The People of Minneapolis Will Simply Not Let the ICE Thugs Prevail

The blood pooled in the snowbank, seeping into the thick sheet of ice below. On this corner, at 34th Street and Portland Avenue in Minneapolis, this was a reminder, visual and visceral, of Renee Good’s death by gunshots fired in daylight, for all to see, by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Federal officials had moved her lifeless body here after Ross fired multiple shots into her as she drove away from him, and first responders did their best to revive her.

Looking at the bloody snowbank half a day after she died, I was struck by what wasn’t there. No investigators collecting evidence. No attempt to hide the blood—the snowbank was too deep, and the ice too thick. At most crime scenes, the blood gets erased quickly, with a pressure washer. Not this one. It would linger into the night of her killing, telling the story of her fatal encounter with ICE while protesting their marauding presence in her South Minneapolis neighborhood.

As a journalist, I thought mostly of how to tell this story. But as a Minnesota kid, this story just hit me in a much more personal way than other tragedies. I thought of how close this was to the George Floyd murder scene, just five years prior. Of how close it was to Lyndale Elementary, a mile west of here on 34th Street, where my mother taught the same immigrants who now are being targeted and chased out. Of the impossible burden carried by this city, scene to one civic nightmare after another in recent times. I thought of the line from Hamilton about the woebegone citizens of this besieged city: They were “outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned.”

The occupying forces of the federal government, armed with assault rifles and tear gas canisters, seemed overwhelming. There were 3,000 of them, and as Good’s partner, Becca, said in describing the mismatch, they had guns and the people had whistles. They had little duty to obey laws, and seemingly carte blanche to use their weapons however they felt like. It seemed inevitable that this city would fall, whatever that meant, and be forced to surrender. 

Except that the people of Minneapolis, and Minnesota more broadly, didn’t buy the story of their inevitable capitulation. It’s as if they waved reassuringly with their chopper mittens and declared to the nation and world in their native language: “Oh, geez, wouldya calm down already? We got this.”

They have shown the world how to fight back successfully, using an iron resolve, a superior information operation, and winter grit, without resorting to the violence being used against them. It’s taken all hands: Nearly 30,000 Minnesotans trained as “constitutional observers,” essentially a rapid-response citizens’ force against perceived abuses. Tens of thousands of others have taken to the streets to monitor and film federal officials, or delivered groceries to neighbors too scared to leave their homes, or accompanied vulnerable neighbors from the parking lot to schools or church.

As dusk approached on the day Good was shot, two Puerto Rican men stood on a front lawn near Good’s memorial as police retreated after reopening the street. Angry protesters lobbed snowballs at them and cheered. 

“You don’t fuck with Minneapolis,” one of the men shouted, waving his finger in the winter air. “Will you never learn?!”

Trump administration figures have echoed this sentiment, in their own way.

“In one city we have this outrage and this powder keg happening,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in an interview on Fox News. “And it’s not right. And it doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

Surely, Blanche meant this as an insult. Just as surely, the people of Minneapolis took it as the highest compliment. 

I went to grade school, high school, and college in Minnesota, but I haven’t lived there in nearly 25 years. Going back to cover the federal incursion, I was struck by how everyone seems to know everyone. 

“You find out how much of a small town this is,” my college friend Mark said. He was the first of many old acquaintances I renewed. Mark took his usual midday run the day after Good’s killing, which ended in a most unusual way.

The Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building is not far off his route, so he stopped over to check the protest.

Soon, full of anger and outrage over Good’s killing, he approached a line of about 30 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. He insulted each one, pouring out a new set of f-bombs as he looked each in the eyes.

After running out of things to say, Mark spit in the general direction of the agents. Soon, a phalanx of them piled onto him, and off to the pokey he went. In eight hours of detainment, his legs were shackled as he was held in a cell marked with a Post-it note: “U.S. Citizen.” He was never asked to provide identification, apparently put in the safe confines of the citizens’ wing because of his skin color (white). Repeatedly, men with guns demanded to know which agency was in charge of him, and what charges he was facing.

“I’m like, ‘How the hell should I know?’” he said. He was eventually unshackled, with a watch and other personal items returned. Still in his blue running tights and Seoul Marathon 2008 T-shirt, he ran home, and hasn’t heard from anyone since.

“It was just an unorganized fucking mess,” Mark tells me.

Later that day, I was at a vigil led by leaders from local Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. They stood together at the site of Good’s killing and demanded justice. Specifically, they called for the arrest of Ross, the ICE agent who killed Good, and immediate departure of ICE from the city. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when the Catholic representative, Father Dale Korogi, took the mic. Father Korogi was a priest at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, about 10 miles from the Good killing site, in my grade school years. He was beloved by us as someone who always made time for his parishioners, young and old. He and my mother coordinated the altar boys’ program, which included my brothers and me. It had been probably 37 years since our last meeting, yet there we were.

