Minneapolis Is Under Occupation

First of all: Hello. This is a new space that I've set up to write some thoughts independent of the work I do for my employer writing about the financial planning industry. I generally don't get into my own personal political or cultural views there for various reasons, but I I've found myself increasingly wanting an outlet to express them. The events last week in my hometown of Minneapolis were a tipping point: I can't really go on without speaking my mind about what's happening there. So here we are.

I hope you'll reach out or comment to let me know what you think - or at the very least, read and feel something that moves you to do good in the world. We are what we pretend to be, so don't sit around and wait for the chance to prove that you're the good person that you know you are on the inside. Do something today.

Minneapolis is being terrorized. It seems overdramatic to put it that way, but that's really all there is to it. Minnesota is guilty of voting for Democratic politicians and for fielding a vice presidential candidate against Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and for that reason it's now being flooded with federal agents who are here to intimidate, arrest, and kill people simply for living here. Nominally, these agents are targeting immigrants, whose association with ginned-up fraud accusations hyped by right-wing media has provided the pretext for the invasion. But their real target, as evidenced by the wide range of recipients of the violence that they're bringing down on us, is whomever disagrees with the Trump regime's scattershot immigration roundups or takes any action to oppose them. Those who protest peacefully get tear gassed and thrown into out-of-state SUVs. Those who follow the agents and, with a cacophony of car horns, whistles, and shouts, alert their neighbors to the danger that ICE presents, often get more physical treatment, with their phones and bodies knocked to the ground (even on school grounds). And those who don't immediately comply with ICE agents' demands to their liking - even when those demands are shouted incoherently from several agents at once, with some orders contradicting others - can find themselves fired upon, with actual guns, without warning.

This is what happened last Wednesday to Renee Nicole Good. You've probably seen one or more videos of what happened. On that morning, she was in her SUV parked across Portland Avenue in South Minneapolis. Portland Avenue in that area is a wide, multi-lane one-way boulevard, and so even with the SUV parked perpendicular to the road there was room for other cars to go around it - but it did create a bottleneck that cars, including ICE vehicles, needed to drive around. I don't know how or why Renee Good's car was in that spot to begin with, but videos showed her waving cars to go around her. She wasn't trying to keep traffic from moving past. Soon, however, she found her car surrounded by ICE agents on foot, with weapons drawn, yelling orders at her variously to get out of the car and move it out of the way (obviously it isn't possible to do comply with one of those orders without disobeying the other one), and grabbing at her door handle. As one agent pulls on her driver's side door handle and tries to reach into the car, another one walks around the front of the SUV, holding his phone in one hand (recording a video) and grabbing for his gun with the other. The SUV backs up a foot or two, and the wheels turn to the right - away from where the phone-and-gun cop has planted himself near the front driver's side corner of the SUV. The vehicle starts to move forward, turning away from the agent, and all of a sudden he reaches forward and unloads three rounds from his pistol through the windshield and driver's side window, shooting Renee Good in the face from no more than three feet away. In the video that the ICE agent himself recorded, he can be heard muttering "fucking bitch" as the now driverless SUV careens down the street and plows into a parked car 20 feet away. That ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, then left the scene shortly afterwards, while the remaining goons blocked medical professionals from trying to give lifesaving care. ("I'm a physician!" "I don't care.")

Almost immediately, the Trump regime and its allied media went over-the-top to blame Renee Good for her own killing, claiming (despite contradictory video evidence from multiple angles) that she had tried to run the ICE agent over, and that what had happened was not the execution of a peaceful bystander who was trying to get out of harm's way, but instead a heroic action to stop a "domestic terrorist" - the actual words they used! - from committing vehicular homicide.

I confess that I haven't watched every video recording of what happened that morning. I just find it too sickening to witness the moment of someone's death, especially someone who by all accounts had had no intention of putting herself in harm's way when she had left home that morning to drop her 6-year-old son - the same age as my own son - at school. But at the same time, the immediacy with which the propaganda machine shifted into full gear, and the extremity of the ludicrous hyperbole with which they smeared the woman that their agents had killed, made it all too clear just how damning the evidence against them must have been. There was no room for anything like a reasonable inquiry or letting the investigation play out before jumping to conclusions, because that would only confirm what anyone with eyes who had watched the videos could see for themselves: That agents of the U.S. government had murdered an innocent woman for no other reason than being in their way.

In the wake of the killing, and the ensuing events last week - the cancellation of Minneapolis schools after ICE showed up to shove people around at Roosevelt High after school let out; the debate over whether or not state and local police can prosecute Renee Good's killer after the FBI shut them out of its rigged investigation; and the growing public unrest as protesters gathered in multiple places around Minneapolis over the weekend - I've found it hard to think of much else. I think about Renee Good, and how her 6-year-old son will not only have to grow up without a mom, but will do so while living under a government that killed his mother and then slandered her name to cover up their own culpability. I think about the observers and demonstrators who still go out on the streets to follow ICE around and document their abuses, even while knowing now (and being reminded by the ICE goons themselves) that they're putting their lives at risk of being ended in a split second of rage from a hotheaded agent who will curse at them after they shoot them dead.

