace the Minneapolis Police Department. In other cases, residents and community leaders who spotlighted the murder of George Floyd are now calling attention to the injustices of ICE. In still others, neighbors are relying on the group chats they had originally created either out of fear that rogue white supremacists were infiltrating their streets or to organize teams to patrol the block and look for fires. Learning from the unrest in 2020, Minneapolis prepared for this fight.

These lessons led witnesses to stream onto the street Wednesday when ICE pulled up in the Central neighborhood of Minneapolis. They blew car horns and whistles, drawing observers out of their homes. Good, driving that morning with her wife, lived in the neighborhood too. This routine everyday resistance was apparent as neighbors began recording on their cellphones and continued to do so even after Good was shot at close range right in front of them.

Across the country, ICE agents have killed three other people in the past five months, and nonfatally shot several more, including a woman in Chicago who, like Good, was caught in an altercation with immigration agents while driving her car. More have died in ICE custody. The killing of Good, however, appears so far to be a potential turning point, another moment of reckoning driven in part by protest in Minneapolis against injustice.

We can also see the impact of movements challenging police violence in the refusal of Minnesota elected officials to accept federal law enforcement’s claims about Good’s death. In the immediate aftermath of the killing, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described Good as a “violent rioter” and accused her of “an act of domestic terrorism,” while characterizing the shooter’s actions as self-defense. President Trump went one step further, insisting that Good had “run over” an ICE agent who was subsequently hospitalized.

It is easy enough to dismiss these as the latest round of grotesque lies from the administration—lies easily disproven by the widely available video evidence. What is more remarkable is the speed and virulence of local officials’ responses against these statements.

In 2020, local and state officials condemned the actions of Officer Derek Chauvin, but many, including Mayor Jacob Frey, were more cautious in critiquing the police department or policing more broadly. Now, in 2026, local and state officials are directly calling out the authorities. Frey described Noem’s claims as “bullshit,” while Minnesota Governor Tim Walz decried the administration’s “propaganda.”

At a press conference Wednesday night, Mayor Frey, flanked by law enforcement leaders, told ICE forcefully: “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” This message has been repeated across the local political spectrum, from Frey’s allies to his opponents, in a surprising repudiation of Minnesota nice. Frey himself repeated it—sans curse word—in a New York Times op-ed on Thursday.

Of course, it’s easier for local and state officials to condemn federal agencies than to condemn their own. And the political logic of Homeland Security raids is quite different from that of local police actions—no mayor in America is likely to tell their police department to “get the fuck out.” But it’s hard to imagine residents’ preparations for ICE patrols, the intensity of politicians’ rebukes, or the public appetite for the call to “abolish ICE” without the muscle-building political struggles in the summer of 2020 and organizers’ continual insistence that law enforcement lies about police violence.

It is precisely this work of organizers and the city’s righteous anger in 2020 that made Minneapolis a target of the Trump administration in 2026, and it flooded the Twin Cities this week with an unprecedented 2,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents to snatch up largely law-abiding immigrants. (As point of reference, the Minneapolis Police Department stands at just over 600 officers.) It was only a matter of time before someone here was killed.

Over the coming weeks, investigators, journalists, and online sleuths will parse the video evidence of Good’s killing frame by frame, making the case that the ICE agent’s behavior did (or did not) constitute murder according to law. With federal agencies leading the investigation, justice will be hard to come by. But just as the criminal conviction against Chauvin was not enough to transform city policing, so too will the fight against ICE terrors need to go well beyond the courts.

The broader truth is clear: There is no reason for ICE to be swarming Minneapolis. There is no crisis on the city streets other than the one created by the Department of Homeland Security. But Noem and Trump wanted this fight. Fortified by the lessons of 2020, Minneapolis stands ready to give it to them.