Korogi grew up on the North Side of Minneapolis and graduated a year ahead of Prince at Minneapolis Central High School. He’s 68 and currently serves as pastor at Ascension, a large parish on the North Side.   

Korogi told me he doesn’t generally get publicly involved in civil rights matters. But this time is different. His parish is more than half Mexican American. Before the ICE surge started in December, he’d normally welcome about 400 Spanish-speaking parishioners at Sunday masses. That number has since shrunk to 30 or 40. Numerous parish families have had someone detained or deported, with little ability to track them, or contact them, once they’re gone. ICE vehicles have circled near the parish parking lot near Mass times.

“There’s certainly something about this particular moment that has cut me to the core,” he told me. “Each and every person who is being detained, and certainly being deported, an entire family is undone. The human cost of this has cost me. I feel it deeply and personally.”

With federal agents still on the prowl, Ascension has shifted into a much more involved mutual aid operation. Last Saturday, volunteers delivered a week’s worth of groceries to 300 households. That’s double the number they served just two weeks earlier. And they have ample volunteers to grow.

“People across the ideological spectrum, from religious conservatives to religious liberals to people who have no religion whatsoever are responding to this call,” Korogi says. “People are recognizing what an affront to just simple human dignity this has been for so many people.”

He does proceed with caution, wary of reports that federal agents are tailing such food trains in the Twin Cities. 

The story of Operation Metro Surge often plays out at multiple locations at the same time: a court hearing, a press conference, a planned protest, an unplanned ICE raid. It’s nonstop, it’s adrenalized, it’s around the clock. Covering it can get dangerous, and is always unpredictable. Weekends have been busier than weekdays. 

There are few metro areas left in the United States with a media landscape that wouldn’t get buried by it. The Twin Cities, fortunately, is one of them. The region’s highly educated, relatively wealthy population has kept consuming and supporting media, from legacy outlets to start-up nonprofits, at levels not seen in decades in many other cities. The biggest fish, The Minnesota Star Tribune, ranks seventh in the nation for newspaper circulation, despite the Twin Cities being just the sixteenth-largest metro area by population. And it’s not the only daily—my hometown St. Paul Pioneer Press still operates, although in a significantly depleted form from its heyday. 

The “Strib,” by contrast, hasn’t hemorrhaged jobs and institutional knowledge, at least to the same degree as other regional papers. Its coverage of this story stands out for being all-encompassing: multiple staffers at all breaking news, quick-turn investigations that debunk government spin, video analysis that verifies and illuminates the endless reels of footage provided by staffers and by citizens with smartphones. The Strib has 50 journalists working the story daily out of 200 total in the newsroom, says Kathleen Hennessey, the somewhat new editor and senior vice president who grew up in St. Paul and previously was a deputy politics editor at The New York Times.

“This story is stretching across beats, to business, food, culture, and even high school sports,” she says. “It’s touching the whole newsroom.” National outlets, especially the Times, have also committed major on-the-ground resources to the story. An unusually strong network of smaller outlets throughout Minnesota has contributed, as well. And finally, of course, there is the army of citizens out there, all collecting video evidence.

Add it all up, and the feds have cameras and coverage on everything they do, from the detainment of a 5-year-old Latino boy to the Hmong grandfather being led away on a frigid day in shorts, to the closeup of the prone protester getting sprayed point-blank in the face by orange tear gas. 

A judge can castigate ICE, as Patrick J. Schlitz, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, did recently, calling the agency out for violating more court orders in a month than many agencies have in their entire history. But those words don’t resonate in the way that photos and videos that document misdeeds do. 

I’m astonished by how global this story is. I regularly get notes of concern from friends in Sweden and Ireland, where my placid, picturesque little home state often leads newscasts looking like a war zone. Exchange students in our Milwaukee community have been warned by their parents to steer clear of Minneapolis. The mayor of Milan has moved to ban ICE from the upcoming Winter Olympics. It’s all so bonkers. 

But none of it has done anything but boost enthusiasm and participation by the regular people who have powered the pushback from the start. 

Two Fridays ago, the sun rose in the Twin Cities to temperatures of 20 degrees below zero. In those conditions, you can throw a bucket of boiling water into the air and see it turn instantly to snow. If you leave a soda pop can out, you can watch it explode in minutes. Exposed skin will be frostbitten in 10 minutes. 