But mostly, I think about the guy who did this - Jonathan Ross - and what must have been going through his head. Although on the surface he seems like the epitome of the type of meathead that ICE is recruiting to occupy Democrat-led cities under this regime, what's striking is that he's not just some untrained slob who was given a badge and a gun last week and told to go make life hell for blue-state liberals. Thanks to the Star Tribune's reporting, we know that Jonathan Ross has been working for ICE for over 10 years. And before that, he served in the Iraq war. In other words, Renee Good wasn't killed at the hands of a trigger-happy new recruit who panicked when he saw her SUV start to roll forward. It was someone with training and experience in handling risky situations involving guns and vehicles (including one in which Ross himself ended up being dragged by a car driven by someone he was trying to arrest). And yet, last Wednesday, Ross put himself in a position in front of Renee Good's vehicle where it could hit him if it rolled forward - giving him the plausible defense of fearing for his life when the SUV moved, even if it was his own choices that put him in that position.

It's really hard not to conclude, given Ross's level of experience and training, that he intentionally stood in front of Renee Good's SUV, even though doing so drastically increased the chances that the situation would escalate to lethal violence.

Why would he do that? The most generous interpretation is that by putting himself in front of the SUV, Ross would force Renee Good to get out of the vehicle, where he and his fellow ICE agents could rough her up, drag her like they've dragged and abused many other women who have tried to resist them, and likely detain her for an uncertain period of time (despite having no constitutional right to do so). However, one also wonders whether, with gun out and camera phone running to document his vantage point, Ross had fully intended to pull the trigger all along. If by creating a mild obstacle in the road for ICE's vehicles to go around and making some mild jabs to deflate the goons' self-importance ("It's OK dude, I'm not mad at you"), Renee Good had signed her own death warrant in the agent's mind. If, like in the Iraq war that Jonathan Ross had taken part in, the occupying forces saw the citizens of the occupied territory as something less than human, and believed that by picking off one or two civilian bystanders (under circumstances that could be plausibly molded into a justification of lethal force even if the facts on the ground showed the opposite), they could terrorize the remaining locals into full compliance. Now, after invading Minneapolis under a pretext just as fraudulent as the invasion of Iraq, the veterans of the earlier occupation are applying the same tactics to the current one.

What's particularly devastating is that unlike most of ICE's troop surge, Jonathan Ross doesn't come from outside the state. He has a home and family in the Twin Cities suburbs. Minnesota isn't some abstract place to him that he's only ever encountered via overhyped Fox News segments - it's his home. It's his neighbors and their families that he's signed up to wage an assault on, to round up and deport anyone who looks like they could come from another country. It's a depressing sign of just how broken this country has become that when a capricious and thuggish regime turns its attention to a place whose elected leaders have dared to stand up to it, the instinct from some people is not to resist this blatant incursion on their community's civil liberties, but instead to rush out to round up their neighbors and dispense violence on the state's behalf. We no longer live in a country where people can be counted on to stick up for their friends and neighbors even if they don't share political views: The lust for power and domination over others is so strong that people like Jonathan Ross sign on to inflict terror on their community. Rather than seeing people of other cultures, political beliefs, or skin colors as other humans who contribute to the fabric of their society and deserve the same rights they demand for themselves, they see a target on the face of anyone who won't submit to them - a target for a boot, a canister of pepper spray, or a bullet or three, depending on the whims of whoever is giving the orders.

So yes, Minneapolis is being terrorized, because we now know that any decision we make to outwardly defy this regime and its agents who occupy the city could be met with a bullet in the face. And we know that the "best" and most-trained agents on the streets - the ones who come from just outside the communities they're currently marauding - will use that training not to protect the people among whom they live, but instead will use it to frame up situations where the only options are violent and illegal detainment or instant death, while their higher-ups stand ready to spin a story recasting them as heroes protecting the country from radicals and terrorists rather than as the petty and violent stooges that they are. (Would that everybody could expect that level of support from their bosses!) And there's very little sign that the terror campaign will stop: If anything, the regime seems set on escalating the situation further by sending in even more ICE goons, perhaps hoping to goad Minnesotans into a more unruly uprising that gives them the pretext for violent suppression.

But what gives me hope is that the signs of open defiance by Minnesotans to ICE's occupation haven't weakened, but have instead grown stronger and more confident. ICE convoys are still being hounded out of neighborhoods and stores by growing crowds of observers who make as much noise as possible to ensure that everyone can see and hear them coming. Neighbors, restaurants, and stores are collaborating with one another to deliver food, shovel snow, and do chores for their neighbors who are too scared to leave the house. And the anti-ICE demonstrations are growing in size. Our Democratic politicians might even grow a spine at some point and start pushing for more accountability from the regime, though that might still, somehow, be too much to expect.

Winter is a long and brutal season in Minnesota. In the depths of January it feels like we'll never escape the cold and darkness. But when we keep going, day after day, the days get longer and eventually warmer, the sun shines more, and eventually, sometimes without even realizing it, the seasons change. In the midst of this darkness, we need to keep the faith that if we stick around long enough, we'll see that changing of the seasons, and celebrate the day when the cold - and ice - are gone for good.