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans woke up to those conditions and decided it would be a great day to spend hours outside protesting ICE. My sister and nephew were two of them. Between them, Patty and Ben counted 37 different articles of clothing on their persons. Office Space introduced us to 37 pieces of flair. In Minnesota, it’s 37 pieces of layers. They joined all the others, looking like mummies. 

The sight of so many people enduring Siberian conditions, day after day—whether delivering vital goods to scared neighbors, monitoring federal agents with smartphones, or marching in the streets—serves as a reminder. Nobody can out-suffer Minnesotans. Winter brings pain, day after day. The state’s sports teams offer not respite but more agony. Minnesota dominates the rankings of the longest title drought among metro cities with men’s teams in all four major American sports (the Twins were the last of the four teams to win it all, back in 1991; Minnesota’s women’s teams, the Lynx and the Frost, have had better success than the guys).

Buttressing that toughness and tenacity is a bedrock belief in the multicultural society that’s been created in the Twin Cities. Father Korogi talks of how white the Minneapolis he grew up in was. For most of its history, Minnesota has been among the whitest states, peopled by the descendants of Scandinavian, German, and Irish immigrants. It remains very white, although far more diverse than it was. 

“Minneapolis, at a certain point, has, I think, been so hungry for some diversity, or a broader kind of cultural experience,” Korogi says. 

I was fortunate to know that changing Minnesota through my parents. They taught in the public schools, which meant they worked with whatever kids showed up from the community. For my dad, that meant teaching the early Hmong arrivals in the 1980s, the kids by day and the adults learning English at night, at St. Paul Central High. For my mom, it meant teaching Somali immigrants at Lyndale Elementary in the early 2000s. 

We heard endless stories of immigrant grit and tenacity, and of a community willing to do the work and provide the social infrastructure to support the new arrivals. When I was there most recently, I couldn’t believe how transformed Minneapolis and St. Paul have become in the quarter-century since I left—immigrant business corridors that stretch for blocks and blocks, Hmong and Somali and Latino families living among white and Black families in city and suburban neighborhoods. I wasn’t looking for immigrant success stories, but they kept presenting themselves. Some of them are conspicuous—St. Paul just elected its first Hmong mayor, Kaohly Her; a St. Paul native, Suni Lee, won an Olympic gold medal in gymnastics at the Tokyo Games; Ilhan Omar, a Somali American, represents Minneapolis in Congress.

Less heralded were the people whose paths crossed with mine. My cab driver from Ethiopia told me about his four adult children who grew up in Minneapolis and now operate a business together in Oregon. They bought him the $130,000 Cadillac SUV cab we were in. A restaurant owner on University Avenue in St. Paul told me about the Thai coffee recipe her mom perfected in a refugee camp and now bottles and distributes at the family restaurant and at Twin Cities grocery stores. Two young Somali American men told me about their start-up media production company, Moon Media, and wanted to have me on their podcast.

Then there was the young Somali American man I met at the Good shooting scene. He was on a particularly treacherous stretch of ice as we walked along. I offered him space on my lane, which was better cleared. He was wearing a full-length cloak and running shoes.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m from Minnesota. I’ve walked on ice before.”

The state’s ongoing investigation of corruption within the Somali American community shows that not all is well in the integration game. Federal prosecutors uncovered a widespread misuse of public funds, resulting in charges against 98 people, nearly all of them Somalians. Those prosecutors have since resigned in protest of the Department of Justice’s handling of the Renee Good shooting, severely undercutting what was a winning political issue for the GOP. The Somali fraud scandal, while deeply concerning, doesn’t negate the larger story that seems to trend toward a society that’s remained comparatively wealthy as its demographic makeup shifted.  

Those gains have largely been erased in recent months, at least visually. Father Korogi talks about driving around his hometown these days to a changed landscape. Immigrants and anyone with black or brown skin simply won’t risk going out in the community, knowing the many reports of U.S. citizens, including off-duty police officers, getting roughed up simply for being nonwhite.

“I don’t see any Latino people,” Korogi says. “It’s really, really white, and it’s kind of the Minneapolis I grew up in. There’s something just kind of creepy about it.”

It’s a stark reminder of how much life and the very complexion of the Twin Cities has changed, at least for now. But the events of the past months, when citizens of this town became accidental heroes in a shockingly violent episode in American history, suggest this won’t be reality forever. Attempts to permanently undo the last half-century of societal change are destined to fail because the people who live here just won’t allow it.  

One lesson from living through four seasons every year: All things are temporary. Seasons change. Circumstances, and governments, change. The frozen lakes thaw out and turn liquid again, and the sidewalks don’t stay glaciers forever. Every winter becomes part of lore. Someday, over a campfire, they’ll tell the story of the winter of ’26. We’ve had some rough winters, but that one, they’ll say, that one sure was a doozy.